Sri Guru Gobind Singh Ji

Gobind Rai was born at Patna in December 1666 while his father was travelling in Bengal and Assam. He spent his first five years there with his mother Gujri and his uncle Kirpal, and reached Anandpur in 1672. His father's execution in 1675 made him Guru at nine. His education, in Punjabi, Braj, Sanskrit and Persian as well as riding and arms, continued at Anandpur under teachers the family engaged.

He married Jito in 1677 and Sundari in 1684; a third relationship, with Sahib Devan, the tradition treats as a spiritual marriage. His four sons were Ajit (b. 1687), Jujhar (1691), Zorawar (1696) and Fateh (1699).[EoS][EoS][EoS]

In 1685 he accepted an invitation from the ruler of Sirmaur and built Paonta on the Yamuna, where for three years he kept a court of poets and translators and wrote much of his own early work. Jealousy among the hill rajas, and resentment of a Guru who kept an army, led to the battle of Bhangani in 1688, in which his small force, stiffened by Pathan mercenaries who stayed loyal and Udasi ascetics who did not flee, beat a coalition led by Fateh Shah of Garhwal on 18 September 1688.

He returned to Anandpur, which he fortified with five small forts, and fought alongside Raja Bhim Chand of Bilaspur against a Mughal tax-collecting expedition at Nadaun in 1691. The 1690s were spent building up Anandpur, resisting Mughal detachments sent from Lahore and Sirhind, and recasting the community.[EoS][EoS][EoS]

At the Vaisakhi gathering of 30 March 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Ji asked the crowd for a head. The five who came forward one by one, a Khatri from Lahore, a Jat from Hastinapur, a washerman from Dwarka, a water-carrier from Jagannath Puri and a barber from Bidar, were brought out alive, initiated with sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword, and named the Panj Piare, the five beloved. Guru Ji then asked them to initiate him in turn.

Those initiated took the name Singh, lion, and were to keep uncut hair, carry a sword, wear a steel bracelet, short breeches and a comb, and reject caste, tobacco, the masands and the rival Guru lines. The masand system of deputies, which had grown corrupt, was abolished; Sikhs were to deal with Guru Ji directly. The Khalsa, the pure or the sovereign, was a community that could recognise itself and act without a Guru present, which within a decade is exactly what it had to do.

The earliest account of the event, Sainapati's Sri Gur Sobha, written within a few years of Guru Ji's passing, confirms the abolition of the masands and the new code, though it does not give the dramatic details of the five heads.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Src]

A combined force of hill rajas and Mughal troops besieged Anandpur from May 1705. On the night of 5-6 December 1705 Guru Ji accepted sworn promises of safe passage and evacuated the town. The promise was broken at the Sarsa river in flood, where the party was attacked and scattered. His mother and two younger sons were separated and taken to Sirhind, where the boys, aged nine and six, were martyred by the governor Wazir Khan after refusing conversion, and Mata Gujri passed away in custody.

Guru Ji reached Chamkaur with about forty men and held a mud-walled house against the pursuing army for a day; his two elder sons were martyred in sorties. At the insistence of the remaining Sikhs he left by night, and crossed the Malwa alone and on foot, sheltered by two Pathan brothers who had served him, Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan. At Dina he wrote the Zafarnama to Aurangzeb, a letter in Persian verse which accuses the emperor of perjury and tells him that when every other means has failed it is lawful to draw the sword.

At Khidrana in late December 1705 forty Sikhs who had deserted him at Anandpur returned under Mai Bhago's leadership and attained martyrdom holding off Wazir Khan's pursuit. He named the place Muktsar. He rested at Talwandi Sabo for most of 1706, where tradition says he dictated the final text of the Adi Granth, adding his father's hymns, with Bhai Mani Singh as scribe.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS]

Aurangzeb, who had invited Guru Ji to meet him, died in February 1707. Guru Ji supported Bahadur Shah in the succession war, met him at Agra in July 1707, and travelled south with the imperial camp while the question of Wazir Khan went unresolved. At Nanded on the Godavari in September 1708 he met the ascetic Madho Das, initiated him as Banda Singh, and sent him north with authority to punish Sirhind.

Shortly afterwards two Pathans, by most accounts hired by Wazir Khan, stabbed him in his tent. The wound was stitched but reopened. Before passing away on 7 October 1708 Guru Ji declared, according to Sikh tradition, that there would be no further human Guru: Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji was to be Guru, and the Khalsa the embodiment of Guru Ji. The passages of Sri Gur Sobha checked for this site name the Khalsa in this connection. The decision gave the Sikhs a scripture and a community as their authority through the century of persecution and war that followed.[EoS][EoS][Src][EoS]

Works attributed to Guru Ji, with those of his court poets, were collected after his passing in the Dasam Granth. The Jaap Sahib, the Akal Ustat, the Bachitra Natak autobiography, the Zafarnama and the Savaiyyas are generally accepted as his; the authorship of the Charitropakhyan tales and some of the mythological material has been disputed since the nineteenth century. He added no compositions of his own to Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji beyond a single salok in some recensions.[EoS][EoS]