Guru Gobind Singh Ji

A childhood ended at nine

Born at Patna in 1666, Gobind Rai was nine when his father was executed at Delhi for another community’s freedom of worship — and he became tenth Guru at Anandpur under that shadow. The court he built there was as much literary as martial: poets in Braj, Persian and Punjabi, the Guru himself among them — author of the Jaap Sahib, and of the Zafarnama, the defiant “epistle of victory” later addressed to Aurangzeb.^1,2,3

The Khalsa

On Vaisakhi 1699 he created the Khalsa: five volunteers, the double-edged sword, amrit, the name Singh for every initiate, a discipline worn on the body. Then, in the standard Sikh account, he asked those five to initiate him in turn — sovereignty handed to the community itself. War followed: Anandpur besieged, evacuated in 1705 on promises broken at the Sarsa; his two elder sons killed at Chamkaur; the younger two, aged about six and nine, bricked up and executed at Sirhind; his mother dead in captivity. The tradition preserves his composure in loss as the model of chardi kala — unbroken spirit.^1,2,3

The final acts

At Damdama he fixed the final recension of the scripture; at Nanded in 1708, dying of an assassin’s wound, he ended the human Guruship and sealed it in the Guru Granth Sahib forever — having first sent Banda Singh Bahadur north to the Punjab.^1,2,3