Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahibਤਖ਼ਤ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਕੇਸਗੜ੍ਹ ਸਾਹਿਬ

Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib is the great white gurdwara on the hill at Anandpur Sahib, and one of the Panj Takht, the five thrones from which the Sikh community orders its collective life. Every other Takht marks a seat of government, a birthplace or a final journey; Keshgarh marks a beginning. On this hill, on Vaisakhi 1699, Guru Gobind Singh Ji called for a head, and then another, and founded the Khalsa: the event from which the modern Sikh world dates itself.

The town of the last two Gurus

Anandpur Sahib was founded in June 1665 by Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, who bought the land in the Shivalik foothills near the Sutlej and named the settlement Chakk Nanaki, after his mother. It was here that the news of his martyrdom at Delhi reached the town in 1675, and here that his nine year old son Gobind Rai was installed as the tenth Guru. Guru Gobind Singh Ji spent some twenty five years at Anandpur, the longest settled period of his life, building it into a fortified city of congregations, poets and soldiers. The Keshgarh hill was its citadel and its pulpit at once: the place from which the Guru addressed the sangat, and the last ground of Anandpur to be given up when the city was evacuated in 1704.

What is Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib?

A takht is a throne, and a Takht is a seat of authority where the temporal and spiritual meet. Keshgarh takes its name from the kesh, the unshorn hair that is one of the five articles of the Khalsa's faith: the fort of the hair. The Takht's own Jathedar is appointed by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, and its hukamnamas, like those of the other Takhts, are received by Sikhs everywhere. But Keshgarh is visited less as a court than as a birthplace: of the five Takhts it is the one where something began. For most of its history the shrine was served simply by its granthi; a Jathedar of Keshgarh in the modern sense belongs to the era after the Gurdwara Reform Movement, and the line of SGPC appointed Jathedars is recorded from the 1940s.

The fort on the hill

The Takht stands on the site of Keshgarh Qila, one of the ring of forts Guru Gobind Singh Ji raised around Anandpur from the end of the 1680s: Anandgarh at the centre, and Lohgarh, Holgarh, Fatehgarh and Taragarh around it, joined by earthworks and tunnels. The Guru held his congregations on the Keshgarh hill, which then stood higher than it does today. Building the ring of forts took the better part of a decade from the end of the 1680s, and Keshgarh, at the centre, was never stormed: it was yielded only when the Guru decided to leave the city in 1704. The original fort structures did not survive the centuries of war and rebuilding; kar seva in the twentieth century replaced them with marble gurdwaras, and the present Takht building was raised in the mid 1930s over the old site, white domes above the town the ninth Guru founded in 1665.

Vaisakhi 1699: the birth of the Khalsa

On Vaisakhi 1699 the Guru summoned the congregations to Anandpur and, before the assembled thousands, asked who would give his head for the faith. Five men, the Panj Pyare, came forward one by one, and the Guru prepared the amrit, the sweetened water stirred with a double edged khanda in an iron bowl, and gave it to them to drink, receiving it from their hands in turn and taking the name Singh himself. A new people, casteless in its founding idea and bound to the discipline of the saint soldier, stood up on the Keshgarh hill that day. Vaisakhi at Anandpur Sahib is still kept as the birthday of the Khalsa, and the Takht is its shrine.

The relics of the Guru

In the sanctum the Takht preserves the historic weapons associated with Guru Gobind Singh Ji, shown to the congregation on great days: among them the khanda with which the first amrit was stirred, a long spear, a dagger and other arms of the Guru's court. Photographs from the 1930s, when the present building was new, already show these relics being carried out for display, and they remain the Takht's treasure: not gold, but the steel of 1699.

The Takht today

Anandpur Sahib draws its largest crowds at Hola Mohalla, the festival of martial display the Guru himself founded, when Nihang horsemen charge and fence below the Takht, and at Vaisakhi, when the birthday of the Khalsa fills the town. The Virasat-e-Khalsa museum, opened in 2011 below the hill, tells the five hundred year story the Takht stands at the centre of. Pilgrims combine the Takht with the town's other shrines: Sis Ganj Sahib, the forts, and Bhora Sahib, where the ninth Guru meditated.

How do I reach Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib?

Anandpur Sahib lies in Rupnagar district, about 40 km from Rupnagar town and 78 km from Chandigarh, on the road toward Nangal and Una. The town has its own railway station, Anandpur Sahib, and regular buses from Chandigarh, Rupnagar and Hoshiarpur. The Takht is reached through the town on foot: a covered climb of steps from the market to the hilltop courtyard. Like every gurdwara it is open to all, with langar served through the day. The complex has its own sarovar, a large langar hall and sarai accommodation for the pilgrims who arrive in their lakhs for the great festivals.