The short version: the ninth Guru was put to death in Delhi in November 1675 on Aurangzeb’s orders, according to the earliest Persian notice (1710s); no order survives, and nobody at the time wrote down why. Consensus on the event. Every explanation comes from a later source, Sikh or Persian, and each was written by people who already had a view of what the death meant. What follows sets the sources side by side, and says what historians make of them. Which reason is stressed is itself a modern political argument. Political
Who Guru Tegh Bahādur was
Guru Tegh Bahādur (1621–1675) was the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, who had turned the community to arms (§4).[1] Majority He was recognised as Guru at Bakālā in 1664, against several rival claimants, after the child Guru Har Krishan died in Delhi.[2][1] Majority In 1665 he founded Chakk Nānakī, which grew into Anandpur; from 1665 to 1670 he travelled east to Patna, Dhaka and Assam, visiting congregations along the trade routes and going with the army of Rājā Rām Singh of Āmber, a Mughal general, on its campaign against the Ahoms.[1][3] Majority
He was also a poet. His hymns, fifty-nine of them with fifty-seven saloks, are in the scripture, and speak of detachment and the absence of fear:[4][5] Consensus
ਭੈ ਕਾਹੂ ਕਉ ਦੇਤ ਨਹਿ ਨਹਿ ਭੈ ਮਾਨਤ ਆਨ ॥
bhai kāhū kau det nahi nahi bhai mānat ān
“One who frightens no one, and fears no one else” (aṅg 1427, the site’s translation).[6]
Later Sikh writers read that ethic into his death, though the hymns themselves never mention it. Consensus
What is certain
In 1675 the Guru set out from Anandpur and was arrested in July near Ropar by the local Mughal officer, held at Sirhind and taken to Delhi.[2][1][7] Majority on the route and dates. He was beheaded in public in Chāndnī Chowk on 11 November 1675.[1][8] Consensus By Sikh tradition three Sikhs who had come with him were put to death before him: Bhāī Matī Dās, Bhāī Satī Dās and Bhāī Dayāl Dās.[9][10] Majority that this is the tradition’s account. The Gurdwārā Sīs Gañj stands on the site of the execution, and his head was carried to Anandpur, to his nine-year-old son, Gobind Rāi.[9][1] Majority
It was the second execution of a Guru by Mughal authority. In 1606 Guru Arjan had died in Mughal custody at Lahore; Jahāṅgīr records ordering his execution, writing in his own memoirs that he had long wanted to end the Guru’s “false trade” or bring him into Islam, and taking the Guru’s meeting with the rebel prince Khusrau as the occasion (§3).[11][12] Consensus on the text. For Guru Tegh Bahādur there is no such statement.
The silence of 1675
No contemporary document gives a reason. The court’s official chronicle of Aurangzeb’s reign, the Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī (1710), does not mention the execution.[13][14] Majority The earliest Persian notice, in Muḥammad Aḥsan Ijād’s Farrukhsiyar-nāma of the 1710s, known through William Irvine’s summary, says only that Aurangzeb secretly ordered the arrest, that Dilāwar Khān, the faujdār of Sirhind, seized the Guru near Ropar, and that he was executed after refusing to become a Muslim.[15][16] Majority Everything else is a reading of later evidence.[9][1] Contested
The Sikh accounts
The tenth Guru’s poem. The earliest Sikh account is the son’s, in the Bachitar Nāṭak of the Dasam Granth: his father protected “their tilak and sacred thread”, the marks of the Hindu twice-born, and “gave his head, but not his resolve” (§5).[17][9] Majority that the text is the Guru’s or his court’s. The poem does not say whose marks they were. Most readers take them to be the Brahmins’; Louis Fenech argues that they are Guru Tegh Bahādur’s own, the marks of the faith he would not give up.[18] Contested
The Kashmiri Brahmins. The story most Sikhs know is fuller. Brahmins from Kashmir, threatened with forced conversion by Aurangzeb’s governor, came to Anandpur and asked the Guru for help; the boy Gobind Rāi said no one was worthier to give his life than his father; the Guru told them to tell the emperor that if Guru Tegh Bahādur could be converted, they would follow.[10][9] Consensus that this is the tradition’s account. The delegation is told in eighteenth-century Sikh histories, the one usually cited being Kesar Singh Chhibbar’s Baṅsāvalīnāmā of 1769, by a Brahmin whose family had served the Gurus as dīvāns, and at length in the nineteenth century.[7][9] Majority on the dates of the texts; Contested on the history behind them. The bards’ registers, as published in the twentieth century, date a deputation of Kashmiri Pandits to Anandpur on 25 May 1675, but their entries cannot be checked against the originals.[2] Contested
