Guru Arjan

Guru Arjan (1563-1606), the youngest son of Guru Ram Das and Guru from 1581, presided over the Panth as it took on the form of a settled, organised religion. He completed his father's city of Amritsar and raised at the centre of its sacred pool the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, giving it, by tradition, four doors opening to the four directions, a built statement that it stood open to all castes and all peoples.

He founded further towns, among them Tarn Taran and Kartarpur, and organised the community's finances through the masand system, a network of local deputies who gathered the offerings of the faithful and remitted them to the centre. Under his leadership the Panth grew markedly in numbers, wealth and visibility, a prosperity that was itself, in time, to draw the attention of the Mughal state.

Guru Arjan's central achievement was textual: in 1604, working at Amritsar, he compiled the Adi Granth, drawing together the hymns of his four predecessor Gurus with his own extensive compositions and, deliberately, with verses by Hindu Bhakti and Muslim Sufi poets outside the Sikh line, among them Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev and Farid, a decision that fixed the scripture's inclusive character from its first assembly. He installed the completed volume in the Harmandir Sahib and appointed Baba Buddha its first reader.

His prosperity drew the suspicion of the Mughal court. In 1606, under Jahangir, who records the episode in his own memoir, Arjan was arrested, fined and tortured to death at Lahore, for supporting the rebel prince Khusrau and for his growing following; he is remembered as Sikhism's first martyr.

Arjan's central achievement was the compilation, in 1604, of the Adi Granth, the first authorised scripture of the Sikhs. Working at Ramsar with the scribe Bhai Gurdas, he gathered the hymns of the five Gurus before and including himself and set beside them the compositions of Hindu and Muslim bhakti poets, Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev, Sheikh Farid and others, arranging the whole not by author but by raga, the musical mode in which each hymn is sung.

The compilation was an act of deliberate editorial judgement, not mere collection. Pashaura Singh and others, working from the surviving Kartarpur manuscript and its antecedents, have shown Arjan selecting, ordering and in places setting aside material, shaping a canon. He installed the completed volume in the Harmandir Sahib with the aged Baba Buddha as its first granthi, giving the community a fixed scripture at its physical centre. A century later the tenth Guru would add a final layer and close it as the eternal Guru.

Arjan's prominence, and his community's growth, drew him into the politics of the Mughal court. When the rebel prince Khusrau fled toward the Punjab against his father, the emperor Jahangir, Arjan was accused of having blessed and aided him. He was arrested, and he died in Mughal custody at Lahore in 1606.

This is one of the more securely attested events of early Sikh history, for Jahangir records it in his own memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, writing that he ordered Arjan's property confiscated and the man himself put to death, a rare external corroboration, though the emperor frames it in his own terms, citing the "false traffic" of a following he wished to end. Sikh tradition remembers a death under torture and reveres Arjan as the first of the faith's martyrs.

Its effect was structural. The execution turned the Panth toward self-defence: Arjan's son and successor, Hargobind, took up arms and built a seat of temporal power, and the community that Arjan had organised as a scriptural congregation began to arm itself as a polity.