Guru Gobind Singh’s Last Years: Muktsar, Damdama and the Knife at Nanded

Nanded, in the Deccan, the autumn of 1708. The monsoon has filled the Godavari, and on its bank, some 1,500 km from Anandpur, stands the camp of a man with no home left to go back to.

The evening prayer, Rehras, is over. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, is resting in his tent. He is 41. For days a Pathan stranger has been sitting quietly at the back of the sangat, at the morning and evening services, like any other listener.

Tonight he comes closer. Then there is a knife.

Soon the Guru was dead. Before he died, Sikhs believe, he did something that shaped every gurdwara on earth: he ended the line of human Gurus and told his Sikhs that the Guru from now on would be the scripture, the Granth, and the Khalsa, the community he had founded.

How did the Guru of Anandpur come to die on the Godavari? The road runs from a jungle in Punjab, past a dry pool in the desert and a village of scribes, to a robe of honour at Agra.

The worst of it had already happened. In one December week, by most accounts in 1704 (the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says 1705), the Guru left besieged Anandpur on a sworn promise of safe passage, saw the promise broken, lost his two elder sons in battle at Chamkaur and his two youngest, with his mother, at Sirhind. Our long read on the four Sahibzadas tells that December in full, including his escape from Chamkaur and the night in the jungle of Machhiwara.

Here we pick up the trail where that story leaves him: a hunted man in blue, carried past Mughal patrols by two Pathan horse dealers, Nabi Khan and Ghani Khan, and set down in the sandy country of the Malwa.

For weeks he moved from village to village, Hehar, Manuke, Mehdiana, Dina, sheltered by trusted Sikhs, among them the grandsons of Rai Jodh, an old ally of his grandfather, Guru Hargobind. At Dina, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, a few hundred Brar fighters joined him.

At Dina, or at nearby Kangar (the sources differ), the Guru wrote to Aurangzeb, the most powerful man in Asia, in the emperor’s own court language: Persian verse.

The letter is the Zafarnama, the letter of victory, 111 verses long. It reminds the emperor of the oath his commanders swore on the Quran at Anandpur and then broke, and it tells him, in effect, that he has won nothing. Two of the first Panj Pyare, Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh, carried it south to the imperial camp at Ahmadnagar. (The Sahibzadas story quotes its most famous line.)

Is the poem we read today the letter that reached Aurangzeb? For Sikhs it is part of the Dasam Granth, the book of the Tenth Guru, and its verses are recited on great occasions. Some historians are more cautious. A.C. Banerjee and Christopher Shackle doubt the surviving text is word for word what was sent; both suggest the original may have been prose, later turned into polished verse.

Louis Fenech, in his 2013 book on the letter, traces its echoes of the Persian classics, Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and Sa’di, and reads it as a moral victory won in the empire’s own language.

Sikh accounts say the letter worked on the old emperor, and that he asked to meet the Guru. They never met.

Far to the north, in the Majha country near Amritsar, a woman was ashamed of the men of her own district.

Her name was Mai Bhago, of the village of Jhabal. During the siege of Anandpur, forty Sikhs from Majha had lost hope. The tradition says the Guru told them they could go only if they signed a paper, a bedava, saying they were no longer his Sikhs. They signed, and went home.

At home, the story goes, they found no welcome. Mai Bhago rallied them and led them back to find the Guru and beg his pardon. They found him in the Malwa, with a Mughal force from Sirhind hard on his trail.

At Khidrana, a pool of rainwater in the desert, the only water for miles, the forty and the woman who led them took cover behind bushes and trees and met the pursuers head on. The Sikh accounts say the Mughal force was driven to retreat. The Guru, firing arrows from a sandy mound, was saved.

When the dust settled, the forty lay dead or dying. The Guru went among them. He found their leader, Bhai Mahan Singh, still breathing, and took his head in his lap. Mahan Singh asked one thing: tear up the paper. The Guru took the bedava from his clothes and tore it, and Mahan Singh died in peace.

The Guru called the dead the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated Ones. The pool of Khidrana became Muktsar, the pool of liberation. Mai Bhago, badly wounded, survived and never left his side again; she rode with him to the end as one of his bodyguards, the tradition says, dressed as a man.

