Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Jiਸਾਹਿਬਜ਼ਾਦਾ ਜੁਝਾਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Ji was the second of the four sons of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, and the second of the Char Sahibzade to be martyred. His name, Jujhar, means a warrior, one who struggles, and his short life ran true to it: at about fourteen he refused the shelter of the little fortress at Chamkaur and went out to fight grown soldiers of the Mughal army, following his elder brother into the last battle of December 1704.

Birth and upbringing at Anandpur

Jujhar Singh was born at Anandpur Sahib in 1691 to Mata Jito Ji; most accounts give 14 March, while his birth is celebrated on 9 April in the Nanakshahi calendar. He grew up in the Guru's court in the Shivalik foothills, in a town that was half seminary and half garrison, and like his elder brother he was trained in warfare by Bhai Jiwan Singh. He was eight years old when his father founded the Khalsa on Vaisakhi 1699 and received the amrit with the family. The Anandpur of his childhood was a place under growing pressure: the hill chiefs around it and, behind them, the Mughal empire, moved from skirmishes to open siege as the boy grew. It was also, in its better years, a court of learning: the Guru kept fifty two poets at Anandpur, and the princes were educated among scholars and soldiers at once, in the Gurmukhi and Persian letters of the court and in the horsemanship and steel of the camp. Jujhar Singh's short life was spent entirely inside that double world, and his end came in its defence.

The evacuation and the march to Chamkaur

When Anandpur was given up in December 1704, Jujhar Singh marched in the Guru's own party. He crossed the flooded Sarsa river in the night attack that scattered the column, losing his grandmother and younger brothers in the confusion, and reached Chamkaur Sahib with a remnant of about forty Sikhs. The party fortified a mud walled haveli, and by morning the Mughal and hill forces had surrounded it. The Guru's own letter, the Zafarnama, would later tell the emperor that his small band fought against an army beyond counting, and a Mughal court record of the day confirms that the Guru's two sons were killed in that house.

What happened in the battle?

The Sikhs fought from the walls and roof while their arrows and ammunition lasted, and then, as the day wore on, began to go out in sallies of five, the Guru's prescribed way of meeting a hopeless fight. Sahibzada Ajit Singh Ji led one of these sallies and was killed. Jujhar Singh, who had watched his brother fall, asked to go next. Tradition dwells on the moment: a boy of fourteen, slight beside the veteran soldiers around him, unwilling to be left alive in the fortress while his father and brother fought outside. He led his five out, fought, in the words of the accounts, with the fierceness of a crocodile seizing its prey, and was killed. In the same day's sallies fell three of the first five beloved ones of 1699, Bhai Mohkam Singh, Bhai Himmat Singh and Bhai Sahib Singh of the Panj Pyare, so that Chamkaur binds the two sets of martyrs together: the first initiates of the Khalsa and the sons of its founder, going out through the same gate in the same order of fives. By nightfall almost every Sikh in the haveli was dead, and the surviving five, acting as the Guru Panth, ordered the Guru himself to slip away in the dark so that the Khalsa would live.

The battlefield today

The haveli where the brothers made their stand is marked at Chamkaur Sahib by Gurdwara Garhi Sahib, and the open field where the sallies fell by Gurdwara Katalgarh Sahib, the principal shrine of the town; a group of five gurdwaras together keeps the geography of the battle. Pilgrims walk the short distance between them and read the day in the ground itself: how small the fortress was, how open the field, how young the two princes who came out of the gate. The town keeps the elder Sahibzade's Shaheedi Jor Mela in December, in the same weeks that Fatehgarh Sahib keeps their younger brothers'.

How is Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Ji remembered?

He is remembered together with his brother wherever Chamkaur is honoured: at Gurdwara Katalgarh Sahib, which marks the field, and in the Shaheedi Jor Mela held at Chamkaur Sahib each December. The eighteenth century Sikh historian Ratan Singh Bhangu, whose grandfather had fought in these wars, compared Jujhar Singh's death to the fall of Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata, the young warrior who died defending his father, and gave him the thought that has followed him since: how can a son live while his father confronts death in battle? With all four brothers he is honoured on Veer Bal Diwas, 26 December.