Life and times
Sri Guru Ram Das Ji, the fourth Guru, was born Jetha in Lahore in 1534 and was orphaned at seven. He came to Goindwal as a boy, worked on the Baoli, married Bibi Bhani, the daughter of Sri Guru Amar Das Ji, and was chosen as Guru in 1574. In his seven years as Guru he established the town that became Amritsar, composed the Lavan and began the line of Gurus in the Sodhi family.
We know his teaching from 638 hymns in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, a large and direct body of evidence. His life is less well attested. The Bhatts and the Var of Balvand and Satta confirm his standing and the succession, and Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji praises Ramdaspur by name. But the details of his early life and of how he obtained the land for Amritsar come from later writing, and the sources for the land disagree.
Mahima Prakash, the first connected account, gives him only eight sakhis, far fewer than for his predecessor. That gap shows in what can be said about these years.
Guru Ji was born in 1534 during the troubled early reign of Humayun. Sher Khan Sur drove the emperor through Lahore in 1540, when the boy was about six. Humayun regained Delhi and Agra only in July 1555. By then Bhai Jetha was settled at Goindwal.
The busy road that crossed the Beas at Goindwal linked him to the commercial world of Lahore. The later plan to invite traders and craftsmen to Ramdaspur draws on the same economic setting.[EoS][EoS][EoS]
Akbar was crowned at Kalanaur in the Punjab in February 1556 and ruled throughout Guru Ji's adult life. His relatively open religious policy meant that a growing community could found a new town without being treated as a threat. The Encyclopaedia says he treated the third, fourth and fifth Gurus with reverence, though the specific stories mostly come from Sikh writers.
A new town also depended on tenure. Land near Tung, Sultanwind and Gumtala lay among existing villages, and securing it needed either a purchase or imperial favour. This is why the land question below matters.[EoS][EoS][Gupta]
1534-c. 1546
Sri Guru Ram Das Ji was born on 24 September 1534 in Chuna Mandi, Lahore, and was named Jetha, meaning firstborn. The Encyclopaedia names his father as Hari Das and his mother as Anup Devi, also called Daya Kaur, Sodhi Khatris. Both parents passed away when he was seven, and he went to live with his grandmother at Basarke, the ancestral village of Sri Guru Amar Das Ji.
There he earned his keep by selling cooked beans. The Encyclopaedia reports that people remembered him giving food away to the hungry. These details come from later accounts.[EoS]
The orphaned boy sells cooked beans for a living and gives food to the hungry.
Note. Macauliffe introduces the family through a Sodhi named Thakar Das at Chuna Mandi, so the family details are not fully settled in these later accounts.
At twelve, Bhai Jetha travels to Khadur and on to the new settlement of Goindwal.
Note. Macauliffe's narrative and the Encyclopaedia's Bibi Bhani entry connect him with the Baoli, which the Goindwal entry dates from 1559. If he arrived in about 1546, he had been in the town for many years by then.
1554-1574
Bhai Jetha married Bibi Bhani on 18 February 1554. The couple stayed in Goindwal and did not return to Lahore, as custom would have had them do. Three sons were born there: Prithi Chand in 1558, Mahadev in 1560 and Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji in 1563.
Over the next twenty years Bhai Jetha became the most trusted of Guru Ji's helpers, and the sources show him labouring on the Baoli, serving the congregation and representing Guru Ji at court. Macauliffe says that this humility earned him the name Sri Guru Ram Das Ji, the slave of God.[EoS][EoS][Macauliffe]
Mata Mansa Devi sees the young hawker and tells the family to find a husband like him.
Macauliffe tells how Mata Mansa Devi saw Bibi Bhani playing one day and said that it was time to find her a husband. An agent was about to set out on the search when she noticed a boy selling things outside her door and said that they should look for a youth like him.
Sri Guru Amar Das Ji told the agent to wait and studied the boy. There was no need for a search, he said, since the boy had no equal. After questioning him on what a father-in-law wants to know, he sent gifts to the boy's family at Lahore and arranged the betrothal.
