Guru Gobind Singh

Guru Gobind Singh's wars with the Mughal empire and the hill states cost him his entire immediate family within the span of a single winter. In December 1704, after the Mughal army broke a truce and besieged Anandpur, his two elder sons, Ajit Singh and Jujhar Singh, were killed fighting at the battle of Chamkaur, while his two younger sons, Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh, were captured with their grandmother, taken to Sirhind, and executed on the orders of the local Mughal governor after they refused to renounce their faith. Sikh tradition remembers all four as the Chaar Sahibzade, the four sons, and their deaths are commemorated every year, the younger boys' martyrdom especially, as a defining act of witness in Sikh memory.

In the aftermath, Guru Gobind Singh wrote a letter in Persian verse to the emperor Aurangzeb himself, the Zafarnama, Letter of Victory, rebuking him for breaking his oath and for the killing of the Guru's sons while asserting that ultimate victory belonged to truth rather than to imperial power. The letter is preserved as part of the Dasam Granth tradition and stands as a rare direct address from a Sikh Guru to a reigning Mughal emperor, a documented historical exchange rather than only a devotional legend.

On Baisakhi in 1699, at Anandpur, Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa, the order of initiated Sikhs. The tradition recounts that he called from the assembly for a head, and that five men rose in turn and followed him into his tent, emerging with him unharmed; these Panj Pyare, the "five beloved ones," were drawn deliberately from different castes and regions of India. He initiated them with amrit, water stirred with a double-edged sword, the khanda, and was in turn initiated by them, an unusual mutuality that placed the Guru within the order he created.

The initiated were bound to a code of conduct, the Rahit, and marked by the Five Ks: kesh, uncut hair; kangha, the comb; kara, the steel bracelet; kirpan, the sword; and kachera, the prescribed undergarment. Men took the name Singh ("lion") and women Kaur ("princess"), and the older intermediary masand system and the barriers of caste were set aside. The Khalsa gave the Panth a visible, disciplined and self-conscious form that it retains.

The last years of Gobind Singh's life were years of catastrophe and of a decisive settlement. In the siege and evacuation of Anandpur he lost all four of his sons, the sahibzade: the two elder killed in battle at Chamkaur, the two younger, aged roughly seven and nine, executed at Sirhind for refusing conversion, and his mother, Mata Gujri, dying in the same days. From this extremity he addressed to Aurangzeb the Zafarnama, the "epistle of victory," a defiant verse letter asserting the justice of his cause.

Before his death at Nanded in 1708, from the wound of an assassin, he made the settlement that closed both the succession and the canon. He completed the scripture, adding his father's hymns to Arjan's compilation, and then ended the line of human Gurus, declaring that Guruship would pass not to any living person but to the scripture itself, thereafter revered as the Guru Granth Sahib, together with the collective authority of the community, the Guru Panth. With that act the ten-Guru line reached its intended term, and the Sikhs became a people whose Guru is a book.