The janamsakhis.
The birth-stories of Guru Nanak: the river, the Kaaba, the meeting with the Siddhas, the bread that bled. Sikh scholarship has known since the nineteenth century that these are devotional narrative rather than chronicle, and Punjabi households go on telling them regardless, which is roughly what they are for.
The janamsakhis are the life of Nanak as narrative, and they are the reason most Sikhs know the stories they know. The main recensions — Puratan, Bala, Meharban, Bhai Mani Singh — disagree with each other about routes, dates and even which companions were present, and the Bala tradition has been suspected of sectarian origins since the nineteenth century. Sikh scholarship, from the Singh Sabha onward and sharply in the twentieth century under historians like W H McLeod, has treated them as hagiography built after the fact, which caused a good deal of anger when said in those terms. Most practising Sikhs hold both positions comfortably: the stories are how the teaching is transmitted, and the historical apparatus is somebody else's business. Punjabi children's books, animated films and gurdwara wall paintings all run on janamsakhi material.
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