Tegh Bahadur was a poet of considerable power, and his verse is the last body of composition to enter the Sikh canon. After his death his son, Guru Gobind Singh, incorporated some fifty-nine hymns and fifty-seven couplets of his into the scripture, the single later addition to the collection first assembled by Guru Arjan, and the act that gave the volume the final form revered as the Guru Granth Sahib.
The tone of these compositions is distinctive: a sustained meditation on the transience of the world, the emptiness of attachment, and above all fearlessness, the counsel to "frighten no one, and fear no one" reads, in retrospect, as of a piece with the manner of his death. His martyrdom, remembered each year, fixed the defence of religious freedom, including the freedom of those outside one's own faith, near the centre of the Sikh self-understanding.
His execution is dated 11 November 1675 at Chandni Chowk in Delhi, and the site is marked today by the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib. Tradition holds that he offered his life specifically in defence of the Kashmiri Pandits' right to practise their own religion rather than his own, a martyrdom for another community's freedom of conscience that Sikhs regard as without close parallel among the world's religious traditions. His son Gobind Singh, then nine, would go on to found the Khalsa in 1699, an institution the tradition presents as the direct answer to the persecution that had claimed his father.