Vaisakhi 1699: The Sword, the Five and the Birth of the Khalsa

Anandpur, Vaisakhi, 1699. On the plain below the Shivalik hills the wheat is turning gold, and the harvest festival has pulled Sikhs to the Guru’s town from all over Punjab and far beyond it.

On a rise of ground where Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib now stands, a tent has been pitched. Out of it steps Guru Gobind Singh, thirty-two years old, with a drawn sword in his hand.

He asks, the tradition says, whether any Sikh there will give him his head.

Nobody moves. Some edge away. He asks again. On the third call a man from Lahore named Daya Ram stands up and walks to the tent. The Guru takes him inside. The crowd hears a blow. The Guru comes out alone, the sword wet and red, and asks for another head.

Four more men answer, one after another. Then the Guru brings all five out of the tent, alive, dressed alike in new clothes.

Sikhs call them the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved. Before that day was over, the Guru had made them the first members of a new order, the Khalsa, and then knelt before them and asked them to initiate him.

This is the story of that morning: the boy from Patna behind it, the father whose death shaped him, the rajas and the emperor who answered it with war, what the old records can and cannot tell us, and why millions still mark it every April.

The man with the sword was born a long way from Punjab. On 22 December 1666, at Patna on the Ganges, Mata Gujri gave birth to a son. His father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru, was travelling in Bengal and Assam. The boy was named Gobind Rai.

The Sikh tradition remembers a boy who led his friends in mock battles by the river, and a childless queen, wife of a local raja, Fateh Chand Maini, who fed him boiled chickpeas. Her house is now Gurdwara Bal Leela.

Another sakhi tells of a Muslim holy man, Pir Bhikhan Shah, who came to see the baby and set two bowls before him. The child, the story goes, laid a hand on each: one for Hindus, one for Muslims.

In 1670 Guru Tegh Bahadur sent his family back to Punjab. In March 1672 the five-year-old reached Chakk Nanaki, a new settlement in the Shivalik foothills that his father had founded on land bought, Sikh sources say, for 500 rupees from Rani Champa of Kahlur, the hill state of Bilaspur. It would grow into Anandpur. Remember who sold that land.

There the boy learned Punjabi, Braj, Sanskrit and Persian, and the arts of war.

Early in 1675 a party of Kashmiri Brahmins came to Anandpur. Sikh tradition says they were led by Pandit Kirpa Ram of Mattan and were being pressed to convert by Aurangzeb’s governor in Kashmir, Iftikhar Khan. They asked Guru Tegh Bahadur for help.

The Guru, the best-loved sakhi goes, said it would take the sacrifice of a truly great man. His nine-year-old son answered that nobody was worthier than his own father.

Guru Tegh Bahadur set out. He was arrested at Ropar, held at Sirhind and taken to Delhi. Told to show a miracle or accept Islam, he refused both. His companions were killed in front of him: Bhai Mati Das was sawn in two, Bhai Dayala was boiled, and Bhai Sati Das was put to death as well. On 11 November 1675, on Aurangzeb’s orders, the Guru was beheaded in Chandni Chowk. Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib stands on the spot.

Then came two acts of nerve. Bhai Jaita, a Sikh from the low-caste Rangreta community, slipped away with the Guru’s head and carried it to Anandpur. Tradition says the boy embraced him and called the Rangretas the Guru’s own sons. A wagon trader, Lakhi Shah Vanjara, burned down his own house to cremate the body; Gurdwara Rakab Ganj stands there now.

He shielded their tilak and their sacred thread.Bachitra Natak, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, on his father’s death (a common English rendering)

Why did Aurangzeb do it? Sikh sources say faith. Persian writers gave other reasons: Bhimsen, around 1708, said the Guru called himself padshah, king; Siyar-ul-Mutakhkherin, in 1782, accused him of extortion. The historian Satish Chandra called plunder the official explanation and doubted the Kashmir story, which no contemporary source mentions. Sikh historians reply that court writers had every reason to blacken a man the emperor had killed.

On Vaisakhi, 29 March 1676, the boy was formally installed as the tenth Guru. He was nine.

The young Guru grew into a rider and archer who kept hawks, and a poet; Var Sri Bhagauti Ji Ki (1684) was his only major work in Punjabi, the rest mostly in Braj. From 1685 he lived for a time at Paonta on the Yamuna, where tradition says 52 poets worked at his court.

He also raised armed men, and the hill rajas around him did not like it. Raja Bhim Chand of Kahlur quarrelled with him over an elephant the Guru refused to hand over.

