Guru Gobind Singhਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life

Guru Gobind Singh was born as Gobind Rai in 1666 in Patna, in present-day Bihar, where his father Guru Tegh Bahadur's family was then living. His mother was Mata Gujri. When he was a small child the family returned to Punjab and settled at Anandpur, in the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1675, when Gobind Rai was just nine years old, his father was executed in Delhi on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for defending the religious freedom of Kashmiri Hindus. The boy was installed as the tenth Sikh Guru.

Growing up at Anandpur, the young Guru trained in horsemanship, archery, swordsmanship and the use of firearms alongside his study of languages and literature. He mastered Persian, Sanskrit and Braj as well as Punjabi. From the beginning, his Guruship carried a martial character: the community his grandfather Hargobind had armed, and his father had died for, now needed a leader who could both inspire and defend it.

Founding of the Khalsa

On Vaisakhi day in 1699, Guru Gobind Singh called his followers to Anandpur and made an extraordinary demand: he asked for five volunteers willing to give their heads. One by one, five men stepped forward and were led into a tent, from which the Guru emerged each time with a bloodied sword - until finally all five walked out alive, dressed in new garments. These were the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved Ones, drawn from different castes and regions of India.

The Guru baptised them with Amrit - sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword - and then, in a revolutionary act, asked to be baptised by them in turn. From that day he was Gobind Singh, and his followers were the Khalsa, the Pure. He gave them the Five Ks - Kesh (uncut hair), Kangha (comb), Kara (steel bracelet), Kachera (undergarment) and Kirpan (sword) - and the shared surname Singh for men and Kaur for women, erasing all marks of caste. The Khalsa was to be a casteless brotherhood of saint-soldiers, fearless and devoted.

Battles and sacrifice

The rise of the Khalsa alarmed both the Mughal authorities and the hill chiefs around Anandpur. Years of conflict followed. The Guru's forces fought at Bhangani (1688) and Nadaun (1691), and endured long sieges of Anandpur. In December 1704, after the Sikhs evacuated Anandpur under a sworn safe-conduct that was promptly betrayed, the Guru's elder sons - Ajit Singh, aged eighteen, and Jujhar Singh, aged fourteen - died fighting at Chamkaur, where forty Sikhs held off a Mughal army. His younger sons, Zorawar Singh (nine) and Fateh Singh (seven), were captured and executed at Sirhind for refusing to convert.

The Guru himself escaped, and from the wilderness he wrote the Zafarnama - the Letter of Victory - to Aurangzeb, denouncing the emperor's treachery in magnificent Persian verse. It remains one of the great moral indictments in Indian literature: a defeated man lecturing an emperor on honour.

Later life

After Aurangzeb's death, Guru Gobind Singh allied briefly with the new emperor Bahadur Shah and travelled with the imperial camp to the Deccan. At Nanded, on the banks of the Godavari, he was attacked by assassins and wounded. He died from his wounds in 1708, at the age of forty-two. Before his death, he ended the line of personal Gurus: henceforth, he declared, the Sikh community's Guru would be the Granth - the scripture - and the Khalsa itself. Guru Maneyo Granth: recognise the Granth as Guru.

Literary works

Guru Gobind Singh was a prolific poet. The compositions attributed to him - collected in the Dasam Granth - include the Jaap Sahib, a soaring meditation on the attributes of God; the Tav-Prasad Savaiye; and the Bachittar Natak, which contains his autobiographical account. His Persian and Braj poetry shows a mind equally at home in the Sikh, Hindu and Islamic literary traditions of his time.

Legacy

Guru Gobind Singh transformed the Sikhs from a religious community into the Khalsa - a distinct, visible, casteless order bound by discipline and courage. The Five Ks, the names Singh and Kaur, the greeting Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh, and the doctrine of Guru Granth Sahib all flow from his decisions. His four sons are honoured as the Chaar Sahibzaade, and his life remains the defining epic of Sikh identity: the poet-warrior who gave his followers an unbreakable sense of who they are.