Guru Tegh Bahadur
Guru Tegh Bahadur earned the title Srisht ki Chadar, protector of humanity, from the poet Chandra Sain Sainapati. Persian and Mughal chroniclers, describing the very same man, called him a bandit instead. One life, two irreconcilable portraits, and a public execution still split how the story gets told. This documentary follows a guru's son from Punjab through that argument. It asks what really drove the conflict between a Sikh spiritual leader and the Mughal emperor who ordered his death.
Guru Tegh Bahadur was born Tyag Mal on the 1st of April 1621 in Amritsar, the youngest of Guru Hargobind's five sons. His family belonged to the Sodhi clan of Khatris. His siblings were Bibi Viro, Baba Gurditta, Suraj Mal, Ani Rai, and Atal Rai. The boy showed valor at the Battle of Kartarpur against the Mughals. Afterward, his father renamed him Tegh Bahadur, meaning Brave Sword. He was raised in Sikh custom and trained in archery and horsemanship. He also studied the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Puranas. On the 3rd of February 1632, he married a woman named Gujri.
In the 1640s, as Guru Hargobind neared death, he and his wife Nanaki moved to the family's ancestral village of Bakala, in Amritsar district. Tegh Bahadur and Gujri went with them. After Hargobind died, Tegh Bahadur stayed on in Bakala with his wife and mother. According to a text called Guru Kian Sakhian, he left Bakala on pilgrimage in 1656. He was living with his family in Patna when Guru Har Rai, the seventh guru, died. Being far from Punjab, he did not learn the news in time. He did not return to Punjab until 1664.
In March 1664, Guru Har Krishan contracted smallpox. Asked who would lead the Sikhs after him, he answered simply, 'Baba Bakala.' He meant that his successor would be found in the village of Bakala. Several men seized on the ambiguity and installed themselves there as guru. Ordinary Sikhs were left unsure who to follow.
A wealthy trader named Makhan Shah Labana had once vowed, after surviving a shipwreck, to give five hundred gold coins to the true Sikh guru. Arriving in Bakala, he tested each claimant with a token offering of two gold coins. Every false guru accepted the coins without comment. When he reached Tegh Bahadur, the guru blessed him but noted the offering fell short of the five hundred coins once promised. Makhan Shah made up the difference, then ran to the rooftop shouting, 'Guru ladho re, Guru ladho re.' It meant, 'I have found the Guru, I have found the Guru.'
In August 1664, a Sikh congregation led by Diwan Dargha Mal, son of a well-known devotee of Har Krishan, arrived in Bakala. They formally installed Tegh Bahadur as the ninth guru. As had been the custom since the Mughal emperor Jahangir executed Guru Arjan, the new guru kept armed bodyguards. Even so, he otherwise lived simply. Guarded but plain living, he would soon leave Bakala altogether, carrying his teaching into towns far beyond Punjab.
Guru Tegh Bahadur traveled as far as Dhaka and Assam, carrying the teachings of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, into new territory. Along the way, he started community wells and langars, the free kitchens that fed the poor. The towns he stayed in later became sites of Sikh temples.
He also visited Mathura, Agra, Allahabad, and Varanasi. In 1666, while he was in Dhubri, Assam, his son was born in Patna. That son later became Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh guru. The Gurdwara Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib now marks the spot in Dhubri. Sikh accounts claim that while in Assam, he brokered peace between Raja Ram Singh and the Ahom ruler Raja Chakradhwaj Singha, also known as Supangmung.
After passing through Assam, Bengal, and Bihar, Guru Tegh Bahadur visited Rani Champa of Bilaspur, who offered him land in her territory. He bought the site for 500 rupees and founded the city of Anandpur Sahib in the foothills of the Himalayas. By 1672, he was traveling through the Malwa region to meet the masses. The persecution of non-Muslims was reaching new heights, a tension about to break.
