The Martyrdom of Guru Arjan

Guru Arjan, fifth in the Sikh line, had done more than any predecessor to give the community institutional form. He completed the pool and the central shrine at Amritsar, and in 1604 he compiled the Adi Granth, the scripture, gathering the compositions of his predecessors with those of Hindu and Muslim devotional poets whose teaching he judged consonant with the Gurus'. The community he led was large, organised and collecting its own offerings.

In 1606 he was taken into Mughal custody at Lahore and died there under torture. The emperor Jahangir's own memoir records his decision in the matter, complaining that too many people, Hindus and Muslims alike, were being drawn to the Guru, and stating that he ordered him brought in. Sikh tradition holds that he was tortured with heat and refused to yield, and that his composure under it is the pattern of martyrdom in the faith.

Historians read the mixture of motives differently. Political factors are present in the record, including the Guru's reported contact with a rebellious prince. Religious hostility is also present in the emperor's own words about conversions. What is not in dispute is the effect within Sikhism: a community that had been quietist acquired a martyr, and the question of how to respond became the central question of the next century.

The answer given by Guru Arjan's son and successor, Hargobind, changed the shape of the religion. He is said to have taken his seat wearing two swords, one for spiritual authority and one for temporal, and to have built the Akal Takht, the throne of the timeless one, facing the Harmandir Sahib across the pool at Amritsar. Devotion and governance were placed side by side, physically as well as doctrinally.

The doctrine that grew from this, miri and piri, holds that the spiritual and the worldly are not separate spheres for a Sikh and that a community of faith may lawfully defend itself. It is the ground of the martial tradition, of the later founding of the Khalsa, and of the institutional arrangement by which the Akal Takht still issues directions to the Sikh community on matters affecting it.

This is a clear case, in a table full of them, of a religion's structure being set by an act of violence against it. The Sikh tradition did not choose the martial turn in the abstract; it chose it after an execution. The same pattern repeats in the same tradition seventy years later. When this atlas records that martyrdoms reshaped institutions, these two are the clearest evidence, because in both the change followed within a single succession and the tradition itself explains the change by the death.