Bhai Mohkam Singh Jiਭਾਈ ਮੋਹਕਮ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Bhai Mohkam Singh Ji (1663 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 Mohkam Chand at Dwarka in Gujarat, into a family of Chhimba calico-printers, he had already served the Guru for some fourteen years when he stepped forward to offer his head, and he brought to the founding of the Khalsa the skills of a trained fighting man.

The printer's son from Dwarka

Mohkam Chand was born on 6 June 1663 at Dwarka, the Krishna pilgrimage town on the western tip of Gujarat (his birthplace is also given as Bet Dwarka, the island shrine just off the coast). His father was Tirath Chand and his mother Devi Bai, and the family belonged to the Chhimba community, the printers and dyers of cloth whose patterned calico was Gujarat's famous export. His name is written several ways in the records, Mohkam, Muhkam and Mukham among them, a reminder of how many tongues carried these men's fame home.

He made his way to Punjab as a young man and reached Anandpur Sahib around 1685, entering the Guru's service while the court was still young. Alongside his devotion he practised the martial arts in earnest, and in the years that followed he fought in the Guru's defence against the hill chiefs and the imperial troops who pressed Anandpur again and again. By 1699 he was no new arrival but a veteran of the Guru's household. His long training in arms mattered in what followed: when the five were chosen, the Guru was not gathering symbols but soldiers, men already proved in his service, and Mohkam Singh's years of practice stood behind the sword he was about to receive.

Offering his head in 1699

On 30 March 1699 the Guru called the Vaisakhi assembly at Keshgarh fort and asked for a head. Mohkam Chand was one of the five who rose and followed him, and with the rest he received the new baptism and the name Mohkam Singh. In the order still used today he is named fourth of the five, after Daya Singh, Dharam Singh and Himmat Singh. Curiously, the older sources place him second in the order of volunteering, immediately after Daya Singh, while later accounts give the second place to Dharam Singh; the discrepancy is a small sign of how the story was retold across many regions, each of which treasured its own son's place in it.

His trade mattered to the story the Guru was telling. The five were a shopkeeper, a farmer, a printer, a water-carrier and a barber, ordinary working men from the far corners of India, and among them the printer of Dwarka stood for Gujarat and for the artisan castes. Early Sikh literature deepened the compliment, describing Mohkam Singh as a rebirth of Bhagat Namdev, the tailor-saint of Maharashtra whose hymns stand in the Guru Granth Sahib; the tradition loved to see the old bhagats reborn in the Guru's new order.

Martyrdom at Chamkaur

Mohkam Singh fought through the last Anandpur sieges and was among the small band who held the fortress of Chamkaur with the Guru in December 1705, after Anandpur was evacuated. There, on 7 December 1705 (some accounts date the battle to 1704), he fell fighting beside two of his fellow beloved ones, Bhai Himmat Singh Ji and Bhai Sahib Singh Ji. Of the five men who had founded the Khalsa together six years earlier, three died in that one small fortress in a single day, buying with their lives the hours in which the Guru, by the council's command, escaped into the night.

No tomb or portrait marks Mohkam Singh's individual story beyond what the tradition kept, and that is perhaps fitting for a man of the founding five: his memorial is the institution itself. Every amrit ceremony since 1699 has been conducted by five Sikhs standing where he stood, and every list of the Panj Pyare recited in a gurdwara carries the name of the calico-printer from Dwarka who gave up his loom and his life for the Guru's new order.

What was Bhai Mohkam Singh Ji's trade before 1699?

He was born into a Chhimba family of Dwarka in Gujarat, the community of calico printers, dyers and tailors. The craft stayed part of how the tradition pictures him: a working artisan whose hands, trained to print cloth, took up the sword in the Guru's service, and whom early Sikh literature honoured by calling him a rebirth of the tailor-saint Bhagat Namdev.

Why do sources disagree about Bhai Mohkam Singh Ji's place among the five?

The five are usually named in the order Daya, Dharam, Himmat, Mohkam and Sahib Singh. But older accounts place Mohkam Singh second of the volunteers, straight after Daya Singh, and only later retellings settled Dharam Singh into the second place. The difference does not change the story itself: all five offered themselves, all five were baptised together, and the Guru honoured them as one body.