Guru Tegh Bahadur, ninth in the Sikh line, was executed publicly at Delhi in 1675 under the emperor Aurangzeb, at the place where the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib now stands. Sikh tradition holds that a delegation of Kashmiri Brahmins had come to him for help against forced conversion, that he undertook to intervene, and that he was arrested, pressed to convert or to display a miracle, and beheaded when he refused both.
What makes this martyrdom distinctive in this atlas is its object. The Guru did not die defending Sikh practice or Sikh institutions. On the tradition's own account he died on behalf of the religious freedom of a community not his own, whose beliefs about images and ritual differed sharply from his. The title by which he is remembered, Hind di Chadar, the shield of India, makes exactly that claim.
Historians who work on Aurangzeb's reign weigh the political and religious elements in the case differently, as they do with Guru Arjan, and the sources for the immediate circumstances are largely from the Sikh side. The execution itself, its place and its date are not in doubt, and the principle the tradition draws from it, that defending another community's freedom of belief is a religious obligation, is one of the more unusual martyrdom doctrines in this atlas.