Guru Arjan and 1606: A Temple, a Book, an Emperor’s Order and Two Swords

Punjab, June. It is one of the hottest days of the year. At crossroads from Amritsar to Abohar, young men step into the road with steel jugs. They wave down every car, bus and tractor. They pour out cold water sweetened with milk and syrup. This is the chhabeel, and they will not take a rupee for it.

Ask them why. Someone will tell you about a Guru who was made to suffer in the heat of a Lahore summer until he died. The cool drink, the scholar Pashaura Singh writes, answers the burning sand of his torture. It also recalls how calm he stayed.

That Guru was Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth of the ten Sikh Gurus. He built the Harmandir Sahib, the shrine the world now calls the Golden Temple. He put together the Adi Granth, the book that became the Guru Granth Sahib. And in 1606 he died in Mughal custody in Lahore. Emperor Jahangir had ordered it, and he wrote about it himself.

Within weeks his son, a boy of eleven, was wearing two swords. He was raising a throne opposite his father’s temple. Sikh history turned that summer. Here is how, told from every side the sources allow.

Amritsar was barely a town then. The fourth Guru, Guru Ram Das, had dug a pool in the flat Majha country. He invited traders and craftsmen to settle round it. When he died in 1581, he passed over his two elder sons. He named the youngest as Guru: Arjan, eighteen years old.

The new Guru set out to build a shrine in the middle of the pool. The SGPC, the Sikh body that runs it today, says the foundation was laid in December 1588. It says the Guru asked a Muslim to lay it: Hazrat Mian Mir, a Sufi of the Qadiri order from Lahore.

It is one of the best-loved stories in Punjab. As far as the record shows, it is also a late one. It first appears in Ghulam Muhayy-ud-Din Bute Shah’s Tawarikh-i-Punjab, written in 1848. No early Sikh text mentions it. The historians Louis Fenech and W.H. McLeod call it unsubstantiated, not backed by evidence. And the Sikh epic Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth says the Guru laid the stone himself. So we give it as what it is. It is a tradition many Sikhs cherish, and historians cannot confirm it.

What is beyond doubt is the design, and the design made a point. Temples of the day stood on high plinths, raised bases. This one sat lower than the ground around it, so you walk down to it. The historian Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair reads that as a lesson in humility. It had a door on each of its four sides. The doors were open, the SGPC says, to every caste and creed. Beside it the Guru kept a langar, a free kitchen where anyone could eat.

The money came from the Sikhs. They were asked to give a tenth of their earnings, the dasvandh. Deputies called masands collected it. The Guru founded more towns: Tarn Taran, Kartarpur near Jalandhar, and Sri Hargobindpur.

A Sikh centre was taking shape inside the Mughal Empire. It had its own towns, its own income and its own followers, many of them Jat farmers. People in Lahore were watching.

Not everyone in the family accepted the youngest son. Prithi Chand, the eldest, had expected to become Guru. He was about five years older than Arjan. Sikh sources say he hid letters between his father and his brother. Guru Ram Das found out, they say, and sent him away.

He set up his own seat at Hehar, on the road to Lahore. He lobbied the masands. Guru Arjan’s followers called his people the Minas, meaning scoundrels. Bhai Gurdas gave a whole vaar, a long poem, to condemning them as false gurus.

Sikh hagiographies, the lives of saints, go further. They say Prithi Chand and his wife Karmo tried three times to kill the Guru’s infant son, Hargobind. They tried a poisoned nurse, a snake and poisoned curd. But these stories were written down long afterwards, by his rivals’ side. The Minas’ own writings do not support the worst of them. Prithi Chand’s son Meharban was a serious writer. Historians still read his account of Guru Nanak.

The Minas were also passing round the Gurus’ hymns mixed with verses of their own. The historian Hardip Singh Syan suggests this helped push Guru Arjan to make one authorised book. It would fix the canon, the approved set of hymns.

Beside a quiet pool called Ramsar, a short walk from the Harmandir, the Guru sat down to make the book. The hymns of the first three Gurus lay in manuscripts at Goindwal. Baba Mohan, a son of Guru Amar Das, held them, and Guru Arjan borrowed them. To them he added his father’s hymns and his own. His own came to 2,218, more than anyone else’s. Among them is the Sukhmani Sahib, the Psalm of Peace. Bhai Gurdas wrote the book out.

Then he did something remarkable. He brought in fifteen bhagats, saint-poets from outside the line of Gurus. He set their words in the same book as the Gurus’ own, in the same ragas, the musical modes.

