Guru Har Krishan

Guru Har Krishan's dying instruction, Baba Bakala, named only a village, not a person, and the ambiguity that followed shows how much authority rested on the child Guru's final words alone. In the vacuum after his death in 1664, some twenty-two different claimants set themselves up at Bakala, each declaring himself the true ninth Guru and gathering followers and donations on the strength of the dying boy's cryptic phrase. The true successor, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was living quietly among them and made no claim of his own.

He was identified, according to the tradition recorded by later Sikh chroniclers, through a specific test devised by a merchant named Makhan Shah Lubana, who had once vowed a large sum of gold to whichever Guru saved his storm-threatened ship at sea. Visiting each of the twenty-two claimants at Bakala in turn and offering a small coin to each, he received only blessings in return until he reached Tegh Bahadur, who alone named the full amount originally vowed without being told it, prompting Makhan Shah to run through the town proclaiming that he had found the Guru. The episode, however it is weighed as history, is the traditional account of how the community moved from a five-year-old's dying word to a settled ninth Guru.

Summoned to Delhi by the emperor Aurangzeb, who, the tradition holds, wished to examine the disputed succession, the boy Guru was lodged in the mansion of Raja Jai Singh, at the site now marked by the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. The city was then swept by an epidemic of smallpox and cholera, and the accounts relate that Har Krishan gave himself to the care of the sick and dying without regard to caste or faith, until he contracted smallpox himself and died at the age of eight, in 1664.

Before his death he gave only the cryptic direction "Baba Bakala", indicating that his successor was to be found in the village of Bakala. There, after impostors had set themselves up to claim the office, the community identified Tegh Bahadur, a son of Guru Hargobind, as the true ninth Guru. Har Krishan's brief life, spent in service to the stricken, became for Sikhs a model of selfless compassion.