Guru Tegh Bahadur: The Quiet Guru, the Cage to Delhi and the Head That Came Home

Delhi, the first week of November 1675. A party of soldiers comes down the Grand Trunk Road from Sirhind with a prisoner the city has heard of but never seen in chains. By the Sikh tradition’s account, he travels in an iron cage.

He is 54 years old. His name is Tegh Bahadur, and to the Sikhs he is the ninth Guru in the line that began with Guru Nanak. Three of his Sikhs are prisoners with him: Bhai Mati Das, his brother Bhai Sati Das, and Bhai Dayala.

At home in the Shivalik foothills he has left his wife, Mata Gujri, and their only child, a boy of eight called Gobind Das. Four months earlier the boy was named his father’s successor.

On 11 November 1675, in front of the kotwali, the city police post in Chandni Chowk, the Guru was beheaded on the orders of the emperor Aurangzeb. A gurdwara called Sis Ganj Sahib, the shrine of the head, stands on the spot today.

Why he died is still argued over. Sikhs call him Hind di Chadar, the shield of India: a man who gave his life so that people of another faith could keep theirs. Some historians, reading the Persian chronicles, say the Mughal state saw a rebel with a following. Here is the whole story, tradition and record side by side.

He was born in Amritsar on 1 April 1621, the youngest of the five sons of Guru Hargobind and Mata Nanaki. His parents named him Tyag Mal. Tyag means renunciation.

His father was the Guru who wore two swords, one for worldly power and one for the spirit.

In April 1635 Mughal troops attacked the Guru’s camp at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar. The Sikh texts say the fourteen-year-old fought so well that his father renamed him Tegh Bahadur: brave of the sword. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates the clash to 26 April 1635.

Two years earlier, in February 1633, while still a boy, he had been married to Gujri, daughter of Lal Chand of Lakhnaur. The marriage would last forty-two years.

Then the swordsman did something nobody expected. He put the sword down.

After Guru Hargobind died in 1644, the guruship passed not to his son but to his grandson, Guru Har Rai. Tegh Bahadur went with his mother and wife to Bakala, a village near the Beas, and there, for the better part of twenty years, he lived quietly.

Sikh accounts remember him in an underground room, a bhora, absorbed in meditation. Several of his relatives, by contrast, wanted very much to be Guru.

The guruship went from Guru Har Rai to his younger son, Guru Har Krishan, who had become Guru at five. In 1664 the child Guru was in Delhi, staying at the palace of Raja Jai Singh of Amber at Raisina, when smallpox broke out. He nursed the sick, caught it himself and died there on 30 March 1664. Gurdwara Bangla Sahib marks the house.

Asked who should follow him, the dying boy is remembered as saying two words: Baba Bakale. The elder at Bakala.

Two words were not enough. Within weeks Bakala was full of Sodhis, men of the Gurus’ family, each sitting on his own cushion under his own canopy and each taking offerings as the true Guru. Tradition counts twenty-two of them.

Into this bazaar of holy men rode a rich trader, Makhan Shah Lubana. Caught in a storm at sea, the story goes, he had promised the Guru 500 gold coins if he lived. He lived. Now he had come to pay, and did not know whom.

So he tested them. He bowed before each claimant and placed two gold coins at his feet. Each one took the two coins and blessed him. Then someone pointed him to a man who was not claiming anything at all.

Tegh Bahadur took the two coins and, the tradition says, asked about the rest. Where were the 500 that had been promised in the storm?

Makhan Shah ran up to a rooftop and shouted to the whole village: ‘Guru ladho re, Guru ladho re!’ I have found the Guru. On 11 August 1664, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records, the Sikhs formally installed him as Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru.

Not everyone accepted it. His nephew Dhir Mal, one of the claimants, plotted with his masand Shihan, who fired at the Guru; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he missed. Dhir Mal’s men then ransacked the Guru’s house. Makhan Shah’s men struck back and looted Dhir Mal’s house, taking even his old copy of the Granth Sahib. The Guru had everything returned.

Late that year he went to Amritsar. The masands who ran the Harmandir Sahib shut the doors on him. He sat outside for a while, where Gurdwara Thara Sahib now stands, then went to the nearby village of Valla. The Amritsar sangat, ashamed, sent a party of women after him to make amends, and he blessed them.

The new Guru spent most of the next eight years on the road, and the road nearly ended early. In November 1665, at Dhamtan in what is now Haryana, he was arrested on imperial orders and taken to Delhi; Sikh historians differ on why. Raja Ram Singh of Amber, son of Raja Jai Singh, spoke for him, and he was freed.