The hostile Persian account
The first full Persian narrative, Ghulām Ḥusain Khān’s Siyar al-Mutaʾakhkhirīn of about 1781–1782, pairs the Guru with a Muslim holy man, Ḥāfiẓ Ādam, as leaders who gathered followers and levied money in Punjab, the Guru from Hindus and the shaikh from Muslims, until reports reached the emperor; it puts the execution at Lahore rather than Delhi.[19][13] Majority on what the text says. Sikh historians reject it, and most historians give it little weight: it was written in Bengal a century later, and if its Ḥāfiẓ Ādam is the Naqshbandī shaikh Ādam Banūrī, he died at Medina in 1643, two decades before Tegh Bahādur became Guru.[20] Majority
How historians read it
| View | Main argument | Main proponents |
|---|---|---|
| Martyrdom for religious freedom | The Guru died for the right of others, Hindus included, to their own faith | The Sikh tradition; Fundamental Issues[21] |
| Religious policy | The execution fits Aurangzeb’s harder line on non-Muslim religious leaders and conversions in the 1670s | Grewal, in part[1][8] |
| Reason of state | A Guru with a large following, armed retainers and long tours raised the suspicion of a state that had put down such movements before | Syan; Truschke on Aurangzeb’s motives generally[3][22] |
| Martyrdom as a later reading | The language of shahīd, martyr, was applied to the Gurus’ deaths mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries | Fenech[9] |
Contested; Political The second and third views are compatible, and most historians combine them; the fourth is about how the death was remembered rather than why it happened.[9][1] Majority
Why it is political
Which answer is stressed is a modern political question in its own right: whether the Guru is remembered as a protector of Hindus, as a martyr for the freedom of conscience of people not of his faith, or as a victim of Mughal rule.[9][18] Political The first reading bears on the argument over whether Sikhs are Hindus; the third on how Mughal rule, and Aurangzeb in particular, is remembered. This page reports each reading and does not choose between them.
The death framed what followed. The tenth Guru became Guru at nine because of it, and the second execution of a Guru, seventy years after the first, shaped his whole reign and the founding of the Khālsā in 1699 (What happened in 1699?).[9][3] Majority
Common misconceptions
- “A Mughal record explains the execution.” None from 1675 does, and the official chronicle is silent. Majority
- “The Kashmiri Brahmins are in the earliest account.” The Bachitar Nāṭak speaks of the tilak and sacred thread without naming Kashmir; the delegation is told in later texts. Majority
- “It was part of a war between Sikhs and the empire.” The Gurus had kept armed retainers since Guru Hargobind, but no source records fighting with Mughal forces under Guru Tegh Bahādur; Hargobind’s clashes with Mughal officers were local disputes, not a war with the empire (§4), and the tenth Guru fought hill rajas and Mughals in turn (§5). Majority
What the evidence cannot settle
Historians can date the arrest and the execution, and date each source that explains them. They cannot recover the order that sent the Guru to his death, because it does not survive, and whether his death was a martyrdom is a question each tradition answers in its own terms. Consensus
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i J. S. Grewal The Sikhs of the Punjab. The New Cambridge History of India II.3, Cambridge University Press, 1990. The standard narrative history; revised edition 1998.
- ^ a b c Harbans Singh, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism. Punjabi University, Patiala, 4 vols, 1992. open access Published 1992–1998; the standard reference, with signed entries reporting both tradition and sources.
- ^ a b c Hardip Singh Syan Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth Century: Religious Violence in Mughal and Early Modern India. I. B. Tauris, 2013.
- ^ Pashaura Singh The Guru Granth Sahib: Canon, Meaning and Authority. Oxford University Press, 2000. doi The formation of the Sikh canon, from the 1604 Ādi Granth to its installation as Guru.
- ^ Gurinder Singh Mann The Making of Sikh Scripture. Oxford University Press, New York, 2001. The manuscripts from the Goindvāl pothīs to the Damdamā recension.
