The Execution of Guru Arjan, and What Followed

In 1606 the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan, died in Mughal custody at Lahore. The emperor own memoir records his decision against Arjan, taken after the Guru had been connected with his rebellious son Khusrau, and the details of what followed in custody are reported differently in different traditions. Sikh accounts remember it as a martyrdom and treat it as the first of the tradition, and the atlas records both the imperial notice and the Sikh reading rather than harmonising them.

What followed changed the community. Arjan son Hargobind is remembered as having taken up two swords at his succession, standing for miri and piri, temporal and spiritual authority together, and as having built the Akal Takht facing the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, a seat from which worldly matters could be decided. The Sikh community began to arm and to organise, and the sequence that runs through the execution of the ninth Guru under Aurangzeb to the founding of the Khalsa has this reign at its head. It is worth setting that beside the picture in the first article. Personal curiosity about other religions and lethal action against a particular movement sat in the same ruler without either cancelling the other, which is a more useful fact about religious politics than either half on its own.