When was it? The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, following the Bhatt Vahis, the bards’ registers, says 29 December 1705; a local tradition says the spring of 1705. Sikhs remember it each January at Maghi, when crowds bathe in the sarovar at Sri Muktsar Sahib and bow at Gurdwara Tutti Gandhi Sahib, whose name means the broken bond, tied again.

On 20 January 1706, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, the Guru reached Talwandi Sabo, a village on the edge of the desert near Bathinda. For the first time in years nobody was chasing him. He stayed more than nine months. Sikhs call the place Damdama: the breathing place.

The local chief, Chaudhari Dalla, took the Khalsa vows there, and one of Damdama’s best-loved stories is about him. Dalla boasted of how loyal his soldiers were. The Guru, the tradition says, asked for a volunteer to stand as the target for a new gun. None of Dalla’s men moved. Two Sikhs, remembered as Bir Singh and Dhir Singh, a father and his son, ran forward, each trying to be first. Dalla was humbled.

From Delhi came Bhai Mani Singh, escorting the Guru’s wives, Mata Sundari and Mata Sahib Devan. And at Damdama the Guru turned to books.

With Bhai Mani Singh as scribe, the Guru prepared a fresh, final edition of the scripture: the Adi Granth compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604, now with the hymns of his own father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, added. He did not add his own writings. This edition, the Damdami Bir, is the text of the Guru Granth Sahib that Sikhs read today, 1,430 pages in its standard printing.

A much-loved tradition says the Guru, with no copy to hand, recited the entire scripture from memory while Bhai Mani Singh wrote. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes a fresh copy made under the Guru’s supervision. Scholars who work on the old manuscripts, such as Gurinder Singh Mann and Pashaura Singh, still argue over exactly how it was put together and which surviving manuscripts stand closest to it.

Damdama became known as Guru ki Kashi, the Guru’s seat of learning, and Baba Deep Singh, who stayed on to look after it, spent years copying the scripture. The SGPC declared it the fifth Takht in 1966 and the Government of India in 1999, though the Budha Dal Nihangs still dispute its status.

On 30 October 1706 the Guru left Damdama and headed south, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, to meet the emperor who, Sikh accounts say, had asked to see him.

He was in Rajasthan, near a place called Baghaur, when the news came. Aurangzeb had died at Ahmadnagar in the Deccan in March 1707 (20 February by the old calendar some histories use), aged 88, after 49 years on the throne. He was buried in a plain grave at Khuldabad.

The man who had ordered the execution of the Guru’s father in 1675 was gone, and, as always in the Mughal house, his sons went to war over the throne.

The eldest surviving son, Prince Muazzam, asked the Guru for help. The Guru sent a band of Sikhs, 200 to 300 strong by one account, under Bhai Dharam Singh. In June 1707, at Jajau near Agra, Muazzam beat his brother Azam Shah, who died on the field. Muazzam took the throne as Bahadur Shah.

Agra, 23 July 1707. The new emperor received the Guru.

Bahadur Shah thanked him for his help at Jajau and gave him a khillat, a robe of honour, with a jewelled scarf, a dhukhdhukhi pendant and a kalgi, a jewelled plume for the turban. Here, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism notes, the Guru broke the court’s custom. A man honoured with a robe was expected to put it on in front of the emperor. The Guru’s attendant was called in from outside the hall and carried it away to the camp.

Then came the talks. The Guru, historians say, wanted Anandpur back; Sikh accounts add that he wanted Wazir Khan punished. Bahadur Shah was in no hurry: he did not want to anger either the Guru or the hill rajas, and he put the matter off.

The Guru plainly expected to go home. On 2 October 1707 he wrote two almost identical letters, hukamnamas, to the Sikhs of Dhaul and Khara. He told them he had met the emperor, and asked them to come to him armed when he reached Kahlur, the hill state around Anandpur.

He never reached it.

Bahadur Shah could not stay in Agra. His Rajput vassals of Amber were in revolt, and in the Deccan his youngest brother, Kam Bakhsh, had declared himself emperor. The imperial camp, a moving city of soldiers, clerks, elephants and traders, rolled south. The Guru went with it, with his own Sikhs, preaching along the way.

Was it wise? The talks were the one hope of getting Anandpur back without more war. But the oath broken at Anandpur had been sworn in the name of the same empire.

