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A Founding Trust Is Tested Again on the Road to Aurangzeb

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A Founding Trust Is Tested Again on the Road to Aurangzeb

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1705, after the Battle of Chamkaur and the loss of Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh sent Bhai Daya Singh together with Bhai Dharam Singh as armed escort to carry the Zafarnama to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Choosing two of his own Panj Pyare for that mission, rather than routing the letter through ordinary Mughal couriers, is documented as a deliberate decision distinct from how a purely administrative letter would normally have traveled.

Daya Singh's role on that mission followed directly from his standing as one of the five men initiated at the Khalsa's founding six years earlier, a documented continuity between the trust placed in him at Vaisakhi in 1699 and the trust placed in him again under far more dangerous circumstances in 1705. Delivering the Guru's own letter of moral indictment to the emperor personally required an escort the Guru judged reliable enough for a mission that ordinary couriers could not be trusted with.

That the same man named first among the Panj Pyare in 1699 was chosen six years later to help carry the Guru's most consequential letter into hostile territory marks Bhai Daya Singh's 1705 mission as a documented case where an early mark of trust was tested again, under far greater risk, later in the same life.

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Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)J. S. Grewal
Sources
J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)
J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source
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