The Martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur

Guru Tegh Bahadur, ninth in the Sikh line, was executed publicly at Delhi in 1675 under the emperor Aurangzeb, at the place where the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib now stands. Sikh tradition holds that a delegation of Kashmiri Brahmins had come to him for help against forced conversion, that he undertook to intervene, and that he was arrested, pressed to convert or to display a miracle, and beheaded when he refused both.

What makes this martyrdom distinctive in this atlas is its object. The Guru did not die defending Sikh practice or Sikh institutions. On the tradition's own account he died on behalf of the religious freedom of a community not his own, whose beliefs about images and ritual differed sharply from his. The title by which he is remembered, Hind di Chadar, the shield of India, makes exactly that claim.

Historians who work on Aurangzeb's reign weigh the political and religious elements in the case differently, as they do with Guru Arjan, and the sources for the immediate circumstances are largely from the Sikh side. The execution itself, its place and its date are not in doubt, and the principle the tradition draws from it, that defending another community's freedom of belief is a religious obligation, is one of the more unusual martyrdom doctrines in this atlas.

The Guru's son Gobind Rai was a boy when his father was taken to Delhi, and he succeeded as the tenth Guru. Twenty-four years later, at Anandpur, he founded the Khalsa, and the connection between the two events is drawn explicitly in the Sikh tradition and in the writings attributed to him.

The problem the founding addresses is visible in the manner of the father's death. The Sikh community had been persecuted repeatedly and had no organised, identifiable body able to withstand it, and the tradition records that even the disciples who witnessed the execution did not immediately claim the body for fear of being identified. The Khalsa answered that directly: initiated Sikhs would be recognisable, by uncut hair, by the articles of faith they wore and by the names they took, and would be bound to a discipline that included the defence of the community.

Being identifiable is the pivot. A persecuted group ordinarily conceals itself, and the founding of the Khalsa did the opposite, requiring visible marks that could not be set aside under pressure. That decision, taken by a Guru whose father had been executed in public, is a deliberate reversal, and it is the reason the two events are read together in the tradition rather than separately.