This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bhai Daya Singh is traditionally named as the first of the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved Ones, to come forward when Guru Gobind Singh asked the assembled Sikhs at Vaisakhi in 1699 for a head, the founding act of the Khalsa. That he stepped forward first is documented as a distinct detail within the shared tradition of the five, not a claim made equally of all five founding members, and it is the detail by which Sikh tradition most often names him first among equals.
The Guru initiated Daya Singh together with four others drawn from the same gathered assembly, and Sikh tradition holds him to have come from Lahore in the Punjab region, in present-day Pakistan, before that founding moment. His stepping forward first is preserved as part of how the Khalsa's founding sequence itself is remembered, rather than as an undifferentiated detail among five otherwise interchangeable figures whose individual order the tradition does not otherwise distinguish.
That one member of a group of five founding initiates is specifically remembered as having answered the Guru's call before the other four marks Bhai Daya Singh's place in the Khalsa's founding as a documented case where a shared collective moment still preserves an individual order within it, distinguishing him inside a tradition that otherwise names the five together as one single founding act.