Guru Tegh Bahadur

Before the Guruship

Born in 1621, a son of Guru Hargobind, he fought in his father's engagements as a young man and afterwards lived in retirement at Bakala for some two decades. He was identified as Guru in 1664 following Har Krishan's death, and travelled widely thereafter — in the Punjab, in the eastern provinces as far as Assam, and in the Shivalik hills, where he founded the town of Anandpur.

The execution

The traditional account holds that a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits came to him at Anandpur reporting forced conversion under Aurangzeb's officials, and that he advised them to say they would convert if he did. He went to Delhi, was arrested, and was executed at Chandni Chowk in November 1675 after refusing to accept Islam, together with three companions who were killed before him.

Contemporary Mughal sources give a different emphasis, treating the matter as a question of rebellion and political disturbance. Historians generally accept the execution and its circumstances while noting that the surviving accounts are partisan on both sides. What is not in dispute is that a Sikh Guru was put to death by the state for the second time in seventy years.

Significance

Sikh tradition gives the event a distinctive reading: that Tegh Bahadur died not for his own community's right to practise but for another community's, which is unusual as a claim about religious martyrdom and is central to the Sikh self-understanding that followed. He is titled Hind di Chadar, the shield of India.

Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Delhi marks the place of execution and Rakab Ganj the place of cremation. His compositions, largely on detachment and the transience of the world, were added to the scripture by his son Guru Gobind Singh, and are among the most quoted passages in Sikh devotional use.