The Four Sahibzadas: Chamkaur, the Cold Tower and the December Punjab Never Forgets

Sirhind, December. On the edge of the governor’s fort stands a tall brick tower called the Thanda Burj, the cold tower. In a Punjab summer its breeze is a gift. In a Punjab winter it is a punishment.

Inside, the Sikh tradition tells us, sit three prisoners on a bare floor. One is Mata Gujri, widow of the ninth Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur, beheaded in Delhi on Aurangzeb’s orders in 1675. The other two are her grandsons, Sahibzada Zorawar Singh and Sahibzada Fateh Singh, sons of the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh. One is eight or nine years old. The other is five or six.

They do not know where their father is, or that their two elder brothers have just died fighting at Chamkaur, less than 30 km away.

In the morning they will be taken before the governor of Sirhind, Wazir Khan, and asked to give up their faith. What happened next has been told in every Sikh home, every December, for more than 300 years.

This is the story of that December: a broken oath, a river in flood, a last stand, a betrayal and a wall. It is also the story of people who did right when it could cost them everything. They were Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So were the people who did wrong.

Guru Gobind Singh had four sons. Sikhs call them the Chaar Sahibzaade, the four princes, and speak of each with the title Baba, the word for a revered elder. Not child. Elder. Remember that word; it comes back at the end of this story.

The ages depend on whether these events happened in December 1704 or 1705, which historians still argue about. The birth years come from Punjabi University’s Encyclopaedia of Sikhism.

Anandpur Sahib, where the Punjab plain meets the Shivalik hills, was the Guru’s home and the birthplace of the Khalsa. To the Hindu rajas of the hill states around it, led by Raja Ajmer Chand of Bilaspur, a fortified town of armed Sikhs who bowed to no one was a threat. After years of fighting, they asked the Mughal emperor for help.

From about May 1704, by most modern accounts, Mughal troops from Sirhind and Lahore joined the hill armies around Anandpur’s forts. Month after month the town starved. Sikh accounts speak of people eating leaves and bark.

Then came the offers. Leave Anandpur, the besiegers said, and you and your people can go in peace. Sikh sources say the Mughal commanders swore it on the Quran and the hill rajas on the cow, sacred to Hindus. The Guru’s own later letter to the emperor, the Zafarnama, accuses Aurangzeb’s men of breaking an oath sworn on the Quran.

The Guru did not believe them. The tradition says he tested them with bullock carts draped in rich cloth, as if carrying treasure, but full of rubbish. The besiegers fell on them and looted them.

But the hunger was real. His mother and many Sikhs begged him to accept. Some had already gone; tradition says forty signed a paper disowning him and walked away, a story that ends, a year later, at Muktsar. On a freezing December night, the Guru, his family and a few hundred Sikhs walked out of Anandpur.

A word on dates. Most histories, and India’s 26 December observance, put these events in December 1704. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says December 1705: Anandpur left on 5–6 December, Chamkaur on 7 December, Sirhind on 12 December. Sikhs keep the days by the month of Poh: 8 Poh for Chamkaur, 13 Poh for Sirhind. Even the conversion is disputed: the historian Hari Ram Gupta and the calendar scholar Pal Singh Purewal date the same battle differently.

The column had barely left the town when the promise broke. Mughal and hill troops fell on its rear. Sahibzada Ajit Singh, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, commanded the rearguard and held them off at a mound called Shahi Tibbi until Bhai Udai Singh took over; many of the Sikhs who held that ground died there.

Ahead lay the Sarsa, a stream you could usually wade. That night it was in flood, black and freezing. With the enemy behind them, horses and people went into the water in the dark. Many Sikhs drowned. Tradition says manuscripts of the Guru’s writings were swept away too.

When the survivors dragged themselves out on the far bank, the family had been torn apart. A gurdwara near the crossing is called Parivar Vichhora Sahib: the place where the family was separated.

• Guru Gobind Singh, Sahibzada Ajit Singh, Sahibzada Jujhar Singh and a few dozen Sikhs rode on towards Chamkaur, with Mughal troops from Ropar on their heels.
• Mata Gujri, Sahibzada Zorawar Singh and Sahibzada Fateh Singh went with Gangu, who had worked in the household as a cook, towards his village near Morinda.
• Mata Sundari and Mata Sahib Kaur, the Guru’s wives, reached Delhi with Bhai Mani Singh, according to the Sikh tradition.

