Guru Gobind Singh

Gobind Das was born at Patna on the Ganges in December 1666, the only son of Guru Tegh Bahadur and Mata Gujri, and came to Anandpur as a small boy. He was nine when Kashmiri Pandits came to ask his father's help, and by tradition it was he who said that no one was more worthy to make the sacrifice than his father. After the execution in Delhi in 1675 he became the tenth Guru.

He grew up a poet, a scholar of Persian, Sanskrit and Braj, a hunter and a soldier. He kept fifty-two poets at his court and wrote the Jaap Sahib, the Akal Ustat, the Bachittar Natak and the heroic Chandi di Var, which are collected in the Dasam Granth. The hill rajas, Hindu rulers of the Shivalik states, resented the armed Guru on their borders, and in 1688 he defeated them at Bhangani, helped by the Sufi Pir Budhu Shah, who lost two sons in the battle.

On Vaisakhi day 1699, before a great gathering at Anandpur, he drew his sword and asked for a head. One by one five men came forward, a Khatri, a Jat, a washerman, a water-carrier and a barber, from every corner of India and every caste. He initiated them with amrit, water stirred with a double-edged sword while the hymns were recited, then knelt and asked them to initiate him. They were the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved, and the first of the Khalsa, the community of the pure. Every Sikh man would be Singh, lion; every woman Kaur, princess; all would keep their hair uncut, carry the sword, and recognise no caste.

The next years were war. The hill rajas and the Mughal governors of Sirhind and Lahore besieged Anandpur from 1700. In December 1704, promised safe passage on oaths sworn on the Quran and the cow, the Guru left. The promises were broken. His mother and his two youngest sons were captured and taken to Sirhind, where the boys, nine and six, were bricked up alive and executed for refusing to convert, and Mata Gujri died in the cold tower. At Chamkaur the Guru, with some forty Sikhs, held a mud fortress against a huge army; his elder sons Ajit Singh and Jujhar Singh went out and died fighting. The Guru escaped through the jungle of Machhiwara.

From the Malwa desert he wrote to Aurangzeb the Zafarnama, the Letter of Victory, in Persian verse: an indictment of an emperor who broke his oaths, and the declaration that when every other means has failed it is right to take up the sword. At Khidrana, renamed Muktsar, the Forty Liberated died for him in 1705. At Talwandi Sabo, Damdama Sahib, he dictated the final version of the Granth to Bhai Mani Singh.

After Aurangzeb's death he travelled south with the new emperor Bahadur Shah and settled at Nanded on the Godavari, where he met the ascetic Madho Das and made him Banda Singh Bahadur, sending him north to punish Sirhind. There, in October 1708, he was stabbed by an assassin sent by Wazir Khan of Sirhind. Before he died he declared that there would be no more human Gurus: the Guru would be the Granth, and the Khalsa the Guru's body. He had given everything, his father, his mother and his four sons, and he was forty-one.