Guru Ram Das

Guru Ram Das (1534-1581) was born Bhai Jetha, orphaned young and raised in poverty at Lahore before entering the service of Guru Amar Das, whose daughter Bibi Bhani he married and whom he succeeded in 1574. His great work was the founding of a city.

On land the tradition associates with a grant from the emperor Akbar, he excavated a large sacred pool, the amrit sarovar, the "pool of nectar", and laid out around it the settlement first called Ramdaspur or Chak Ram Das, later Amritsar. He invited traders and craftsmen of fifty-two callings to settle there, so that the place grew as a centre of commerce as well as of worship. Around that pool his son would raise the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, which remains the spiritual centre of the Sikh world.

The founding of Amritsar gave the Panth a fixed holy city and an economic base, binding a dispersed community to a shared centre in a way the earlier, more itinerant leadership had not.

Ram Das composed the Lavan, the four-stanza hymn that is the heart of the Sikh wedding rite, the Anand Karaj: the couple circle the Guru Granth Sahib once for each stanza, and the verses read the marriage as a figure of the soul's union with the divine. It remains in use at every Sikh wedding, and his other compositions are woven through the daily liturgy.

With Ram Das the office of Guru also changed character. He was succeeded not by a disciple, as Nanak and his successors had arranged, but by his own youngest son, Arjan, and thereafter the Guruship remained within the Sodhi family. Historians note this as a real institutional development rather than an inevitability: the succession was contested by Arjan's elder brother Prithi Chand, whose rival faction (the Minas) persisted for a generation. The hereditary principle, once settled, carried the line through to the tenth Guru.