Nobody on the riverbank knew it, but the Guru would never see his mother or his two youngest sons again.

By nightfall the Guru’s band reached Chamkaur, a village on the plain, and took shelter in a garhi, a high-walled fortified house. Sikh accounts say the owner refused to let them in and his younger brother opened the gate.

By sunrise the house was surrounded by troops from Sirhind and Malerkotla and local Ranghars and Gujjars. In the Zafarnama the Guru counts forty defenders against ten lakh, a poet’s number for hopeless. A Mughal letter of the time, cited by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, reports the fight and says two of the Guru’s sons were killed.

When arrows and powder ran low, the Sikhs went out in batches of five, on foot, each batch buying a little more time.

Sahibzada Ajit Singh asked to lead one. In the tradition his father embraces him and lets him go. He fought his way deep into the attackers before he fell. From the wall, his younger brother watched.

Then Sahibzada Jujhar Singh, thirteen or fourteen, asked to go too. Towards evening he led the last sally and died near the spot where his brother fell; Gurdwara Qatalgarh Sahib marks the place. Three of the Panj Pyare, the Guru’s first five Khalsa, Bhai Mohkam Singh, Bhai Himmat Singh and Bhai Sahib Singh, also died at Chamkaur.

That night, the handful of Sikhs left alive in the garhi did something unheard of. As the Khalsa, they gave their Guru an order: leave, and live, so the Panth lives. He obeyed.

Bhai Sangat Singh, who is said to have looked like the Guru, put on his clothes and plume and stayed behind; he and the others died in the morning assault. Tradition says the Guru clapped and called out as he left, so nobody could say he had crept away.

He walked alone across frozen fields to the jungle of Machhiwara and slept on bare ground. The tradition places here one of the most loved shabads in the Sikh world, Mitar pyare nu, a message to the beloved friend.

At Machhiwara, two Pathan horse dealers who knew him, the brothers Nabi Khan and Ghani Khan, found him. Mughal patrols were searching every village. The brothers dressed the Guru in blue robes and carried him out in a palanquin as the Uchch da Pir, a holy man from Uchch. When soldiers stopped them, they talked their way through. Had they been caught, they would have died with him.

The Guru gave them a hukamnama, a letter of thanks; their house in Machhiwara is now a gurdwara. At Raikot a Muslim chief, Rai Kalha, took him in and, tradition says, sent his herdsman Noora Mahi to Sirhind for news. Noora Mahi came back with the worst news a father can hear. The Guru gave Rai Kalha a water jug, the Ganga Sagar, which his family carried to Pakistan in 1947.

Back at the river, Mata Gujri and the two boys had followed Gangu to his village, Kheri, now called Saheri, near Morinda. Gangu had cooked for the Guru’s household. He gave them a roof.

What happened next is told in the Sikh tradition, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism repeats it. Gangu saw the money in the old woman’s saddlebag and stole it. Then, out of greed or out of fear (the accounts differ), he told the officials at Morinda who his guests were.

Two Ranghar officials of Morinda, Jani Khan and Mani Khan, came and arrested the three. The next day they were sent under guard to Sirhind and locked in the Thanda Burj. The story says Gangu’s reward was a word of praise and nothing more.

The eighteenth-century chroniclers Ratan Singh Bhangu and Sukha Singh call him a Brahmin; others, only a servant. No record outside the Sikh tradition mentions him.

In the tower, the tradition remembers one kindness. Baba Moti Ram Mehra, who worked in the governor’s kitchen, brought the prisoners milk at night, paying off the guards with what little he had. Sikh tradition says Wazir Khan later found out and had Moti Ram and his family put to death for it. Sikhs remember him as a shaheed, a martyr, and honour his name at Fatehgarh Sahib.

Wazir Khan was the Mughal faujdar of Sirhind, the emperor’s man on the road between Delhi and Lahore. He had just come back from Chamkaur, where the Guru had slipped through his fingers. Now he had the Guru’s two youngest sons.