Then he went east, along the old pilgrim road: Mathura, Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Gaya and Patna. He left Mata Gujri at Patna and went on. On 22 December 1666, in Patna, she gave birth to a son. They called him Gobind Das. The Guru heard the news at Monghyr, further down the Ganga.

He travelled on to Dhaka, where a Sikh sangat had grown up, and as far as Chittagong and Sylhet. In Dhaka, by tradition, the mother of his host, Bhai Bulaki, had a painter named Ahsan make his portrait. If that is right, it is one of the very few likenesses of a Guru that may have been painted from life.

In January 1668 Aurangzeb sent Raja Ram Singh to fight the Ahom kingdom of Assam. Ram Singh, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, asked the Guru to come with him, and he did. They reached the Brahmaputra early in 1669.

Sikh chroniclers say the Guru brought the two sides to a truce, and that Ram Singh’s soldiers built a mound at Dhubri, in Assam, to mark it. A gurdwara stands on that mound today. The truce did not last; the war dragged on for six more years.

Before he set out east, the Guru had done one more thing. In May 1665 he went to Bilaspur, in the hills, to mourn its late raja, Dip Chand. The widowed Rani Champa offered him land. He insisted on paying, and bought it for 500 rupees, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says.

On a mound at Makhowal, near the Sutlej, he founded a settlement and named it after his mother: Chakk Nanaki. In time it came to be called Anandpur, the city of bliss. His son would make it the most famous town in the Sikh world: the birthplace of the Khalsa in 1699, and the fort besieged in 1704 (our long read on the Four Sahibzadas tells that story).

The Guru came back from the east to Delhi in June 1670 and was with his family at Chakk Nanaki by Baisakhi 1672. He then toured the Punjab villages, digging wells, setting up langars and preaching. His hymns speak of the passing of all things and of a mind free of fear.

He frightens no one, and is frightened by no one.Guru Tegh Bahadur, Salok Mahalla 9, Guru Granth Sahib (our rendering)

Fifty-nine of his shabads in fifteen ragas, and 57 saloks, are in the Guru Granth Sahib. He was the first Guru since Guru Arjan whose words were added to it.

To understand 1675, you have to understand the man on the throne.

Aurangzeb Alamgir had taken power in 1658 by defeating his brothers. In 1659 he had his elder brother Dara Shikoh, a scholar who had translated the Upanishads into Persian, executed on charges of apostasy. A Sufi mystic, Sarmad, was put to death soon after.

He was a devout Sunni who wanted his empire run by Islamic law. His record includes acts Hindus and Sikhs have never forgotten:

• 1669: he ordered the Vishwanath temple at Varanasi pulled down.
• 1670: after a Jat rising around Mathura, the great Keshava Deva temple there was demolished and an Eidgah built in its place.
• 1672: he ordered grants of land held by Hindus taken back, though officials did not enforce it everywhere.
• 1679: four years after the Guru’s death, he brought back the jizya, a tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished a century earlier.

There is another side to the ledger, which historians such as M. Athar Ali and Audrey Truschke have pressed. Hindus made up a larger share of the Mughal nobility under Aurangzeb than under his father, rising to 31.6 per cent in the second half of his reign, largely because of the Marathas he took into service. Farmans survive in which he granted land to temples, maths and even a gurdwara. The historian Richard Eaton, counting only cases he could confirm in contemporary sources, finds about fifteen temples destroyed in his reign, far fewer than later legend claims.

Many modern historians, Eaton and Truschke among them, read his temple-breaking as aimed above all at places linked to rebels, and the jizya as partly about money and keeping the clerics on side. Neither reading makes a pulled-down temple any less pulled down.

One more fact matters. From the spring of 1674 to the spring of 1676, the court chronicle Maasir-i-Alamgiri places the emperor not in Delhi but at Hasan Abdal, near Attock, fighting Afghan tribes. Whatever happened in Chandni Chowk, Aurangzeb was not there to see it.

Anandpur, 25 May 1675. That is the date the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives for the day a group of Kashmiri Pandits arrived at the Guru’s court.

They were led, the tradition says, by Pandit Kirpa Ram, a Saraswat Brahmin from Mattan, near Srinagar. Some accounts say there were sixteen of them; the Sikh historian Trilochan Singh put the number at about 500. They told the Guru that Kashmir’s governor, Iftikhar Khan, was forcing Hindus to convert, and that they had nowhere else to turn.

