Bhai Taru Singh
A young farmer who fed Sikhs hiding in the forests. Ordered to cut his hair and convert, he refused and his scalp was removed in Lahore in 1745.
Taru Singh was born in 1720 at Poohla in the Majha, the son of a farming family. In the years of the persecution under Zakariya Khan, when the Sikhs had fled to the forests and deserts, he and his sister worked their fields and quietly supplied them with food.
In 1745 he was betrayed by an informer, Harbhagat Niranjania, and taken to Lahore. Zakariya Khan offered him his life if he cut his hair and became a Muslim. He refused. Since he would not give up his hair, the governor ordered that his scalp be cut off with his hair, and it was done with a scraper.
Bhai Taru Singh was twenty-five. Sikh tradition says he survived for twenty-two days and that Zakariya Khan, struck down by a urinary blockage, could only find relief by having Taru Singh's shoe beaten on his head, and died before him. A gurdwara, Shaheed Ganj Bhai Taru Singh, stands at Naulakha in Lahore, and he is remembered in the Ardas among those who 'gave up their scalps but not their hair'.
