Anandpur Sahib

Guru Tegh Bahadur purchased the land and founded the town in 1665, naming it Chak Nanaki after his mother, and later, once fortified and expanded by his son, it took the name Anandpur, the City of Bliss. Guru Gobind Singh, who became the tenth Guru after his father's execution in 1675, made Anandpur his base and, on the Vaisakhi gathering of 1699, called the Sikh community together and asked, according to the traditional account, for volunteers willing to give their lives.

Five men stepped forward, one after another, and are remembered as the Panj Pyare, the five beloved ones; each is described as having been led into a tent, after which Guru Gobind Singh emerged with a sword marked with blood, until all five had gone in and come out alive, the fifth time revealing that the blood had come from a goat. He then initiated the five with Amrit, sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword, founding the Khalsa, the order of initiated Sikhs bound to a shared code and a set of outward articles of faith, and in a further reversal of hierarchy asked the five to initiate him in turn, so that the Guru became, in the phrase Sikhs use, both the father and the child of the Khalsa he had founded. Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib, built on the site of that gathering, is counted among the five Takhts, seats of temporal and religious authority, alongside the Akal Takht at Amritsar.

Guru Gobind Singh fortified Anandpur with a ring of forts, Anandgarh, Fatehgarh, Lohgarh and Holgarh among them, built to withstand the conflict his growing community increasingly drew from neighboring hill rajas and from the Mughal state. The town was besieged repeatedly in the early 1700s, and in December 1704, after a prolonged siege and a promise of safe passage that was broken once the Guru's forces left the fortifications, Anandpur was evacuated under attack; the Guru's two younger sons were captured and executed at Sirhind not long afterward, and two elder sons died in the battle at Chamkaur, a sequence of losses central to how the events at Anandpur are remembered within Sikh tradition.

The festival of Hola Mohalla, which Guru Gobind Singh instituted at Anandpur as a counterpart to the Hindu festival of Holi, replaced its color throwing with displays of martial skill, mock battles and horsemanship performed by the Nihang orders of Sikh warriors, and it remains the largest annual gathering at the city, drawing crowds that rival Vaisakhi itself. Today Anandpur Sahib functions as a major pilgrimage center built around its historic gurdwaras and forts, its economy and civic life organized substantially around the rhythm of these two annual festivals and the steady year round flow of visiting Sikhs.