Guru Gobind Singh

Early life and background

Guru Gobind Singh was born Gobind Rai on 22 December 1666 in Patna, in present-day Bihar, the only son of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, and Mata Gujri. The family's ancestral seat was Anandpur Sahib in the Punjab hills, founded by Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1665, and the young Gobind Rai spent part of his childhood there after the family returned from Patna. In 1675 Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed in Delhi on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb; Sikh tradition holds that he went to Delhi to intercede for a group of Kashmiri Pandits who had appealed to him after being pressured to convert to Islam, and that he was executed after refusing to convert himself. His martyrdom is commemorated at the Sisganj Sahib gurdwara in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. Gobind Rai succeeded his father as the tenth Guru later that year, at the age of nine.

Accession and the Anandpur years

Ruling from Anandpur Sahib, the young Guru built up the Sikh community's military and organizational capacity in the face of pressure from both the Mughal administration and neighboring hill-state Rajput chiefs, who were wary of the growing Sikh presence in their territory. An early clash with a coalition of hill rajas took place at the Battle of Bhangani in 1688, which the Guru's forces won. Over the following decade he consolidated a following that drew on Sikhs from across northern India, supported by an institution of regional deputies (masands) who collected offerings and transmitted teachings — an institution he later dissolved after finding it prone to corruption.

The founding of the Khalsa

On Baisakhi day, 30 March 1699, at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh called an assembly of his followers and, according to Sikh tradition, asked for volunteers willing to give their heads. Five men came forward in succession — Daya Ram, Dharam Das, Himmat Rai, Mohkam Chand, and Sahib Chand, drawn from different castes and regions of India — and became known as the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved Ones. The Guru initiated them with Amrit, sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword in a ceremony known as Khande di Pahul, and then, in a deliberate reversal of hierarchy, asked the five to initiate him in turn, so that the Guru became both giver and receiver of the new order. This assembly constituted the Khalsa, a formal order of initiated Sikhs bound by a common code of conduct and outward identity, including the Five Ks — Kesh (uncut hair), Kangha (a wooden comb), Kara (a steel bracelet), Kirpan (a sword), and Kachera (a specific undergarment) — and the adoption of the surname Singh ("lion") for men and Kaur ("princess") for women, intended to erase caste distinctions signaled by surname.

Conflict with the Mughals and hill rajas

The years after 1699 brought sustained warfare. A combined force of Mughal troops and hill rajas besieged Anandpur Sahib in 1704; after a prolonged siege that exhausted the garrison's supplies, the Mughal commanders offered the Guru and his followers safe passage out of the fort, swearing the guarantee on the Quran and on cows held sacred by the Hindu rajas. The Guru evacuated on these terms, but the promise was broken: his forces were attacked while crossing the swollen Sarsa river, and his family was separated in the resulting chaos. The Guru, with a small band of followers, reached the village of Chamkaur, where on 7 December 1704 a small Sikh contingent held off a much larger Mughal force; his two elder sons, Ajit Singh and Jujhar Singh, were killed in the engagement. His two younger sons, Zorawar Singh (about nine) and Fateh Singh (about six), were captured with their grandmother, Mata Gujri, and taken to Sirhind, where the Mughal governor Wazir Khan had the boys executed and Mata Gujri died in custody — events commemorated by Sikhs as the martyrdom of the "Chhote Sahibzade." In 1705, at the Battle of Muktsar near the village of Khidrana, forty Sikhs who had earlier deserted the Guru during the siege of Anandpur returned to fight and die in his defense, led by a woman, Mai Bhago; the Guru honored them as the Chali Mukte, the "Forty Liberated Ones," and is said to have torn up the document in which they had earlier disavowed him.

The Zafarnama

After Muktsar, Guru Gobind Singh wrote the Zafarnama, a letter in Persian verse addressed directly to Emperor Aurangzeb and sent via an emissary, Bhai Daya Singh. The letter rebukes Aurangzeb for the broken oath at Anandpur and the killing of the Guru's sons, while asserting confidence in divine justice; it forms part of the Dasam Granth and is one of the few Sikh scriptural texts addressed to a named Mughal ruler.

Literary works

Guru Gobind Singh composed extensively in Braj, Punjabi, and Persian, and the works attributed to him were later compiled into the Dasam Granth, a separate scripture from the Guru Granth Sahib. Notable sections include the Jaap Sahib, a hymn enumerating attributes of a formless God; the Akal Ustat, praises of the timeless divine; the Chandi Charitra and Chandi di Var, narrative retellings of the goddess Chandi's defeat of the buffalo demon, read as an allegory of the triumph of righteousness; and the Bachitra Natak, a partly autobiographical account of the Guru's own life and lineage. The authorship and dating of individual sections of the Dasam Granth, compiled after the Guru's death, remain a subject of scholarly and sectarian debate within Sikh studies.

Death at Nanded and the end of personal Guruship

After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, Guru Gobind Singh formed a cordial relationship with his successor, Bahadur Shah I, and traveled with the imperial camp into the Deccan. At Nanded, in present-day Maharashtra, he was attacked in October 1708 by two men sent, according to Sikh tradition, by Wazir Khan of Sirhind; the Guru killed one attacker and wounded the other, but the stab wound he received reopened while he was testing a bow given to him by the emperor, and he died from the resulting infection on 7 October 1708. Before his death he declared that the line of personal Gurus was ended and that the Guru Granth Sahib, the compiled Sikh scripture, would thereafter serve as the eternal Guru of the community, fixing Sikh religious authority in scripture rather than in a living successor.