Gurdwara Shaheedi Asthan Baba Banda Singh Bahadurਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਸ਼ਹੀਦੀ ਅਸਥਾਨ ਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦੁਰ

Gurdwara Shaheedi Asthan Baba Banda Singh Bahadur is the martyrdom shrine of Baba Banda Singh Bahadur at Mehrauli in south Delhi, about one and a half kilometres from the Qutb Minar and close to the dargah of the Sufi saint Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki. It marks the ground where, in June 1716, the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar had Banda Singh Bahadur, the founder of the first Sikh state, put to death with his four year old son Ajai Singh and his last companions, after every one of them refused to give up his faith.

What is Gurdwara Shaheedi Asthan Baba Banda Singh Bahadur?

Gurdwara Shaheedi Asthan Baba Banda Singh Bahadur is the shrine Delhi's Sikhs keep at the execution place of Banda Singh Bahadur, near the Post Office in Mehrauli. Sikh tradition ties the spot to an old stone gate, now called the Shaheedi Gate, by the dargah of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, and a stone pillar about fifty feet high still overlooks the dargah, carrying, by the account kept at the shrine, the steel hook from which he was hanged. The Government of India marked his Martyrdom Day at this gurdwara in June 2022, when the Union Culture Minister said the Shahidi Sthal here would be protected under the Archaeological Survey of India.

Who was Baba Banda Singh Bahadur?

Baba Banda Singh Bahadur was born Lachman Dev on 27 October 1670 at Rajauri, in present day Jammu and Kashmir. As a young man he left home to become an ascetic, took the name Madho Das Bairagi, and settled in a monastery at Nanded on the bank of the Godavari. There, in 1708, Guru Gobind Singh Ji visited him. The ascetic took amrit, received the name Banda Singh, and was sent to Punjab with the Guru's blessing, five of the Guru's arrows, a war drum, a Nishan Sahib and hukamnamas calling on the Sikhs to join him.

What followed changed Punjab. His forces took Samana in November 1709 and stormed Sirhind in 1710, where Wazir Khan, the governor held responsible for the martyrdom of the Guru's younger sons, was killed. Banda Singh Bahadur then founded the first Sikh state, with its capital at Lohgarh. He abolished the zamindari system of landlord rule and gave the land to the people who tilled it, and he struck Nanak Shahi coins in the names of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. For a few years, ordinary cultivators in much of Punjab held their own land under a Sikh government.

Capture and the road to Delhi

The Mughal Empire answered with its full strength. After an eight month siege of the small fort at Gurdas Nangal, where his men were starved into surrender, Banda Singh Bahadur was captured in December 1715 by the forces of Abdus Samad Khan, the governor of Lahore. He and his companions were taken to Delhi in chains. Two envoys of the East India Company, John Surman and Edward Stephenson, watched the prisoners enter the city on 27 February 1716 and wrote home on 10 March: seven hundred and forty prisoners, the heads of Sikhs already executed carried before them, and offers of life made to any man who would renounce his faith. None would, the envoys recorded, and the prisoners called out to the executioner: kill me first.

The martyrdom at Mehrauli, June 1716

For three months Banda Singh Bahadur was held in Delhi while his followers were executed around him. The Mughal court newsletter, the Akhbarat i Darbar i Mualla, dates the emperor's final order to 9 June 1716: Banda was to be taken to the neighbourhood of the tomb of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Mehrauli, near the mausoleum of the late emperor Bahadur Shah, and there killed, and his son killed before him. Some accounts kept at the shrine give 19 June, but the court record and the following day's newsletter, which confirms the order was carried out, fix the martyrdom to June 1716, and it is in June that his martyrdom day is kept.

What the Persian chroniclers and the shrine tradition describe is among the most terrible executions of the age, and they agree on its meaning. Banda Singh Bahadur was offered the standing choice, death or conversion, and refused. He was ordered to kill his own son and refused again. The child Ajai Singh, four years old, was killed before his father's eyes. Banda's own eyes were then put out, his flesh torn, and his body cut apart, and through it all, even the hostile court historian Khafi Khan recorded, he kept his composure. The same stillness had marked the hundreds executed before him, who, the Company envoys wrote, could not be robbed of their dignity by any insult their enemies invented.

What stands at the site today?

Today the martyrdom ground holds a working gurdwara, kept by the local sangat, with the pillar and the old gate amid the lanes and ruins of Mehrauli, one of the oldest lived in quarters of Delhi. A second small gurdwara stands in a room in the courtyard of the adjoining site. The shrine is busiest on the martyrdom day in June, when Delhi's Sikhs gather to remember the founder of the first Sikh state. His memory also lives far beyond Delhi: the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore retold the martyrdom in his celebrated Bengali poem Banda Bir, long memorised by schoolchildren in Bengal.

How do you reach the shrine?

The gurdwara stands near the Post Office at Mehrauli in south Delhi, very near Mehrauli police station and about one and a half kilometres from the Qutb Minar, so most visitors pair it with the Qutb complex and the dargah of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki beside it. It belongs with Delhi's other martyrdom shrines, Sis Ganj Sahib and Rakab Ganj Sahib, which mark the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, and all of them are gathered in the Delhi guide.