The Guru, the story goes, sat silent for a long time. His son, not yet nine, came in and asked his father why he was so troubled. The Guru told him the world’s suffering would end only if some worthy person gave his head for it. Then, the tradition says, the boy answered that there could be no one worthier than his father.

The Guru told the Pandits to send a message to the emperor: if Tegh Bahadur can be made a Muslim, we will all follow. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says they sent a petition to that effect through the governor of Lahore.

This is the story most Indians know. Kirpa Ram, it ends, stayed with the Guru’s family at Anandpur, took amrit in 1699 as Kirpa Singh and was killed fighting at Chamkaur. In July 2025 Punjab’s language department and the Jammu and Kashmir cultural academy held a two-day remembrance of the Guru at Mattan, Kirpa Ram’s town.

Nobody doubts that Aurangzeb’s government put the Guru to death. Historians argue about why, and the problem is the sources.

The Sikh accounts are rich in detail but mostly written down much later. The Persian accounts are thin, and also late. The nearest thing to an eyewitness is a few lines in the Bachittar Natak, a poem attributed to Guru Gobind Singh and written some two decades later. It says his father protected the tilak and the janeu, the sacred mark and thread of the Hindus. It does not mention Kashmir.

He gave up his head, but did not utter a sigh.Bachittar Natak, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, in a common English rendering

The historian Satish Chandra pointed out that the histories of Kashmir from that time, including Narayan Kaul’s of 1710, say nothing of a persecution of Hindus under Iftikhar Khan, and that no order for mass conversion has been found. Sikh writers reply that silence in court histories is not proof that nothing happened.

The Persian writers deserve the same scrutiny as the Sikh ones. Ghulam Husain wrote more than a century later, as a relative of Alivardi Khan, Nawab of Bengal; he puts the execution in Lahore and pairs the Guru with a faqir, Hafiz Adam, whom Chandra calls out of place in time.

Two things can be true at once. The Guru led a growing community that travelled with armed men, and a suspicious empire could see a threat. And the state that killed him was pulling down temples, and asked him, by every Sikh account, to give up his faith.

On 8 July 1675, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, the Guru named his son Gobind Das as his successor. Three days later he rode out of Chakk Nanaki towards Delhi with a few Sikhs. He did not get far.

On 12 July, at the village of Malikpur Rangharan, in the Ropar area, he was arrested by Nur Muhammad Khan of the Ropar police post. For a long time Sikhs believed he had been taken at Agra; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says newer research points to Ropar instead.

He was taken to Sirhind and then held at Bassi Pathana on the orders of the faujdar, Dilawar Khan. He spent more than three months in custody there. Then, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, he was put in a cage and taken to Delhi with three of his Sikhs. They arrived on 4 November.

In Delhi, the Sikh accounts say, he was given a choice: accept Islam, or show a miracle to prove his holiness, or die. He refused to perform a miracle, and he would not convert. He was tortured, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, and still refused.

To break him, the officials began with his companions, in front of him.

By the Sikh tradition’s account, Bhai Mati Das was tied between two posts and sawn in two. Bhai Dayala was boiled alive in a cauldron. Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton and set on fire. J.S. Grewal’s history says Sati Das was hacked to pieces instead. Every account agrees none of the three gave way.

The Mughal kotwali where this happened was demolished by the British after 1857. A museum named after Bhai Mati Das and Bhai Sati Das now stands opposite Gurdwara Sis Ganj. Every day, in the Ardas, the Sikh prayer, Sikhs everywhere remember the martyrs who were sawn apart for their faith.

Then it was the Guru’s turn.

The tradition says he bathed at a well in the kotwali and sat in meditation under a tree. A crowd had gathered in Chandni Chowk, the grand market street of Shahjahanabad, below the walls of the Red Fort. The executioner struck once with his sword.

The date in most histories is 11 November 1675. The day is now marked across India as Shaheedi Diwas, on 24 November.

The body, the tradition says, was left lying in the street under guard, as a warning. Delhi had Sikhs, and Sikh tellings often say that few of them dared come forward. That night, the tradition says, a dust storm blew across the city.

Two men did what the crowd would not.

The first was Bhai Jaita, a young Sikh whom the tradition remembers as a Rangreta, from a community that caste Hindus of the day held to be ‘low’. Under cover of the storm and the crowd, the tradition says, he took the Guru’s head, wrapped it in cloth and slipped out of Delhi, heading north. The Tribune reports that he rested a night in Ambala.