Note. The Bhani entry has him at work on the Baoli in 1554, but the Goindwal entry dates the start of the digging to 1559. These two dates from the same reference work do not fit together, and the sources read here do not resolve them.
Bhai Jetha answers Brahmin complaints about the kitchen before the emperor.
Note. See the life of Sri Guru Amar Das Ji for the fuller story. No Mughal record of this was found in the sources read.
1574-1577
Sri Guru Amar Das Ji passed away on 1 September 1574 after choosing his son-in-law as successor. Guru Ji now had a difficult position, since the sons of his predecessor were still at Goindwal.
Mann describes a replay of the older contest between legal heirs and a nominated successor. As he reads it, the sons Baba Mohan and Baba Mohri took control of their father's establishment, and the new Guru moved to the settlement he had been building, taking much of the following with him.[EoS][EoS][Mann]
All the Sikhs and family bow to Bhai Jetha as Guru, and verses in scripture praise the new Guru.
One scholar sees the move to Ramdaspur as following a dispute, while the Sad shows only unity.
Note. Sri Guru Ram Das Ji did return to Goindwal and passed away there, so any break was not total. Mann's reading is an interpretation, and it does not cite a particular incident.
1577-1581
A site was chosen 40 km north-west of Goindwal. Digging of the tank began in 1577, the year usually taken as the founding of Amritsar. The settlement was called Guru ka Chakk and then Ramdaspur, and only later Amritsar after the pool at its centre. Guru Ji invited traders and craftsmen to settle, an early decision that made the place a market as well as a religious centre.
Paying for the work brought a new kind of organisation. The Encyclopaedia's life of Guru Ji says he sent out masands to collect offerings, naming Bhai Gurdas as one who taught in Agra. Its entry on masands credits the first appointments to Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji instead. Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji's own hymn at Ang 1362 refers to bathing in the sacred pool of Sri Guru Ram Das Ji, showing that the place and its name were established within a generation.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][DB]
Sources disagree: purchase from Tung villagers, a gift from Akbar to Bibi Bhani, or a mixture of both.
The sources tell three stories. In the first, as quoted by the Encyclopaedia from the Amritsar District Gazetteer, 500 bighas were bought for 700 Akbari rupees from the owners at Tung.
In the second, told in the Mahima Prakash tradition and by Macauliffe, Emperor Akbar offered land to Sri Guru Amar Das Ji on his visit to Goindwal. Guru Ji refused, and the emperor made it over to Bibi Bhani. Macauliffe has the headmen of the villages come with offerings to Guru Ji, who sent them on to her husband, the future Sri Guru Ram Das Ji. The Encyclopaedia's life of Bhai Ballu credits him with proposing this solution.
Gupta's version joins the two. He quotes the Gazetteer as saying that the site was granted by Akbar on payment of 700 Akbari rupees to the owners of Tung, and he adds his own view that this was village common land and that the local headmen were consulted.
Note. No document from the time is cited by any of these. The Encyclopaedia's life of Guru Ji gives the Gazetteer as a plain purchase, while Gupta's quotation includes an imperial grant, so the Gazetteer itself needs checking. The purchase and the grant are not necessarily exclusive. The gift story also depends on Akbar's visit to Goindwal, which is not corroborated in the sources read.
The usual date is 1577, but other accounts begin the work earlier under Sri Guru Amar Das Ji.
Note. Macauliffe notes that the Suraj Prakash puts some tank episodes in the time of Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji and doubts this. Santokhsar and the main pool may have been in progress at different times, and this is one reason the dates vary.
Guru Ji sends Sikhs to collect offerings for the tank and langar, an early stage of the masand network.
Note. Three entries in one reference work give three starting points. A likely reading is that the function grew gradually and the name became fixed later, but the sources show only the disagreement.
Asked in jest about his long beard, Guru Ji replies that it is for wiping the feet of holy men.