A much-loved sakhi says the boys were brought in through a wicket gate so low that anyone entering had to bow before the governor. They stepped through feet first, and did not bow.

Wazir Khan offered what power always offers: wealth, honour, a comfortable life, if they would accept Islam. They refused. Tradition says they were told their father and brothers were dead. They refused again. He threatened them with death. They still refused.

In that court, tradition says, sat Sucha Nand, a Hindu Khatri who served Wazir Khan as his diwan. He is remembered as the man who urged no mercy: the young of a snake, he is said to have argued, grow up to be snakes.

There was another man in the room.

Nawab Sher Muhammad Khan ruled Malerkotla, a small Afghan state south-west of Sirhind. He was no friend of the Guru. He had fought against him on the Mughal side, and Malerkotla’s own accounts say he lost his brother and his nephew at Chamkaur.

Wazir Khan, the tradition says, offered him his revenge. The nawab refused. The boys were innocent, he said, and could not be punished for their father; Malerkotla’s accounts say he called it against the Quran. Then he walked out.

His protest is remembered as the haah da naara, the cry of anguish. It changed nothing that week and has never been forgotten. Some accounts say he also wrote to Aurangzeb; we found no such letter in any published record.

Sikh tradition says the Guru, hearing of it, blessed the nawab and his people. In 1947, as Punjab tore itself apart, the Muslim-majority state of Malerkotla saw almost no killing, and Muslims fleeing massacres elsewhere found shelter there. Residents told the historian Pippa Virdee they owed it to the old blessing; she found that firm action by the state mattered too. (Our long read on the Partition of Punjab tells the rest of that year.)

Sikhs built Gurdwara Haa Da Naara Sahib in Malerkotla, on land given by the last nawab, Iftikhar Ali Khan. In 2021, Punjab made Malerkotla its 23rd district.

Wazir Khan passed sentence anyway.

Here the sources part ways, and we set them side by side. In the Sikh tradition, as told at Fatehgarh Sahib and in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, the boys were ordered to be sealed alive in a wall. When the bricks rose to their chests, the wall crumbled. The next day they were offered the same choice again: convert or die. They refused again, and were put to death by the sword.

Some of the earliest Sikh accounts mention no wall, only the killing. The wall is the story as Sikhs have told it for generations. We found no Mughal record of the execution in the published sources we used.

What no source disputes: two small boys were killed at Sirhind on the orders of the Mughal governor, because they would not give up their faith.

When the news reached the cold tower, Mata Gujri died.

Three bodies lay waiting, and nobody, the tradition says, dared to give land for a cremation. Wazir Khan’s anger was the reason.

Diwan Todar Mal, a wealthy man of Sirhind, went to the governor. The price, in the version every Sikh child learns, was as many gold coins as it took to cover the ground. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism names the landowner as Chaudhari Atta. In the best-known telling, Todar Mal stood the coins on their edge, so that they covered less ground each and cost him far more. People call it the costliest land ever bought. Nobody counted, and the totals you see online are modern guesses.

Todar Mal cremated Mata Gujri and the two boys. In 1843 Maharaja Karam Singh of Patiala found the urn of ashes and built Gurdwara Jyoti Sarup over it.

Who Todar Mal was is still argued: a merchant, a banker, a Jain, a Hindu, even Wazir Khan’s own diwan, depending on the writer. The historian Harjinder Singh Dilgeer argues the cremation was done by the family of an older Todar Mal. Tradition says Wazir Khan’s anger ruined him.

Put the names side by side and the line between right and wrong that December does not run between Sikhs and Muslims, or Sikhs and Hindus. It runs straight through all of them.

At Dina or nearby Kangar, in the Malwa, a man who had lost his mother and four sons in a few days sat down to write to the most powerful ruler on earth.

The letter is in Persian verse, the language of the Mughal court, and it is known as the Zafarnama, the letter of victory. Tradition says two Sikhs, Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh, carried it all the way to Aurangzeb’s camp in the Deccan.

It does not beg. It reminds the emperor of the oath his men swore on the Quran and then broke. It calls Chamkaur forty hungry men set upon by an army. And it tells him that killing four sons means little while the coiled snake, the Khalsa, still lives.