At Anandpur the Guru’s son, not yet nine and now Guru Gobind Rai, received his father’s head. It was cremated there on 16 November 1675, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, where Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib of Anandpur stands. The tradition says the boy embraced Jaita and declared the Rangretas the Guru’s own sons: ‘Rangrete Guru ke bete’. Jaita took the name Jiwan Singh when the Khalsa was born in 1699, and died fighting at Chamkaur.

The second man was Lakhi Shah Vanjara, also known as Lakhi Rai, a Lubana trader and contractor who supplied the Mughal army and lived at Raisina, on the edge of the city. He emptied his lime carts near the Red Fort, and in the dark he and his sons, with a few helpers, lifted the Guru’s body into a cart and covered it.

An open pyre would have been reported. So Lakhi Shah laid the body inside his own house and set the house on fire. When the neighbours came running, they saw a family grieving over a burning home. Nobody guessed that it was a cremation.

That burnt house is the site of Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib, which now stands across the road from India’s Parliament.

A chadar is the cloth that covers and shelters. Sikhs call Guru Tegh Bahadur Hind di Chadar because, in their account, he died to protect the faith of people who were not his followers.

Many Sikh writers prefer two other names, Dharam di Chadar, the shield of faith, and Srisht di Chadar, the shield of all creation. Harinder Singh of the Sikh Research Institute has argued that ‘Hind di Chadar’ and ‘Dharam di Chadar’ make him smaller than he was: that he died for the freedom of every conscience, not one country or one religion.

His son drew his own lessons. Twenty-four years after Chandni Chowk, at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh called on the Sikhs to offer their heads, created the Khalsa, and told them never again to hide who they were. The Khalsa would be a community that could always be seen.

On 11 March 1783, a Sikh army under Baghel Singh of the Karora Singhia misl rode into Delhi. Baghel Singh stayed for months and built shrines at the places linked to the Gurus, Sis Ganj and Rakab Ganj among them. Mosques had been built at both sites by then.

At Sis Ganj, the place went back and forth between a mosque and a gurdwara until a court case, decided in the end by the Privy Council in London, went the Sikhs’ way. The British demolished the kotwali after 1857 and the land later passed to the Sikhs. The present building dates mostly from 1930. It keeps the stump of the tree and the well of the story.

At Rakab Ganj, the British pulled down part of the gurdwara’s wall in 1914 to straighten a road to the new viceroy’s house. Sikhs protested. After the First World War, the government gave way and rebuilt the wall at public cost.

On 1 May 2021, the Guru’s 400th Prakash Purab, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, without the usual security arrangements, during India’s second Covid wave, and bowed at the spot where the Guru was killed.

The year-long celebrations ended at the Red Fort on 21 April 2022, the first time an Indian prime minister spoke from there after sunset. Four hundred ragis sang shabads, and a coin and a postage stamp were released. The Prime Minister spoke of Aurangzeb’s ‘tyrannical thinking’.

Guru Tegh Bahadur ji, becoming ‘Hind di Chadar’, stood like a rock.PM Narendra Modi, Red Fort, 21 April 2022

The 350th anniversary of the martyrdom, in November 2025, became a political contest. Punjab’s AAP government held three days of events at Anandpur Sahib from 23 to 25 November, including the first sitting of the Vidhan Sabha ever held outside Chandigarh, and announced holy city status for Anandpur Sahib. The Prime Minister went to a Haryana government event at Kurukshetra instead, and AAP accused him of staying away; the BJP called that baseless. The SGPC refused the state an interfaith gathering at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, Anandpur.

The argument about motive is real. A Guru with a growing armed following may well have looked like a threat to the empire, and the Persian sources say so. The story of the Pandits rests on Sikh tradition alone, and historians are right to say that too.

But strip the story down to what no one disputes, and it is still extraordinary. A man who had spent twenty years in meditation, who wrote that a free person neither frightens nor fears, was caged, made to watch his companions die, and asked to save himself by giving up his faith or performing a trick. He refused both.

Look, too, at who stood up afterwards: a young man from a caste others looked down on, who carried the head home, and a trader who burned his own house for a funeral. One more thing. In our time the Guru’s story is often told as a simple tale of Hindu against Muslim. His own hymns speak of neither; they speak of fear and freedom. The empire tried to make an example of him. It did, though not the one it intended.