• Kabir, the weaver-poet of Benares, with 541 hymns.
• Ravidas, born to a family of leather-workers counted as untouchable.
• Sain, a barber; Sadhna, a butcher from Sindh; Dhanna, a Jat farmer from Rajasthan; Namdev, from Maharashtra.
• Sheikh Farid, the Sufi of Pakpattan. Many call him the father of Punjabi poetry, though some scholars think the verses are by a later sheikh of his line. And Bhikhan, also a Muslim.
• Ramanand and Surdas, Brahmins. They sit on the same pages as men Brahmins would not let into their temples.

The book was installed in the Harmandir Sahib in the late summer of 1604. Punjabi University’s Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives the date as 16 August. Others give 1 September. Baba Buddha had known Guru Nanak as a boy. Now he opened the book and read, with the Guru standing behind him.

I am not a Hindu, nor am I a Muslim.A hymn in the Adi Granth set under Guru Arjan’s name, echoing Kabir (raag Bhairo; our translation)

Word reached the emperor. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, following Sikh accounts, says someone complained to Akbar that the book insulted Islam. Akbar was camped at Batala, and he sent for it. Baba Buddha and Bhai Gurdas carried it to him. They read him hymns in praise of one God. Akbar, the tradition says, made an offering of 51 gold mohars, or coins.

Akbar had visited the Guru at Goindwal in 1598. At the Guru’s request, he cut the land tax for Punjab’s hard-pressed farmers. Akbar died in October 1605.

Agra, 6 April 1606. Jahangir has been emperor for six months. His eldest son, Prince Khusrau, slips out with about 350 horsemen and rides for Punjab. Hundreds more join him on the way. He means to take Lahore, and with it the throne.

His road ran through the Guru’s country. Near the Beas he stopped where the Guru was. Jahangir’s account puts the place at Goindwal. Sikh historians say Tarn Taran. Sikh sources say the prince got what every visitor got: food from the langar and a night’s rest. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says no other help was given.

The rebellion lasted three weeks. Khusrau’s men were beaten. On 27 April he was caught at a ferry on the Chenab. His father’s revenge on his followers was savage. Rows of them were impaled on stakes along the road, and the prince was led past them on an elephant. Some of his backers were paraded in the skins of animals. The emperor’s memoir records it with relish. Khusrau was later blinded.

Then the hunt widened. It took in anyone who had helped the prince, or was said to have. One of the names that reached the emperor was the Guru’s.

Jahangir kept a memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Jahangirnama. It is startlingly frank. In one entry he explains himself. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates it to 19 June 1606, twenty days after the Guru’s death.

At Goindwal on the Beas, he writes, lived a Hindu named Arjan in the garb of a holy man. He had captured many simple Hindus and even some ignorant Muslims. They called him Guru.

For three or four generations they had been peddling this same stuff.Jahangir, Jahangirnama (W.M. Thackston’s translation)

For a long time, the emperor says, he had meant to end this ‘false trade’, or bring the Guru into Islam. Then Khusrau came by. The Guru put a saffron mark, a qashqa, on the prince’s forehead. Hindus think it a sign of luck. That was enough. Jahangir had the Guru brought in. He handed the Guru’s houses and children to Murtaza Khan and confiscated his property. And he ordered him put to death: siyasat o yasa.

Those last words matter. Yasa is the Mongol word for the law of Chinggis Khan. Siyasat means punishment. Under the Mongol code, Pashaura Singh argues, the blood of princes and honoured men was not spilled. So they were killed by other means. In the Guru’s case, he says, that meant torture. Fenech doubts Jahangir thought the Guru honoured enough for that. The Sikh historian Ganda Singh translated the phrase simply as ‘put to death with tortures’.

The emperor does not pretend Khusrau was his only reason. He wanted the movement stopped anyway. And he names no fine, no Chandu, no one else. The order was his.

The Sikh tradition was written down from the 1740s onward. In it the emperor is not the only villain. The other is Chandu Shah, a rich Khatri banker and revenue official in Lahore.

The story goes like this. Chandu wanted Hargobind as a husband for his daughter. The Guru refused the match, and Chandu’s pride never recovered. He tried to turn Akbar against the Guru, and failed. With Jahangir, the tradition says, he succeeded, with Prithi Chand’s help. One Lahore version has him paying the emperor for custody of the Guru. That way he could torment him in his own house.