On 18 September 1688 (some sources say 1686), at Bhangani near Paonta, a league of hill rajas led by Raja Fateh Shah of Garhwal and Bhim Chand attacked. Pathan soldiers the Guru had hired deserted him on the eve of battle, bribed, the Sikh accounts say, by promises of plunder.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. Pir Budhu Shah, a Muslim Sufi of Sadhaura, sent his sons and between 500 and 700 followers to fight for the Guru. Two of his sons were killed. The Guru won the day.

Hold that picture in your mind: Hindu rajas fighting the Guru, a Muslim pir and his sons dying for him, hired Muslim soldiers running away. In those hills, the lines did not fall by religion. The Bachitra Natak, credited by tradition to the Guru, describes Bhangani in his voice and praises brave men on both sides.

Alliances shifted fast: in 1691, at Nadaun, the Guru fought beside the same rajas against the Mughal commander Alif Khan.

By the 1690s the Sikh world had a problem in the middle. Agents called masands collected the offerings of distant sangats, the congregations, for the Guru. Many had grown rich, proud and a law to themselves.

In 1698 the Guru cut them out. He told Sikhs to stop recognising the masands and to bring their offerings to Anandpur themselves. His hukamnamas, letters to the sangats that still survive, say so in plain words.

The poet Sainapati, who lived at the Guru’s court, gives the logic. Because the Guru had removed his old deputies, the Sikhs told one another, he had made all of them his Khalsa.

The word was older than 1699. Under the Mughals, khalisa land was held directly by the crown, with no lord in between; the root is the Arabic khalis, pure. The Guru’s letters from 1699 on often say it outright: the whole sangat is my Khalsa.

So to Vaisakhi. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, published by Punjabi University, gives the day as 30 March 1699 by the calendar then in use, Vaisakhi of the year 1756 in the Indian Bikrami era. Calendar changes and the slow drift of the solar year have since moved Vaisakhi to 13 or 14 April.

In the tradition’s telling, after Daya Ram came Dharam Das from Hastinapur, Himmat Rai from Jagannath Puri, Mohkam Chand from Dwarka and Sahib Chand from Bidar.

What happened inside the tent is the one question the tradition does not settle. One strand holds that the Guru truly took the five lives and restored them. Another, which the historian J.S. Grewal records, says goats were killed in the tent and the blood was theirs. Many Sikhs answer that it does not matter: it was a test of faith, and five men passed it without knowing they would live.

A word on the date. ‘13 April 1699’ is a modern conversion. Koer Singh, writing in 1751, gives the year 1689, and the historian Purnima Dhavan notes that the 1699 date appears only in later sources. Most historians still accept Vaisakhi 1699.

Look at the map, and then at the castes. A trader from Lahore. A farmer from the Ganges plain. And three men from castes the old order placed near the bottom, from the far east, west and south of India.

Sikhs read it as a message: all of India in five men, high and low as one. Historians add a note of care: the castes and birthplaces come from Sikh writings set down later, and some details differ between them. The ages are worked out from birth years in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism and other sources.

Three of the five would die together at Chamkaur in December 1704, fighting beside the Guru’s elder sons. The other two were with him at Nanded when he died.

Then the Guru made amrit, the nectar of initiation. He poured water into an iron bowl and stirred it with a khanda, a double-edged sword, while sacred verses were recited.

Sugar crystals went into the water. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says it was the Guru’s wife Mata Jito who brought them, and adds that sweetness was thus mixed with steel. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha’s Mahan Kosh, and many popular accounts, name Mata Sahib Kaur instead.

The five drank from the same bowl: the Khatri and the water-carrier, the Jat and the barber, from one piece of iron. In a society where people of different castes would not share a cup, that was the revolution.

Each was named Singh, lion. Then the Guru knelt and asked the five to give him amrit. Gobind Rai became Gobind Singh.

Hail Gobind Singh, himself the Guru and himself the disciple.Bhai Gurdas II, eighteenth-century Sikh poet (a common English rendering)

Thousands more took amrit in the days that followed. One figure often repeated is 80,000. Nobody at the time counted, and we have no record that did.

The Khalsa came with a code of life, the rahit, and five articles of faith, each beginning with K in Punjabi.

• Kesh: uncut hair, kept under a turban, as a gift of the Creator.
• Kangha: a small wooden comb, for cleanliness and order.
• Kara: an iron or steel bangle, a reminder of the eternal and of the bond with the Guru.
• Kachera: cotton breeches, for self-control and, in the Guru’s time, for a soldier’s freedom of movement.
• Kirpan: a sword, carried to protect the weak.

