Marriage Quote by Guru Nanak

Marriage here isn’t romance or private fulfillment; it’s infrastructure. Guru Nanak folds an entire moral universe into a single hinge: “depend on one’s wife alone.” The line is blunt on purpose. In a society where lineage, ritual duty, and household religion were taken as the scaffolding of social order, he names the woman not as ornament but as the load-bearing pillar. It’s a reversal that reads almost administrative: if you care about heirs, rites, respectability, even your afterlife accounting, stop pretending the wife is secondary.

The phrasing also exposes the bargain at the heart of patriarchal spirituality. Notice how the promised outcomes stack up: offspring, proper rites, faithful service, conjugal happiness, heavenly bliss. Domestic labor, sexual fidelity, ritual competence, emotional harmony, and salvific payoff get bundled into one expectation and placed on her shoulders. The “alone” flatters and indicts at once. It grants agency while revealing how thoroughly a woman’s body and work are made responsible for everyone’s fate, including “ancestors and oneself.”

Context sharpens the edge. Nanak’s teachings pushed against ritualism and social hierarchies, yet he spoke to audiences steeped in Brahmanical norms about family duty and ancestor rites. This line meets that world in its own vocabulary, then quietly reroutes credit and accountability. It’s less a hymn to wifely devotion than a cultural mirror: if men want religious merit and social continuity, they’re already dependent. The quote makes that dependence impossible to deny.