Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji

Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji was born at Goindwal in 1563, the youngest son of Sri Guru Ram Das Ji and Bhani and grandson of Sri Guru Amar Das Ji. He grew up in Guru Ji's household, learned Gurmukhi and the hymns, and was sent to Lahore in his late teens to represent his father at a family wedding, from where by tradition he wrote the letters of longing that are now part of the scripture.

His father installed him as Guru in 1581 when he was eighteen. His eldest brother Prithi Chand disputed the succession, diverted offerings, and set up as a rival; Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji's supporters called his line the Minas, the deceivers, a name that stuck for a century.[EoS][Macauliffe]

Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji completed the pool his father had begun and in 1588 laid the foundation of the Harmandir in its centre, a temple with doors on all four sides and set lower than the surrounding ground, which Sikhs have always read as a statement about openness and humility. The building was finished in 1601. Tradition says the Sufi Mian Mir of Lahore laid the foundation stone; the earliest sources do not mention this.

He founded Kartarpur in the Jalandhar Doab in 1594 and Tarn Taran in 1596, the latter with one of the largest pools in Punjab and, by tradition, provision for lepers, and had a well dug at Lahore. Amritsar under him became a market town as well as a religious centre.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS]

Between about 1601 and 1604 Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji, with Bhai Gurdas as scribe, gathered the hymns of the first four Gurus from the Goindwal pothis and other collections, added his own 2,218 compositions, and included the work of fifteen bhagats and several bards, among them the Muslim Shaikh Farid and the low-caste Ravidas. Compositions circulating under Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's name that he judged spurious, including ones put about by Prithi Chand's party, were excluded.

The volume was arranged by musical mode rather than by author or theme, each raag section running through the Gurus in order and then the bhagats. It was installed in the Harmandir in 1604 with Baba Buddha as its first custodian. The manuscript held by the Sodhi family at Kartarpur is regarded as that original. Fixing the text in this way gave the community an authoritative scripture about a century before the Guruship passed to the scripture in 1708.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Mann]

Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji is the largest single author in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. His Sukhmani, the psalm of peace, twenty-four sections on the nature of the divine name and the character of the saint, is among the most recited Sikh texts. His hymns range across every mode of the book and include the Barah Maha calendar poem and a large body of short, direct lyrics of thanks and surrender.[EoS][EoS]

In 1606 the new emperor Jahangir, who had just suppressed a rebellion by his son Khusrau, had Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji arrested at Lahore. Jahangir's own memoir records that he had long wanted to end what he called a shop of falsehood and that Guru Ji had blessed the rebel prince; he ordered Guru Ji's property confiscated and the man handed over for punishment. Sikh sources add the enmity of the Lahore financier Chandu Shah and a demand that Guru Ji alter the scripture.

Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji passed away in custody on 30 May 1606 after torture by heat, by the Sikh accounts, and his body was consigned to the Ravi. Sikh tradition holds that he accepted the ordeal as the will of God, a stance summarised in his own line, your doing seems sweet to me. His martyrdom convinced his son and successor Sri Guru Hargobind Ji that the community needed arms as well as hymns.[EoS][EoS][Grewal]