- ^ Guru Granth Sāhib, ang 1427 — Guru Tegh Bahādur, Salok Mahalā 9. 1664–1675 CE (composed). Punjabi and Braj in Gurmukhi. "One who frightens no one, and fears no one else... call him wise": the ninth Guru's ethic of fearlessness. read the text
- ^ a b Kesar Singh Chhibbar, Baṅsāvalīnāmā — Genealogy of the Ten Gurus. 1769 CE. Punjabi in Gurmukhi. A Brahmin Sikh's history of the Gurus, with an early statement that the Granth is the Guru.
- ^ a b John F. Richards The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press (New Cambridge History of India), 1993. The standard survey of the empire from Bābur to the eighteenth century.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Louis E. Fenech Martyrdom in the Sikh Tradition: Playing the "Game of Love". Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000.
- ^ a b Max Arthur Macauliffe The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 6 vols., 1909. Written with Sikh scholars of the Singh Sabhā; the tradition's account in English.
- ^ Jahāṅgīrnāmā, regnal year 1 (1606) — Memoirs of Jahāṅgīr. 1606 CE. Persian. The emperor's own account of ordering Guru Arjan's execution, which he links to the Guru's blessing of the rebel prince Khusrau.
- ^ Wheeler M. Thackston, trans. The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India. Oxford University Press and Smithsonian Institution, 1999.
- ^ a b J. S. Grewal and Irfan Habib, eds. Sikh History from Persian Sources: Translations of Major Texts. Tulika, New Delhi, 2001. Jahāṅgīr, the Dabistān, court newsletters and chronicles in English.
- ^ Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī — Sāqī Mustaʿidd Khān, tr. Jadunath Sarkar (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947), pp. 51–52, 55, 60, 108. 1710 CE. Persian. The official history of Aurangzeb's reign: the April 1669 order on the 'schools and temples of the infidels', the demolition of the Vishvanath temple at Banaras (1669) and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura (1670), and the reimposition of jizya (1679), all framed in religious language. The 1669 order's wording is disputed (Sarkar: 'to demolish'; Eaton: 'be subject to demolition'). read the text
- ^ Muḥammad Aḥsan Ijād, Farrukhsiyar-nāma — History of the emperor Farrukhsiyar. 1713–1719 CE. Persian. The earliest Persian notice of Tegh Bahādur's death, known through Irvine: Aurangzeb secretly orders the arrest, Dilāwar Khān of Sirhind seizes the Guru near Ropar, and he is executed after refusing to become a Muslim.
- ^ William Irvine Later Mughals, vol. 1: 1707–1720. M. C. Sarkar & Sons, Calcutta (ed. Jadunath Sarkar), 1922. full text The fullest account of Banda's rising from the Persian chronicles, from the Mughal side.
- ^ Bachitar Nāṭak 5.13–14 — Dasam Granth. late 17th c. CE. Braj in Gurmukhi. The tenth Guru's account of his father's death: Tegh Bahādur "protected their tilak and sacred thread" and "gave his head, but not his resolve".
- ^ a b Louis E. Fenech The Sikh Zafar-namah of Guru Gobind Singh: A Discursive Blade in the Heart of the Mughal Empire. Oxford University Press, New York, 2013.
- ^ Ghulām Ḥusain Khān, Siyar al-Mutaʾakhkhirīn — Review of Modern Times. c. 1781–1782 CE. Persian. The first full Persian narrative of Tegh Bahādur's execution, a century later and hostile: the Guru and a holy man, Ḥāfiẓ Ādam, gather followers and levy money in Punjab; the shaikh is banished and the Guru executed, placed at Lahore.
- ^ S. A. A. Rizvi Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Agra University, 1965. Pp. 384–388 on Ādam Banūrī: sent from Lahore on the hajj in 1641–42, died at Medina in 1643.
- ^ Kharak Singh, G. S. Mansukhani and Jasbir Singh Mann, eds. Fundamental Issues in Sikh Studies. Institute of Sikh Studies, Chandigarh, 1992. Essays against McLeod's school, from its Sikh critics.
- ^ Audrey Truschke Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King. Stanford University Press, 2017. doi The revisionist short biography: temple destruction under Aurangzeb as limited and political; contested by critics who stress his discriminatory measures.