A letter from that year has an odd echo of this. Father Jerome Xavier, a Spanish Jesuit priest at the Mughal court, wrote it in Lahore on 25 September 1606. He says the Guru was fined, and a rich Hindu stood surety for the money, promising it would be paid. The Guru’s goods were seized. He was beaten and starved to make him pay more. Pashaura Singh thinks the rich man was Chandu.

Historians are wary of the rest. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism doubts that a revenue official had the influence to bring down a Guru. Pashaura Singh goes further. The Chandu story suited the Mughal state, he argues. It moved the blame from the emperor to a private enemy. It is no accident, he says, that some later Sikh chronicles speak kindly of Jahangir.

The tradition also says Jahangir later handed Chandu over to Guru Hargobind. Chandu, it says, died violently at Sikh hands. If so, it was revenge, and the tradition does not hide it.

Before he was taken to Lahore, the Guru named his son Hargobind as the next Guru. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates this to 25 May 1606. The sources agree on how the story ends. They disagree on nearly everything in between.

The Sikh tradition, as the Encyclopaedia tells it, says he was tortured for several days. He was made to sit on a red-hot iron plate. Burning sand was poured over him. He was put into boiling water. Then he was taken to the Ravi, which ran beside Lahore Fort. The cold water was too much for his blistered body. He went into the river and did not come out. The tradition gives the date in the old Bikrami calendar: Jeth sudi 4, 1663 Bikrami. That is 30 May 1606. He was 43.

The other early sources are shorter. Father Xavier was writing from hearsay. He says the Guru was insulted, struck and starved until he died. The Guru, he wrote, died

overwhelmed by the sufferings, torments and dishonours.Father Jerome Xavier, letter from Lahore, 1606

The Dabistan-i-Mazahib is a Persian survey of India’s religions, written a few decades later. It says he was tortured to get money from him and to make him give up his faith. He died, it says, in the heat of the Lahore sand. Jahangir says only that he ordered the execution.

So was it execution, torture or the river? W.H. McLeod was a New Zealand historian whom many Sikhs found too cautious. At first he wrote only that the Guru had died in custody. After reading Pashaura Singh’s work, he accepted that the Guru was cruelly executed. Fenech still holds that the evidence is thin.

What one can say definitively about Guru Arjan’s death is very little.Louis E. Fenech, historian

Every source accepts this much. The fifth Guru went into Mughal custody in Lahore alive, and he did not come out.

Bhai Gurdas knew the Guru, and he wrote a verse honouring the way he died. A Naqshbandi Sufi named Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi wrote something very different. He wrote it in a letter to Murtaza Khan.

The accursed infidel of Gobindwal was very fortunately killed.Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, letter to Murtaza Khan (Pashaura Singh’s translation)

Sikh scholars took the letter as proof that hard-line clerics pushed for the killing. Fenech and Indu Banga note three things. It went to the governor. It came after the event. And it mentions the death only in passing. Jahangir later jailed Sirhindi himself. Pashaura Singh replies that Sirhindi put into theology, the language of faith, where officials were already heading.

Lahore had another holy man that summer. Mian Mir was a Sufi who had come from Sindh as a young man. He lived simply outside the city and fed the poor. Emperors came to his door. One story says he kept Jahangir waiting at it. Jahangir’s grandson Dara Shikoh would become his disciple.

The Sikh tradition remembers him as the Guru’s friend. When he heard what was being done, it says, he came and offered to go to the emperor. The Guru told him not to. This was God’s will, the Guru said, and he would accept it. The historian Rishi Singh writes that Mian Mir did press the authorities to put off the seizure of the Guru’s property.

Like the foundation stone, the friendship appears in Sikh writing only from the 18th century on. But asked who stood by the Guru in Lahore, the Sikh tradition gave its answer: a Muslim saint.

Four hundred and twenty years on, the argument goes on. Here is each side at its strongest.

Amritsar, 24 June 1606. Twenty-five days after his father died, a boy of eleven took his seat before the Harmandir Sahib. Baba Buddha was there. The old man had taught him to use a sword and a bow.

The Gurus before him had been holy men in plain cloth. Guru Hargobind came armed. He wore two swords, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says. One stood for the spiritual and one for the temporal, the worldly: piri and miri. One for the soul and one for the world, and neither to be given up for the other.

A Sikh epic of 1843, the Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth, says this was his father’s last instruction. His son was to take the throne fully armed, with as many armed men as he could gather. No source from 1606 records Guru Arjan’s words. But his son acted as if he had heard them.

Even before the ceremony, the Encyclopaedia says, hukamnamas went out to the sangats. These were the Guru’s written orders to the Sikh congregations, dated 12 June 1606. Their message: bring arms and horses as your offerings. Fifty-two armed Sikhs became the Guru’s first guard.

