ਭਾਈ ਤਾਰੂ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀਭਾਈ ਤਾਰੂ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Bhai Taru Singh Ji is remembered as one of the great Sikh martyrs of the eighteenth century, and he never led an army or held any office. He was a young farmer who fed people the state was hunting, and when the state caught him, he would not buy his life at the price of his hair. His story is the one Sikhs tell when they explain why kesh, uncut hair, is not a custom to them but a trust from the Guru, kept at the cost of life itself.

Who was Bhai Taru Singh Ji?

He was a Sandhu Jatt of Poohla village, also written Puhla, now in Amritsar district, born about 1720. His father, Bhai Jodh Singh, died in battle while Taru Singh was still young, and his mother, Bibi Dharam Kaur, raised him and his younger sister, Bibi Tar Kaur, as a widow. He tilled his small farm, lived as frugally as he could, and what the family saved from its own mouths, in food and in money, went to the Sikhs who had been driven into the jungles by the government of the day.

Tradition holds that he took amrit from ਭਾਈ ਮਨੀ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ, the scholar who was himself executed at Lahore in 1738. One account says it was seeing Sikh fighters rescue a poor girl from her abductors that settled his resolve to join the Khalsa. By the early 1740s his home had become one of the quiet links in the chain that kept the hunted Sikhs of the Majha alive: food cooked in Poohla reached men who could not show themselves in any village.

Feeding the Sikhs in hiding

Punjab was then governed from Lahore by Zakariya Khan, governor from 1726 to 1745, whose policy was to starve the Sikhs out. They were barred from farming, trade and public service, offerings to gurdwaras were stopped, and rewards stood on Sikh heads. The Prachin Panth Prakash, the early Sikh chronicle, has the governor ask his men how the Sikhs still lived when every source of food had been closed to them. His informer Harbhagat Niranjania answered that there were Sikhs who would not eat until they had fed their brothers, who ground corn through the winter and sent it into the jungle. And he named one of them: Taru Singh of Poohla, who ate little and sent what he saved to the Sikhs in hiding, while his mother and sister ground corn beside him.

Arrest and the road to Lahore

Harbhagat Niranjania, also called Akil Das, was a government informer from Jandiala. On his report, Taru Singh and his sister were arrested and charged with treason for aiding the fighters. The villagers bought Bibi Tar Kaur's freedom. Taru Singh refused to seek any pardon for himself. He was imprisoned and tortured, then brought before the governor at Lahore. The Panth Prakash records that he greeted Zakariya Khan with the Sikh salutation, Waheguru ji ka Khalsa, Waheguru ji ki Fateh, and answered the charge plainly: we till your land and pay its revenue, we trade and pay its taxes. What is left feeds us, and what we save from our own mouths we give to our brothers. We take nothing from you. Why do you punish us?

The governor offered the standard choice of the time, conversion or death. Taru Singh's reply, as the chronicle keeps it, was a question in return: why must I become a Muslim? Do Muslims never die?

Why was Bhai Taru Singh scalped, and not simply executed?

Asked where he found the strength to endure his tortures, Taru Singh answered that it came through his kesh, the uncut hair the Guru had blessed. The governor therefore ordered the hair itself to be cut, as the sign of a forced conversion. Sikh lore says the barber found the hair would not cut, as if it had turned to iron. The sentence the qadi then pronounced was designed to make the refusal permanent: the scalp itself was to be scraped from his head, so that the hair could never grow again. It was carried out in public, on 9 June 1745 by the usual dating. The exact method is described differently in different accounts, and historians note the ambiguity. The core of the story, the scalp demanded in place of the hair, is constant in every version.

He was about twenty five years old. He was carried back to prison, expected to die of the wound within days. He did not.

The last twenty two days

What followed is told by the Panth Prakash and kept by Sikh tradition as the seal of the story. Zakariya Khan fell ill, in severe pain and unable to pass urine. His advisers told him the illness was the fruit of his treatment of the Sikhs, and he sent an apology to the Khalsa Panth asking forgiveness. It was suggested his condition would lift if he struck his own head with Taru Singh's shoe, the shoe of the man he had wronged. Taru Singh had said, when his scalp was ordered off, that the governor would be killed by his shoe. The Khan did as advised, and his pain eased, but he died twenty two days after the scalping. When word came that the governor was dead, Bhai Taru Singh Ji, who had outlived him as he said he would, gave up his breath on 1 July 1745.

How is Bhai Taru Singh Ji remembered?

His body was cremated outside the Delhi Gate of Lahore, where a shahidganj, a martyrs' memorial, was raised and became a place of pilgrimage. In 1762 the Bhangi misl took Lahore, and the square where he was scalped became Shahidganj. Today ਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਸ਼ਹੀਦ ਭਾਈ ਤਾਰੂ ਸਿੰਘ in Naulakha Bazaar marks the place where his scalp was removed. Sikhs view Bhai Taru Singh Ji as a martyr and a symbol of the importance of kesh and of steadfast faith. A 3D animated film of his life was released worldwide in 2018, taking the story of the Poohla farmer to a new generation.