When all other means have failed, it is right to take up the sword.Zafarnama, in a common English rendering

Scholars such as A.C. Banerjee and Christopher Shackle doubt the text we have is word for word what the Guru sent; for Sikhs it is part of the Dasam Granth. Sikh accounts say Aurangzeb asked to meet the Guru, who set out south. The emperor died in March 1707 before they met.

Before that, at the pool of Khidrana, the forty Sikhs who had walked out on him at Anandpur came back, shamed into it by a woman named Mai Bhago, and died fighting the Mughal force on his trail. The Guru, the tradition says, tore up their letter of desertion and called them the Chali Mukte, the forty liberated. Khidrana is now Sri Muktsar Sahib.

Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded in October 1708. Before he did, he sent a former ascetic from the Deccan north to Punjab: Banda Singh Bahadur.

On 12 May 1710, at Chappar Chiri, a few kilometres from Sirhind, Banda’s army of peasants met Wazir Khan’s. Wazir Khan was killed in the battle. Two days later, on 14 May, Sirhind fell. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Sucha Nand was caught and killed.

Then the town paid. Sirhind was plundered and the fort razed; the cold tower survived. Persian chroniclers wrote of a massacre of its people, sparing neither children nor pregnant women. Some Sikh writers call that exaggerated. Historians agree the city was looted and wrecked, and many who died had nothing to do with 1704. The first memorial at the place where the boys were killed was raised after this conquest. (More on Banda Singh on our History of Punjab timeline.)

Each December the roads into Fatehgarh Sahib, beside old Sirhind, fill with tractor-trolleys, buses and families on foot. Every few hundred metres a village has set up a langar.

This is the Shaheedi Jor Mel, on 11 to 13 Poh, usually the last week of December. Lakhs come to Gurdwara Fatehgarh Sahib, built by the Patiala rulers where the boys were killed, and to Bhora Sahib, the basement holding the old brick enclosure believed to be the very spot. On the last day a procession walks to Gurdwara Jyoti Sarup, the ground Todar Mal paid for.

It is a mourning, not a fair. In 2022 the district banned political conferences, swings and dance tents and shut the liquor shops; parties that once held rallies here have stopped. Not every rule holds: that year more than 500 langars lined the roads, though the SGPC had asked for simple ones.

A few days earlier, on 6 to 8 Poh, usually around 20 to 22 December, Chamkaur holds its own jor mela for the elder Sahibzadas and the Sikhs who fell with them.

On 9 January 2022, Guru Gobind Singh’s Prakash Purab, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 26 December would be observed across India as Veer Baal Diwas, the day of brave children. At the first, in Delhi on 26 December 2022, about 300 child kirtanis sang shabads and around 3,000 children marched past. Every year since, the Prime Minister has led a national programme.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which runs Punjab’s historic gurdwaras, objected from the first day. So did the Akal Takht, the highest seat of Sikh religious authority. The objection is not to remembering. It is to one word.

Their sacrifice was no less significant than that of any adult.Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, acting jathedar of the Akal Takht, December 2025

In December 2025 Punjab’s own AAP government planned a Veer Bal Diwas fancy-dress contest in which children aged five to eight would dress as the Sahibzadas and Mata Gujri. The Akal Takht said depicting the Gurus’ family is forbidden and demanded it be cancelled; the SGPC has passed resolutions against such depictions since 1934.

As we write in October 2026, we have found no report that the Centre has changed the name.

* The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism puts these events in December 1705: Anandpur on 5–6 December, Chamkaur on 7 December, Sirhind on 12 December.

Strip away every argument over years, ages and walls, and the record still holds a story that needs no decoration. A siege ended in a broken oath. A father lost four sons in a week. Two of them died with swords in their hands. Two were too small to hold one, and still would not do what the most powerful governor in Punjab told them to do.

The tradition remembers the Muslim nawab who stood up to a Muslim governor, the Pathan brothers who risked their necks, the kitchen worker with his milk and the man who paid in gold. It also remembers the Hindu diwan who urged death and the cook who sold out his guests. That honesty is the lesson. Courage and cruelty belonged to no one faith in 1704, and they do not now.

As for the name: the people who have kept this memory alive for three centuries call them Baba. Whatever the government decides, that deserves a hearing.