The camps crossed the Tapti in June 1708 and reached Nanded on the Godavari towards the end of August. The Guru pitched his tents by the river.

At Hira Ghat, Sikh accounts say, Bahadur Shah offered the Guru a diamond, and the Guru tossed it into the Godavari. When the emperor peered into the water to look for it, the story goes, he saw it full of jewels, and understood that the Guru’s court wanted for nothing.

At Nanded, in early September, the Guru met a Vaishnav hermit named Madho Das, initiated him into the Khalsa and sent him north to Punjab with five arrows. History knows him as Banda Singh Bahadur; our long read Banda Singh Bahadur tells what he did there.

Wazir Khan, the governor of Sirhind, was the man who had ordered the Guru’s two youngest sons killed. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he feared what the Guru’s growing friendship with the emperor might cost him.

According to the Sikh accounts and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, he sent two Pathans after the Guru. The Gur kian Sakhian, an old collection of stories, names them Jamshed Khan and Wasil Beg. They followed the camp south to Nanded and, the tradition says, joined the sangat as if they had come to listen.

One evening after Rehras, as the Guru rested, one of them stabbed him below the heart. Sainapati, a poet of the Guru’s own court, describes the blow. Wounded, the Guru drew his sabre and killed his attacker where he stood. The Sikhs on guard killed the second man as he ran.

Bahadur Shah sent his own surgeons, among them, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, an Englishman named Cole. The wound was stitched. For some days it seemed to be healing.

Then, the tradition says, the Guru bent a stiff bow, and the stitches burst. He lost a great deal of blood. This time he knew.

Three hundred years later, the question is still open.

A Mughal court newsletter from that October, published by the historian Ganda Singh, reports that the emperor was told the Guru had killed an Afghan named Jamshed Khan, and that a robe of mourning was given to the dead man’s son, who was in the imperial camp. To some Sikh writers, that robe is a clue. To others it was simply the court honouring one of its own soldiers.

For two centuries, since Guru Nanak, each Guru had named the next. Now there was no son left to name.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism tells the last day this way. The Guru asked for the scripture, the Granth he had completed at Damdama, to be brought before him. He placed five paise and a coconut in front of it, the old gesture of a Guru installing his successor, and bowed his head.

It is my commandment: Own Sri Granthji in my place.Guru Gobind Singh, as recorded in the Bhatt Vahi of Talauda, Jind

His spirit, he told the Sikhs, would live on in the Granth and in the Khalsa. As Sikhs understand it, the scripture would guide them and the community, gathered in its presence, would decide.

Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded on 7 October 1708 (Kattak sudi 5, 1765 Bikrami), by the date most histories give. The Bhatt Vahi puts the proclamation on Wednesday 6 October, and some scholars give that as the day he died. He was 41.

Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh, two of the five who stood up at Anandpur in 1699 (see our long read Vaisakhi 1699), were with him. The room over the place of his cremation is called Angitha Sahib.

Today, after Ardas, the congregational prayer, Sikhs in most gurdwaras sing the words: Sab Sikhan ko hukam hai, Guru manyo Granth. All Sikhs are commanded to accept the Granth as the Guru.

Historians ask a harder question: which records say so, and when were they written?

• Sri Gur Sobha, by Sainapati, a poet of the Guru’s own court, was finished by about 1711. It describes the attack and the Guru’s passing and, scholars say, ends on the doctrine that the Guru lives on in the Granth and the Panth.
• The Bhatt Vahi of Talauda, a bard’s register, has the words quoted above and the date of 6 October 1708; it is credited to Bhatt Narbud Singh, who was at Nanded. Much of what we know of the Bhatt Vahis comes from transcripts published by the scholar Giani Garja Singh. The historian Jeevan Deol wrote in 1998 that some of his extracts are doubtful, because neither the originals nor his copies are held in any institution’s collection.
• Kesar Singh Chhibber’s Bansavalinama (1769) records last words that name the Granth as Guru.
• The famous couplet recited after Ardas appears in later texts, among them rahitnamas, codes of conduct, whose dates scholars dispute. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls one of them, attributed to Prahlad Singh, ‘anachronistically dated’.

On the main point historians agree: the Guru named no human successor, and by the eighteenth century the Sikhs had firmly accepted the Guru Granth and the Guru Panth in his place. The argument is over the exact words and day.

