Bhai Sahib Singh Jiਭਾਈ ਸਾਹਿਬ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Bhai Sahib Singh Ji (1662 to 1705) was one of the Panj Pyare, the five beloved ones who were the first to receive Khande di Pahul from Guru Gobind Singh Ji at Anandpur Sahib on Vaisakhi 1699. Born Sahib Chand at Bidar in present day Karnataka, he was the southernmost of the five, a barber's son from a town Guru Nanak himself had sanctified, and he grew into one of the finest marksmen in the Guru's army.

Bidar, the town Guru Nanak had visited

Sahib Chand was born in 1662 at Bidar, in the Deccan plateau country of present day Karnataka. His family belonged to the Nai community, the barbers; later retellings do not all agree on his father's name, and the honest record is simply that he was a barber's son of Bidar who rose on merit alone. The town held a special place in Sikh memory: Guru Nanak had passed through Bidar on his southern travels in the early sixteenth century, and the spring known as Nanak Jhira, the stream of Nanak, kept a Sikh shrine alive there. A boy growing up Sikh in Bidar grew up inside a story that began with the first Guru himself.

At the age of sixteen, Sahib Chand left Bidar and travelled north to Anandpur Sahib, where he settled in the service of Guru Gobind Singh Ji and never left it. He arrived as a teenager from the deep Deccan and was formed, like the others, by twenty years in the Guru's court before the great day came.

The fifth to offer his head

On 30 March 1699, at the Vaisakhi assembly in Keshgarh fort, the Guru asked his Sikhs for a head. One by one the volunteers rose: Daya Ram of Lahore, Dharam Das of Hastinapur, Mohkam Chand of Dwarka, Himmat of Puri, and last of the five, Sahib Chand of Bidar. He followed the Guru to the tent, and came out with the others in the saffron dress of the new Khalsa, baptised and renamed Sahib Singh. In the order the five are named he stands fifth, and the tradition is content with the symmetry: the last to step forward completed a set that reached from Lahore to Bidar, the whole of India gathered into five men.

The marksman of Anandpur

What set Sahib Singh apart in the years of war that followed was his eye. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism's account records that in one of the battles at Anandpur he shot dead Jamatulla, a Gujjar chief fighting with the hill armies, and that in another engagement his musket shot seriously wounded Raja Bhup Chand of Hindur, a blow after which the hill forces broke and fled. In an age of matchlocks, a marksman who could pick out a commander decided battles, and the barber's son from Bidar became one of the Guru's valued fighting men, his skill a standing answer to anyone who thought worth was inherited.

Martyrdom at Chamkaur

Sahib Singh was with the Guru through the final evacuation of Anandpur in December 1705 and the stand at Chamkaur that followed. On 7 December 1705 he fell fighting in that little fortress, aged about forty-three, with Bhai Himmat Singh Ji and Bhai Mohkam Singh Ji, the three of the founding five who gave their lives that day. He had travelled further than any of them to reach the Guru, and he lies in Sikh memory where he stood in life: in the first rank of the Khalsa, where neither birthplace nor birth counted, only devotion and courage.

Bidar keeps its own thread of the story. The Nanak Jhira shrine where Guru Nanak's visit is remembered still draws pilgrims in Karnataka, and Sahib Singh's name gives the town a second place in the Sikh story: the place that sent the Khalsa its southernmost founder. For Sikhs in the Deccan, he is proof that the Panth was pan-Indian from its first morning.

Why is Bhai Sahib Singh Ji called the southern link of the Panj Pyare?

Because of the five, his home lay furthest south. Daya Singh came from Lahore, Dharam Singh from Hastinapur near Delhi, Mohkam Singh from Dwarka in Gujarat, Himmat Singh from Puri in Odisha, and Sahib Singh from Bidar in Karnataka. Together the five mapped the India of their day, and Sahib Singh's Bidar origin is always cited as the southern point of that founding compass.

What was Bhai Sahib Singh Ji famous for in battle?

For his marksmanship. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that in the fighting around Anandpur he shot dead the Gujjar chief Jamatulla, and in another battle wounded Raja Bhup Chand of Hindur with a musket shot that helped rout the hill army. A barber's son becoming the Guru's sharpshooter is part of why his story is told: in the Khalsa, a man's worth was what he could do and what he would give.