Guru Arjan Dev

Arjan was born in 1563 at Goindwal, the youngest son of Guru Ram Das and Bibi Bhani, and grew up in the house of his grandfather Guru Amar Das, who called him the boat that would carry the world across. Sent to Lahore by his father, he wrote him letters in verse full of longing; the third letter won him the Guruship in 1581, at eighteen, against the bitter opposition of his elder brother Prithi Chand.

He built. He completed the pool at Amritsar and in its centre raised the Harmandir Sahib, the Temple of God, on a platform lower than the city around it and with doors on all four sides, open to every caste and every direction. Tradition says he asked the Sufi saint Mian Mir of Lahore to lay its foundation stone in 1588. He founded Tarn Taran, with the largest sarovar of all, and a leper asylum there; he founded Kartarpur in the Jalandhar Doab and Sri Hargobindpur, and dug wells across the Majha in a time of famine.

His greatest work was the Adi Granth. With Bhai Gurdas as scribe he collected the hymns of the first four Gurus and his own, together with those of Hindu and Muslim saints, Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, Sheikh Farid and others, and arranged them by raga. In 1604 the volume was installed in the Harmandir Sahib with Baba Buddha as its first granthi. His own contribution is the largest of all, 2,218 hymns, among them the Sukhmani, the Psalm of Peace, recited by Sikhs every day.

The Sikh community grew rich and confident under him, with a system of tithes, dasvandh, and a recognised spiritual sovereign. That was enough to make him dangerous. When Prince Khusrau rebelled against his father Jahangir in 1606 and passed through Punjab, the Guru was accused of blessing him. Jahangir wrote in his memoirs that he had long wanted to put an end to this 'shop of falsehood'.

In Lahore, in the heat of May and June 1606, Guru Arjan was tortured: seated on a red-hot iron plate, with burning sand poured over his head, and plunged into boiling water. Mian Mir is said to have offered to intercede and been told to accept God's will. On 30 May, by the Nanakshahi calendar 16 June, he was allowed to bathe in the Ravi, and was never seen again. He was the first Sikh martyr. Gurdwara Dera Sahib stands beside the Lahore Fort where he disappeared, and every year Sikhs mark his martyrdom by serving chilled sweet water, chhabeel, to anyone who passes in the summer heat.