Guru Tegh Bahadur

Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621-1675) was the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, born Tyag Mal and renamed, the tradition says, Tegh Bahadur, "brave of the sword", for his conduct in his father's battles. He then spent long years in seclusion and meditation at Bakala, and it was there that the community, following Guru Har Krishan's dying words, found him and set aside the pretenders who had claimed the office.

As Guru he founded the town of Anandpur (Chak Nanaki) in the Shivalik foothills, which would become the crucible of the later Khalsa, and he travelled very widely, through the Malwa, into the eastern Gangetic plain, Bengal and Assam, teaching and establishing congregations. It was at Patna, during these travels, that his son and successor, the future Guru Gobind Singh, was born.

His travels through Bengal and Assam in the 1660s built congregations, sangats, that endured long after his death and drew him into contact with Assamese and Bengali rulers; a local Assamese chronicle, the Ahom Buranji, is among the few contemporary non-Sikh sources to record his presence in the region. He returned west in 1670 to raise his son at Anandpur. His final journey, prompted by an appeal from Kashmiri Pandits resisting forced conversion under Aurangzeb's administration, ended in his execution at Delhi in 1675, on the emperor's order, for refusing to renounce his faith.

Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom is the event for which he is above all revered, and its distinctive feature is its object. Sikh tradition relates that a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits, Hindu Brahmins facing forced conversion under the policies of the emperor Aurangzeb, came to Anandpur to appeal for help, and that the Guru resolved to stand for their right to practise a religion that was not his own.

Summoned to Delhi, he refused to convert to Islam and was executed at Chandni Chowk in 1675; the Gurdwara Sis Ganj marks the place of his beheading and Rakab Ganj the place of his cremation. Several of his companions, among them Bhai Mati Das, were killed with him. Historians debate the precise sequence of causes, imperial policy, regional politics and the Guru's own growing following all figure in the accounts, but the tradition holds fast to its meaning: that he died not for his own community's freedom but for the religious liberty of another people. It is on that ground that he is titled Hind di Chadar, "the shield of India."

Tegh Bahadur was a poet of considerable power, and his verse is the last body of composition to enter the Sikh canon. After his death his son, Guru Gobind Singh, incorporated some fifty-nine hymns and fifty-seven couplets of his into the scripture, the single later addition to the collection first assembled by Guru Arjan, and the act that gave the volume the final form revered as the Guru Granth Sahib.

The tone of these compositions is distinctive: a sustained meditation on the transience of the world, the emptiness of attachment, and above all fearlessness, the counsel to "frighten no one, and fear no one" reads, in retrospect, as of a piece with the manner of his death. His martyrdom, remembered each year, fixed the defence of religious freedom, including the freedom of those outside one's own faith, near the centre of the Sikh self-understanding.

His execution is dated 11 November 1675 at Chandni Chowk in Delhi, and the site is marked today by the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib. Tradition holds that he offered his life specifically in defence of the Kashmiri Pandits' right to practise their own religion rather than his own, a martyrdom for another community's freedom of conscience that Sikhs regard as without close parallel among the world's religious traditions. His son Gobind Singh, then nine, would go on to found the Khalsa in 1699, an institution the tradition presents as the direct answer to the persecution that had claimed his father.