Founding of Anandpur

A purchase in the foothills

In 1665, in the first year of his Guruship, Guru Tegh Bahadur bought a tract of land near the village of Makhowal, on high ground above the Sutlej beneath the Naina Devi hills, from the ruling house of Kahlur (Bilaspur).^1,4 The new settlement was named Chakk Nanaki after his mother, Nanaki; the town that grew around it became Anandpur, the city of bliss.

The choice of ground was the point. The Shivalik foothills lay among the semi-autonomous hill states, at the edge of effective Mughal administration rather than inside it. The Panth’s earlier centres — Ramdaspur, Kartarpur, Goindval — sat in the open plains, where imperial power reached easily and where Guru Arjan’s authority had already been read as a threat. Anandpur gave the community something it had never had: a seat that was its own, and that geography helped defend.^1,2

That security was relative, not absolute. The hill rajas from whom the land was bought became, in the following decades, the community’s most persistent local opponents.

Refuge and capital

It was to Anandpur in 1675 that a deputation of Kashmiri Brahmins came seeking the Guru’s intercession against conversion pressure — the appeal that led to his execution in Delhi.^1,2

His son Guru Gobind Singh made the town his capital for most of his Guruship, and what he built there was not only a fortress. Anandpur housed a working court of poets and translators alongside an arsenal; the Guru commissioned literary work on a substantial scale while ringing the town with forts — Anandgarh, Keshgarh, Lohgarh, Fatehgarh among them.^1,3 The martial and the literary were the same project.

Cradle of the Khalsa

A generation after its founding the town held the assembly that defined the faith: on Vaisakhi 1699 the Khalsa was created here, at the spot now marked by Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib, one of the five Takhts.^3,4

Anandpur was besieged repeatedly by the hill rajas and Mughal forces, and finally evacuated in December 1705 under sworn promises of safe conduct. The promises were broken at the flooded Sarsa river, where the Guru’s family was separated and much of the community’s library lost — the beginning of the sequence that ends at Chamkaur and Sirhind.^1,3 Anandpur remains the great gathering place of Hola Mahalla, the martial festival the tenth Guru instituted.