Four things are forbidden to an initiated Sikh under the code the SGPC follows today: cutting the hair, eating meat killed by the Muslim halal rite, sex outside marriage, and tobacco. New initiates are told that their father is Guru Gobind Singh, their mother Mata Sahib Kaur, and their birthplace Kesgarh Sahib.

Men took the name Singh; women today take Kaur, often translated princess. Sikh tradition says women took amrit and the name Kaur from the start. The historian Doris Jakobsh argues women’s initiation came later; Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh disagrees. Kaur became a fixed rule only in twentieth-century codes.

Historians also ask how much of today’s rahit goes back to 1699. W.H. McLeod argued that only part of it does, and that the code grew over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some early rahitnamas carried harsh rules against Muslims, born of war; Singh Sabha reformers removed them, Pashaura Singh writes. The code most Sikhs follow now, the Sikh Rehat Maryada, was drafted by the SGPC from 1931 and approved between 1936 and 1945.

The uncomfortable truth: no surviving record was written down on the day.

The earliest Sikh account is Sri Gur Sobha, by the court poet Sainapati, begun around 1701 and finished, most scholars think, by about 1711. Sainapati describes the fall of the masands and the making of the Khalsa, and a fierce quarrel in Delhi, where Khalsa Sikhs who refused to shave their heads at a death were boycotted by fellow Khatris until Mughal officials made the shops reopen. By J.S. Grewal’s reading, Sainapati does not mention any call for heads.

The call for heads first appears in detail in Koer Singh’s Gurbilas Patshahi 10, finished in 1751. Kesar Singh Chhibber’s Bansavalinama followed in 1769. The rahitnama attributed to Chaupa Singh is dated by McLeod to the mid-eighteenth century and by the Sikh scholar Piara Singh Padam to about 1700. Bardic registers called Bhatt vahis are cited by some Sikh scholars; others, such as Jeevan Deol, doubt parts of them.

Even the Guru’s own account goes quiet. The Bachitra Natak, the autobiography the tradition credits to him, ends in about 1696, three years before the Khalsa.

And the famous outside witness is not what he seems. A description of all castes eating from one bowl and 20,000 initiated on the first day is widely quoted as a Mughal newswriter’s report by Ghulam Muhyiuddin. But the historian of that name, Bute Shah, finished his history of Punjab in 1848. We could not trace the passage to any document of 1699, and we found no Mughal court record of the assembly in the published sources we used.

None of this means nothing happened. Every source agrees that around the turn of the eighteenth century, at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh abolished the masands and created the Khalsa with a new initiation by the sword. The argument is over details, and over how much weight to give memory against paper.

Up in the hills, the rajas watched Anandpur fill with armed men who called themselves lions and owed obedience to no one but their Guru, and they took fright.

Their leader was Raja Ajmer Chand of Kahlur, who had taken over from his father, Bhim Chand. He regarded Anandpur as part of his territory, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, and wanted the Guru out. Sikh accounts have the Guru answer that his father had paid for the land. Many Sikh historians add a second reason: proud high-caste Rajput rulers could not stomach a faith that put barbers and water-carriers in the same bowl as kings.

Ajmer Chand formed a league of hill chiefs and attacked Anandpur in 1700 and again in 1703. Both attacks failed.

In those fights the tradition remembers Bhai Kanhaiya, who gave water to the wounded, Sikh and enemy alike. When Sikhs complained, the Guru gave him ointment as well and told him to carry on.

Beaten twice, the rajas did what weaker powers in Mughal India always did. They wrote to the emperor.

Aurangzeb was far away in the Deccan, fighting the Marathas, but an armed order near the Delhi–Lahore road could not be ignored. Sikh histories say Mughal detachments joined the rajas as early as 1700. By 1704, troops of the governors of Sirhind and Lahore had joined the hill armies around Anandpur.

The siege lasted months. The town starved. Then came oaths of safe passage, sworn, Sikh sources say, on the Quran and on the cow, and broken, as the Guru’s own Zafarnama charges, as soon as the Sikhs walked out. (Most accounts put this in December 1704; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says 1705.) Within days the Guru’s elder sons had died fighting at Chamkaur, and his two youngest had been killed at Sirhind. Our long read The Four Sahibzadas tells that December in full.

Of the Panj Pyare, Bhai Himmat Singh, Bhai Mohkam Singh and Bhai Sahib Singh died at Chamkaur. Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh lived, and it was Bhai Daya Singh who carried the Guru’s Persian letter, the Zafarnama, to Aurangzeb.