One group differs: the Namdharis believe the Guru lived on in secret and passed the Guruship to Balak Singh. Nearly all Sikhs reject this, and the records of 1708 and soon after report his death that year.

Sikhs call Nanded Abchalnagar, the city that does not move. The shrine over the Guru’s last camp is Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib, one of the five Takhts, the seats of Sikh authority. Sachkhand means the realm of truth.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab had the present building raised between 1832 and 1837, far outside his own kingdom.

The Sikhs who stayed on at Nanded after 1708 grew into a community of their own, the Hazuri or Dakhni Sikhs, with customs that can surprise a visitor from Punjab. The Dasam Granth is installed beside the Guru Granth Sahib. Under the Takht’s two-centuries-old maryada, or code, its Jathedar must stay celibate and may not leave Nanded; he sends a deputy to meetings at the Akal Takht.

Mai Bhago is remembered here too. A hall in the Takht complex, Bunga Mai Bhago, is said to mark where she lived. After the Guru’s death she went further south, to Jinvara near Bidar, and spent her old age there in prayer; her hut is now a gurdwara.

In the autumn of 2008, Nanded prepared for the three hundredth anniversary of the day the Granth became the Guru, the Gurta Gaddi.

A new airport, Shri Guru Gobind Singh Ji Airport, opened on 4 October 2008; the first flight from Amritsar brought the Jathedar of the Akal Takht. The Maharashtra government talked of renaming the town Hazur Sahib Nanded; trains today run to a station of that name. On Diwali, kept by Sikhs as Bandi Chhor Diwas, The Tribune reported more than a lakh pilgrims at the Takht.

The preparations had critics. In 2007 the management committee demolished two old buildings in the complex, the Ramgarhia Bunga and the Baradari, calling them dilapidated and planning a museum and pilgrims’ rooms.

On 30 October 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came to the main function, in a long saffron gown with a kirpan. The Tribune reported that security turned the town into a police cantonment, and that the procession of the Guru Granth Sahib and the Panj Pyare over the short distance from Gurdwara Nagina Ghat to the Takht took about five hours. Devotees called the delay most unfortunate.

Hazur Sahib is run under a Maharashtra law of 1956, with a 17-member board. Who sits on that board has become a running fight.

In February 2024, the Maharashtra government moved to let itself nominate 12 of the 17 members directly, to cut the SGPC’s nominees from four to two, and to drop places for the Chief Khalsa Diwan, the Hazuri Sachkhand Diwan and two Sikh MPs. Officials said every member would still be a Sikh. The Akal Takht and the SGPC condemned the plan, protesters took to the streets, and the government soon held the bill back.

In June 2026 the state went further. The cabinet of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis approved repealing the 1956 Act and replacing it with a new law. The caretakers of the Takht answered with a gurmata, a resolution taken in the Guru’s name, read out in the presence of Jathedar Giani Kulwant Singh, demanding that the old Act stay. Leaders of the Akali Dal, Congress, AAP and the SGPC objected, and so did BJP Sikh leaders. On 30 June Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule said the state had no intention of interfering; the draft was put on hold and a panel of officials set up to hear Sikh clergy and community leaders.

This holy Takht ... belongs to the Sikh Panth.Sukhbir Singh Badal, Akali Dal president, June 2026

As we write in October 2026, we have found no report that the new law has been passed.

* The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates the evacuation of Anandpur, Chamkaur and Sirhind to December 1705.

Strip away the arguments over dates and words, and the record still tells an extraordinary story. A man who had lost his mother, his four sons and his town went on writing, teaching and fighting. He forgave the men who had deserted him. He wrote to the emperor as an equal. He finished a book that millions of Sikhs now call their Guru.

Aurangzeb’s commanders broke an oath, and Wazir Khan, the tradition says, sent the killers. Yet Bahadur Shah honoured the Guru and sent his surgeons to Nanded, even if, two years later, he ordered Sikhs killed wherever they were found.

And the Guru’s last act was not to crown a son. It was to tell his Sikhs to find the Guru in a book and in each other. Three hundred years on, as governments argue over who should run the Takht at Nanded, that is worth remembering: he left his Sikhs to the Granth and the Khalsa, not to any ruler.