By the time Guru Gobind Singh sat down to write the Zafarnama, he had lost the fortress of Anandpur, watched his forces scatter at the Battle of Chamkaur, and, in the days after that battle, lost his two elder sons in combat and his two younger sons to execution at the hands of the Mughal governor of Sirhind. A letter written under those circumstances could easily have read as a plea or a lament. Instead, in one hundred and eleven verses of Persian addressed directly to the emperor Aurangzeb, it reads as an indictment. Thirty two verses speak to the emperor's own conduct, and fifteen name a specific broken promise, that Aurangzeb's commanders had sworn safe passage out of Anandpur on the Quran itself and then attacked the column once it left the fortress's protection.
The letter's title, the Epistle of Victory, is not military boasting. Guru Gobind Singh had, in the ordinary sense, just lost. What the Zafarnama claims instead is a victory of conscience over power, closing on the argument that when every honest means of seeking redress has failed, taking up arms is not merely permitted but pious. He sent the letter under armed Sikh escort rather than through ordinary Mughal channels, wanting his own emissaries to witness whatever the emperor's reaction turned out to be.