The Mughal state did wrong at Anandpur and Sirhind. It is fair to record what came next, too. Aurangzeb died in March 1707. His son Bahadur Shah, fighting his brothers for the throne, asked for the Guru’s help, and a Sikh detachment fought for him at Jajau in June. On 23 July 1707, at Agra, the new emperor received the Guru with honour and gave him a robe of honour with a jewelled plume.

At Nanded on the Godavari, in the autumn of 1708, the Guru was stabbed by a Pathan assassin. Sikh tradition says the killers were sent by Wazir Khan, the governor of Sirhind; the wound was stitched but later burst open.

Before he died, on 7 October 1708, the tradition says, he made one last change. There would be no eleventh human Guru. Guruship would pass to the scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, and to the Khalsa, the community he had created at Anandpur. Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh were with him.

He had already sent a former ascetic, Banda Singh Bahadur, north to Punjab. In May 1710 Banda’s peasant army took Sirhind.

Every time amrit is prepared, the Panj Pyare recite Jaap Sahib, the Tav-Prasad Savaiye and Chaupai, all from the Dasam Granth, the book of the Tenth Guru. Few subjects divide Sikh scholars more than who wrote all of it.

The book was compiled after the Guru’s death; early manuscripts differ. In 1897 a committee of the Singh Sabha reformers compared 32 manuscripts, dropped some pieces and produced the standard edition, first printed in 1902.

Most gurdwaras install only the Guru Granth Sahib; Takht Sri Patna Sahib and Takht Sri Hazur Sahib at Nanded install the Dasam Granth as well.

Vaisakhi was a harvest festival long before it was the Khalsa’s birthday, and in the villages it still is. For Sikhs it is also Khalsa Sajna Diwas.

The biggest crowds go to Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib in Anandpur, where new Sikhs take amrit, and to Takht Sri Damdama Sahib in Talwandi Sabo, where the Guru stayed after Anandpur and a two-day mela fills the town.

Vaisakhi has known blood too. On 13 April 1919, General Dyer’s troops fired into a Vaisakhi crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar; our long read on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre tells that day. On Vaisakhi 1978 a clash between Sikhs and the Sant Nirankari sect in Amritsar left 16 dead, a day many historians see as the start of Punjab’s long crisis.

In 1999 the Khalsa turned 300. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee inaugurated the celebrations at Anandpur on 8 April, and over two weeks lakhs of pilgrims came to the town, done up for the occasion as a ‘white city’. About 4,000 police were on duty. It was peaceful, and political: rival Akali camps under Parkash Singh Badal and Gurcharan Singh Tohra held rival stages, and Captain Amarinder Singh attacked the spending and a call for Khalistan made from one stage by Simranjit Singh Mann.

The tercentenary left a monument. Virasat-e-Khalsa, the Khalsa heritage museum designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, opened at Anandpur in November 2011. It has drawn more than ten million visitors since.

Every April, in cities that did not exist in 1699, five Sikhs in saffron with drawn swords walk ahead of the Guru Granth Sahib, followed by floats, gatka fighters and free food for all.

The largest is in Surrey, British Columbia. Its organisers counted more than 450,000 people at the 2026 parade on 18 April. They dedicated it to Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the Surrey gurdwara president shot dead in 2023, and to the campaign for Khalistan. Canada’s government has alleged links between agents of India and the killing; India denies it, and four Indian nationals accused of the murder await trial in Canada.

In Pakistan, Sikh pilgrims from India cross at Wagah for Vaisakhi under a 1974 agreement between the two countries. In April 2026 Pakistan issued 2,840 visas for the festival. The pilgrims went to Gurdwara Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal, to Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur and Lahore, where Bhai Daya Singh was born.

Strip away the arguments over dates and manuscripts, and Vaisakhi 1699 is still one of the boldest acts in Indian religious history. A man whose father had been publicly beheaded by one of the most powerful states on earth answered not with a plea but with a new people, armed, unmistakable and bound by one vow, in which a barber and a trader drank from the same bowl and the leader knelt before his followers.

The record is honest about who did what. Hindu rajas fought the Guru and Kashmiri Brahmins sought his father’s protection; a Muslim emperor killed his father and a Muslim pir gave his sons for him; one Mughal emperor’s men broke their oaths and the next emperor received him with honour. Courage and cruelty belonged to no one faith.

Historians and believers will keep arguing about what happened inside the tent. They should. A tradition strong enough to survive Chamkaur, Sirhind and three centuries can survive questions too.