Old chronicles, as the Encyclopaedia reports, say that the aged Baba Sri Chand, son of Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji and leader of the Udasis, came to visit and teased Guru Ji about the length of his beard.
Guru Ji replied that he had grown it to wipe the feet of saintly men such as his visitor. This reminded Baba Sri Chand of his father, and he told those present that Guru Ji was rightly sitting in the founder's true place.
Note. The story also serves to show the Udasis recognising the line of Gurus.
Guru Ji composes the four-stanza hymn now at the centre of the Sikh wedding.
Note. The authorship is firm. The Encyclopaedia describes how the hymn is used today, and when that use began was not examined.
1580-1581
Guru Ji's eldest son, Prithi Chand, managed the household and expected to inherit. Mahadev, the second son, cared little for worldly matters. The youngest, born at Goindwal in 1563, was his father's choice.
Soon after the appointment, Guru Ji retired to Goindwal. He passed away there on 1 September 1581 (2 Assu 1638 Bk), in the same room as Sri Guru Amar Das Ji, as the Encyclopaedia's description of Goindwal states. The office remained in the Sodhi family from then on, with consequences for every later dispute over succession.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][Src]
Sent to a family wedding, the youngest son writes longing verses that his brother intercepts.
As the Encyclopaedia tells it, a cousin named Sahari Mal came from Lahore in 1580 to invite Guru Ji to his son's wedding. Busy with the tank, Guru Ji asked each son in turn to go. Prithi Chand and Mahadev excused themselves. Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji went, and was told to stay in Lahore and care for the Sikhs until called.
After some time he wrote a verse to his father, full of the pain of separation. Prithi Chand intercepted it and hid it. A second letter met the same fate. The third reached Guru Ji directly, and because it was marked number three, the deception came to light.
He was recalled to Ramdaspur, where he added a joyful fourth stanza. Moved by the poem, Guru Ji chose him as the next Guru.
Note. The Encyclopaedia treats the verses as a poem that survives, but they were not traced in the text for this page. The numbered letters read like later elaboration.
Guru Ji passes away at Goindwal, and Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji succeeds him.
Note. The Var and the Dabistan confirm the succession but not the day. The neat seven-year anniversary comes only from the later reckoning.
A later artist's imagining of the ten Gurus, from Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji to Sri Guru Gobind Singh Ji, from the workshop of Purkhu of Kangra. No portrait from any Guru's lifetime is established.
Purkhu of Kangra, Early 19th century. Kapany Collection (as credited on Commons). Public domain. Source
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A later artist's imagining of Sri Guru Ram Das Ji, from a set of the first nine Gurus painted about 1800-1840. No portrait from Guru Ji's lifetime is established.
Unknown, c. 1800-1840. Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 925205 (as credited on Commons). Public domain. Source
The 638 hymns in thirty ragas give a clear account of his devotion and his description of a Sikh's daily discipline (Ang 305). They give almost no narrative.[EoS][EoS]
Praise poems in scripture by people close to Guru Ji's court. They are firm on the succession and on the belief that all the Gurus shared one light. They tell us nothing about the land, the marriage or the founding.[DB][EoS][EoS]
The Mahima Prakash and the Suraj Prakash carry the stories of the marriage, the Akbar grant and the letters from Lahore. The authors wrote some two centuries after the events and often to explain how the Sodhi line came to hold the office. Read here only through the Encyclopaedia and Macauliffe.[EoS][EoS][Macauliffe]
The source of the figure of 500 bighas for 700 Akbari rupees. It is a colonial record written long after the event, and it was read only as quoted by the Encyclopaedia and by Gupta, whose quotations differ in an important way (see the land episode).[EoS][Gupta]
Useful as a corrective, because it presents the move to Ramdaspur as the result of a contest over the Goindwal establishment and not only as a peaceful new foundation. It is written mainly about the scriptural text, so this is an interpretation in passing.[Mann]
"Life and times of Sri Guru Ram Das Ji". Sikh History: lives of the Gurus. https://sikh-history.co.uk/lives/guru-ram-das/