Across the open ground from the Harmandir, the young Guru had a platform built. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates it to 15 June 1606. The art historian Kanwarjit Singh Kang dates it to 1609. The SGPC says Baba Buddha and Bhai Gurdas built it, and no ruler’s hand touched it.

He called it the Akal Takht, the Throne of the Timeless. In the Mughal world a takht was a king’s throne. Many Sikhs say this one was a quiet answer to Lahore. It belonged to Akal, God, and no emperor had granted it.

The Harmandir was for prayer. The Akal Takht was for the worldly business of the Panth, the Sikh community. The Guru heard disputes there and sent out orders. In the evenings, Sikh chronicles say, two minstrels sang ballads of heroes. They were Abdullah, a Muslim from Sursingh, and Natha. A Persian writer of the next generation, in the Dabistan, describes the Guru with 700 horses, 300 horsemen and 60 musketeers.

The Akal Takht is still the highest seat of Sikh authority. Its hukamnamas bind Sikhs everywhere. Afghan armies attacked it in the 18th century. Indian Army tanks shelled it in June 1984. Each time it was rebuilt. (Our long read on Punjab 1984 tells that story.)

Not every Sikh liked the change. In one of his vaars Bhai Gurdas records the grumbling. The earlier Gurus sat and taught, people said, and this one keeps dogs and goes hunting. In the next verse he answers with a farmer’s image. You plant thorny kikar round an orchard to keep it safe. Some scholars, such as the late Rahuldeep Singh Gill, read the verse as praise all along.

The Mughals noticed too. Jahangir had the young Guru held in Gwalior Fort. The Dabistan says it was over the fine Jahangir said was still owed from his father’s case. Accounts of when and for how long differ. Sikhs remember his release as Bandi Chhor, the freeing of the prisoners. The tradition says he would not leave unless 52 imprisoned princes walked out with him, holding on to his cloak. And Jahangir let them go.

Under Shah Jahan, the next emperor, the swords came out. On 14 April 1634 Guru Hargobind’s Sikhs beat a Mughal force at Amritsar. Mukhlis Khan, the faujdar or military governor of Lahore, was killed. More fights followed at Lahira and Kartarpur. Then the Guru withdrew to Kiratpur in the hills.

Why did the Panth turn to arms? Sikh historians answer: 1606. A community whose Guru could be tortured to death on an emperor’s word had to defend itself. John F. Richards, a historian of the Mughals, agrees. In the 1970s W.H. McLeod argued that something else mattered too: Jat farmers joining the Panth, with their martial customs. Sikh scholars replied that the choice was the Guru’s.

The line from that summer runs straight on. In 1675 Guru Hargobind’s son, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was beheaded in Delhi on Aurangzeb’s orders. In 1699 his son, Guru Gobind Singh, created the Khalsa. In 1704 he lost all four of his sons (our long read on the Four Sahibzadas). Miri and piri had become the shape of Sikh life.

Gurdwara Dera Sahib stands between Lahore Fort and the Badshahi Mosque, beside the samadhi, or memorial, of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Since 1947 it has been in Pakistan. Each year Indian Sikh pilgrims cross at Wagah for the Guru’s martyrdom day. In June 2026, the 420th anniversary, the SGPC sent 541. Pakistan said it had set aside up to 1,000 visas.

In Punjab the chhabeel stalls come out again. The date moves with the lunar calendar the SGPC follows. Pakistan’s Sikh committee keeps a fixed 16 June. In 1984 the day fell on 3 June. That was when troops ringed the Golden Temple for Operation Blue Star. Why the Army moved that day is still argued over.

Strip away the later legends, and three facts survive every test. A Guru built a temple open on four sides, and a book with room for a Muslim Sufi and a leather-worker’s son. An emperor wrote in his own memoir that he had ordered that Guru’s death, and why. And the Guru’s son answered. He put on two swords and built a throne no emperor had granted.

The record asks honesty of everyone. The Mughal state killed the Guru. Yet Akbar had honoured him, and Jahangir later freed his son. The Sikh tradition has added villains and details historians cannot find. It also chose to remember a Muslim saint as the Guru’s friend, when it could have remembered only enemies.

Jahangir called the Guru’s teaching a false trade he meant to shut down. Four hundred and twenty years later, the book that came out of that ‘shop’ is opened in the Harmandir Sahib every morning. And in June, across Punjab, the drinks are still free.