The answer given by Guru Arjan's son and successor, Hargobind, changed the shape of the religion. He is said to have taken his seat wearing two swords, one for spiritual authority and one for temporal, and to have built the Akal Takht, the throne of the timeless one, facing the Harmandir Sahib across the pool at Amritsar. Devotion and governance were placed side by side, physically as well as doctrinally.
The doctrine that grew from this, miri and piri, holds that the spiritual and the worldly are not separate spheres for a Sikh and that a community of faith may lawfully defend itself. It is the ground of the martial tradition, of the later founding of the Khalsa, and of the institutional arrangement by which the Akal Takht still issues directions to the Sikh community on matters affecting it.
This is a clear case, in a table full of them, of a religion's structure being set by an act of violence against it. The Sikh tradition did not choose the martial turn in the abstract; it chose it after an execution. The same pattern repeats in the same tradition seventy years later. When this atlas records that martyrdoms reshaped institutions, these two are the clearest evidence, because in both the change followed within a single succession and the tradition itself explains the change by the death.