The conventional view is that the modern age in India began with the advent of British rule in the late 18th century, but in some ways this narrative distracts from the fundamental transformation of Indic thought in the 16th century in response to Islamic incursion, which similarly reflected a dramatic expansion of vision. In "Guru Nanak and His Times" the historian Anil Chandra Banerjee describes the age that Guru Nanak lived in as an era of "political disintegration."

Timur's invasion in the late 14th century devastated the Punjab, and conditions saw little improvement during the Lodi dynasty that followed. By all accounts the region had not yet recovered by the time Babur arrived in India in the early 16th century, which he describes as a wasteland, bereft of education, culture, or beauty. Rather than sweep this away as simple prejudice, Babur's statement might be better understood as an honest (if somewhat exaggerated) assessment of the ground reality following decades of political and social upheaval.

Like during the 18-19th centuries, the decades of turbulence following Timur's invasion saw a total breakdown of the socio-political firmament. Guru Nanak described his age "like a drawn Sword" where "the kings are butchers." It was not just the rulers who were corrupt, however, but also the traditional spiritual authorities who comprehensively failed to resist tyranny. Guru Angad (Nanak's immediate successor) describes the age as follows:

"Every beggar today would be a King, Every blockhead sets up as a Pandit; The blind man would be a connoisseur o f gems, That is the modern way of talking of things. The really bad man sets up as a spiritual leader; The liar is judged the perfect type of man; So it is in this iron age."

The mystical vision of Guru Nanak needs to be understood in the context of what was a persistent civilizational failure to adapt to a new political reality. The wanderings of Guru Nanak and Mardana take on a whole new significance when you realize that they were immersed in such chaos. Although ideas of national identity had of course not yet entered the public consciousness, by rejecting the strictures of jati (i.e., "caste") and Brahminical ritual, Guru Nanak and Caitanya Mahaprabhu's reform can be understood as a precursor to the bhadralok reform movements, which similarly sought to deprovincialize Hindus and transform them into a national religious community.

The critical difference, of course, is that the the luminaries of the bhakti movement were not deracinated in the way that the English-educated Bengalis were, a fact that ultimately limited the latter's ability to reach the masses. Perhaps it should not surprise us that while the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj are marginal movements today, Sikhi and the Gaudiya Vaishnavism continue as vibrant spiritual movements. Rather than trying to fit Indic thought into the dominant thought-current of Enlightenment rationalism and Christianity, the bhakti reformers of the 16th century drew upon existing intellectual and devotional currents to transform spiritual practice in a manner consonant with prevailing socio-political conditions.