Guru Gobind Singh Gurpurab

Guru Gobind Singh Gurpurab celebrates the birth of Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708), the tenth and last of the human Sikh Gurus, born at Patna in Bihar. His life shaped Sikhism decisively: it was he who, in 1699 at Anandpur, founded the Khalsa, the community of initiated Sikhs, calling for the Panj Pyare (the "five beloved") who offered their heads, administering the amrit (nectar) initiation, and giving the Khalsa the names Singh ("lion") for men and Kaur ("princess") for women and the discipline of the five Ks. Before his death he ended the line of living Gurus, vesting the guruship for all time in the scripture, thereafter the Guru Granth Sahib, and in the community.

The gurpurab is kept, by the lunar reckoning, in the month of Poh (December-January), though the Nanakshahi calendar has assigned it a fixed solar date, a point on which Sikh calendar reform has produced disagreement. It is observed as the other gurpurabs are: with the completed Akhand Path, processions, congregational kirtan, the expounding of the Guru's teaching and life, and langar. Gobind Singh was also a poet and warrior, and the day recalls a figure who gave Sikhism both its distinctive initiated form and its enduring self-understanding as a community of saint-soldiers committed to justice.

The Nanakshahi calendar, a fixed solar calendar intended to give Sikh gurpurabs and festivals stable annual Gregorian dates instead of the shifting dates a lunar reckoning produces, was formally adopted by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 2003, designed by the Sikh scholar Pal Singh Purewal specifically to end the older reliance on the Hindu lunar Bikrami calendar that most Sikh festival dates had traditionally followed. The reform proved contested rather than settled: the Akal Takht, under pressure from traditionalist bodies including the Damdami Taksal and some diaspora organisations that objected to moving away from the older lunar dates their communities had always used, backed amendments in 2010 that restored lunar reckoning for a number of major gurpurabs, including this one, even while other events kept the fixed Nanakshahi dates.

The result is a calendar genuinely split down the middle, some Sikh observances fixed permanently to the same Gregorian date every year under the Nanakshahi reform and others, including Guru Gobind Singh's own birthday gurpurab, still calculated by the older lunar method depending on which authority and which gurdwara a given community follows, a live and only partially resolved institutional disagreement about Sikh timekeeping that continues to produce different published dates for the same festival from different Sikh organisations in the same year.