Sahibzada Zorawar Singh Jiਸਾਹਿਬਜ਼ਾਦਾ ਜ਼ੋਰਾਵਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Sahibzada Zorawar Singh Ji was the third son of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, and the elder of the two younger princes, the Chhote Sahibzade. He was eight years old in the December of 1704, and his martyrdom at Sirhind, standing beside his little brother in the court of a Mughal governor and refusing to trade his faith for his life, is among the most retold stories in Sikh history. Of the Char Sahibzade, he is the one whose name the annual gathering at Fatehgarh Sahib speaks first.

Childhood at Anandpur

Zorawar Singh was born at Anandpur Sahib on 17 November 1696; some accounts give 28 November. His name means brave, or powerful. His mother, Mata Jito Ji, died in December 1700, when he was four, and from then on he and his baby brother Fateh Singh were raised largely by their grandmother, Mata Gujri Ji, the mother of the Guru. He grew up in the Anandpur of the Khalsa's first years: the new order founded in 1699, the forts rising on the hills, and, from 1704, the long siege that slowly starved the town.

The night the family was scattered

When Anandpur was evacuated in December 1704, Mata Gujri Ji took charge of the two young boys. In the attack at the Sarsa river, where the Sikhs were set upon in the rain and dark despite the sworn safe passage, the grandmother and the children were separated from the Guru's party and could travel no further. Gangu, a servant who had once worked in the Guru's household, took them in at his village of Saheri, near Morinda. There, fearing for himself or tempted by reward, he informed the officials at Morinda of who his guests were. The three were arrested and carried to Sirhind, the seat of the governor Wazir Khan, and shut for the winter nights in the Thanda Burj, the cold tower, a summer pavilion on the fort wall that was bitterly cold in December for an old woman and two small boys.

What happened in Wazir Khan's court?

On two successive days the boys were carried in procession to the governor's public court at Sirhind, through ranks of armed soldiers. They were told, falsely, that their father and brothers were dead. They were offered safety, comfort and riches if they would accept Islam, and threatened with death if they would not. Tradition remembers the children answering with a steadiness that silenced the court, and pointing to their grandfather Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, who had accepted execution at Delhi rather than abandon his faith. A courtier, Suchanand, urged severity against them. Sher Muhammad Khan, the Nawab of Malerkotla, who had fought against the Guru and lost kinsmen doing it, spoke against harming innocent children and refused his part in it. Wazir Khan overruled him and pronounced the sentence.

The execution and Mata Gujri Ji

In the account every Sikh child learns, the brothers were built alive into a wall, and stood in the rising bricks reciting their prayers until the wall fell and the execution was completed by the sword. The earliest written accounts are plainer and say the boys were beheaded; the difference is noted here because both forms are part of the record. The martyrdom is commemorated on 26 December, at Fatehgarh Sahib, where Gurdwara Fatehgarh Sahib marks the place and Gurdwara Bhora Sahib preserves the wall. Mata Gujri Ji, waiting in the Thanda Burj, died on hearing that the children were gone. A servant of the court, Moti Ram Mehta, who had taken milk to the prisoners, was later executed with his family for the kindness. The bodies of the children and their grandmother were cremated by Diwan Todar Mal, a banker of Sirhind, who bought a small plot for the purpose at a price the tradition measures in gold coins laid upon the ground: Gurdwara Jyoti Sarup stands there now.

The wall and the tower today

A visitor to Fatehgarh Sahib can still walk the whole geography of his last week in a few hundred metres. Gurdwara Burj Mata Gujri stands at the Thanda Burj where he waited with his grandmother. Inside the main Fatehgarh Sahib complex, Gurdwara Bhora Sahib preserves, below the sanctum, the fragment of the wall in which the brothers are remembered to have been built. Gurdwara Jyoti Sarup, a short distance away on the Sirhind road, marks the cremation. Few martyrdoms in the world are mapped so completely onto the ground where they happened, and few are visited by so many children, brought to stand where a boy of eight stood.

How is Sahibzada Zorawar Singh Ji remembered?

Each December the Shaheedi Jor Mela gathers lakhs at Fatehgarh Sahib for three days around his martyrdom, and the Thanda Burj, the court shrines and Jyoti Sarup are walked in procession. Since 2022 his day, 26 December, is Veer Bal Diwas across India. He is remembered not as a soldier, for he never fought a battle, but for a refusal: an eight year old who was offered the world for his faith, understood the bargain, and would not take it.