A congregation of Hindu Pandits from Kashmir traveled to Guru Tegh Bahadur at Anandpur, pleading for protection from Aurangzeb's persecution. According to Trilochan Singh's account in Guru Tegh Bahadur: Prophet and Martyr, five hundred Pandits made the journey. They were led by Pandit Kirpa Ram, who described the religious oppression carried out under the governorship of Iftikhar Khan. Sikh tradition holds that the group first sought help at the Amarnath shrine. There, one Pandit dreamed that Shiva instructed them to seek out the ninth Sikh guru instead.
Guru Tegh Bahadur left his base at Makhowal to confront the Mughal officials persecuting the Pandits. He was arrested at Ropar and jailed in Sirhind. Four months later, in November 1675, he was transferred to Delhi. There he was told to prove his nearness to God through a miracle, or convert to Islam. He refused. Three companions arrested alongside him were tortured to death in front of him. Bhai Mati Das was sawn in two, Bhai Dayal Das was thrown into a cauldron of boiling liquid, and Bhai Sati Das was cut into pieces.
On the 11th of November 1675, Tegh Bahadur was publicly beheaded in Chandni Chowk, a market square near the Red Fort, on Aurangzeb's orders. The scene would be retold for over a century afterward, first by his own son and later by Persian court historians with very different loyalties.
Sikh accounts describe Guru Tegh Bahadur defending the freedom of non-Muslims against Aurangzeb's intolerant policies. Mughal-aligned accounts instead describe him forcibly collecting taxes from non-Muslims across the Punjab region. Members of his own family, rivals for the guruship, are also said to have stirred Aurangzeb's hostility toward him.
The earliest sustained account comes from the Bachittar Natak, a memoir written by Guru Gobind Singh, Tegh Bahadur's own son. It dates to somewhere between the late 1680s and late 1690s. Recalling his father's final act, Guru Gobind Singh wrote: 'He offered all he had for the holy. He gave up his head, but did not utter a sigh. He suffered martyrdom for the sake of religion.' More Sikh accounts, all claiming to draw on the 'testimony of trustworthy Sikhs,' did not begin appearing until the late eighteenth century. Historian Satish Chandra notes they often conflict with one another.
According to Chandra, the earliest Persian source to describe the execution is the Siyar-ul-Mutakhkherin, written by Ghulam Husain Khan around 1782. It claims that 'Tegh Bahadur used to collect money from Hindus and Hafiz Adam from Muslims,' a reference to a contemporary faqir with his own following. Chandra urges caution. Ghulam Husain Khan was related to Alivardi Khan, one of Aurangzeb's closest confidants, and may have been offering an official justification. Chandra also notes the link to Hafiz Adam is historically anachronistic. He adds that Ghulam Husain Khan places the Guru's confinement and execution in Lahore rather than Delhi. Chandra finds no reason to accept that over Sikh tradition.
Sikh sakhis, traditional accounts written in that same eighteenth century, indirectly support the Persian version. They describe the Guru as being 'in violent opposition to the Muslim rulers of the country.' Bhimsen, a contemporary chronicler writing around 1708, claimed Tegh Bahadur proclaimed himself Padshah and gathered a large following. Aurangzeb then had him executed. Muhammad Qasim's Ibratnama, written in 1723, blamed the Guru's religious following, his lifestyle of splendor, and followers who conferred sovereignty on him. Sohan Lal Suri, court historian to Ranjit Singh, wrote in his Umdat ut Tawarikh around 1805 that the Guru gathered thousands of soldiers and horsemen. This happened while he traveled through southern Punjab between 1672 and 1673, sheltering rebels resistant to Mughal officials.
A different strand of pre-modern Sikh writing pinned blame instead on Ram Rai, the elder brother of Guru Har Krishan. It held that Ram Rai urged Aurangzeb to test Tegh Bahadur's spiritual claims by demanding a miracle at court. Satish Chandra, Louis Fenech, and Barbara Metcalf would each weigh these claims against whatever evidence survives.
Satish Chandra doubts the miracle-centered narratives entirely, noting that Aurangzeb himself was not a believer in miracles. He is equally skeptical of the claim that Tegh Bahadur was persecuted for defending Hindus in Kashmir. Chandra finds no contemporary source mentioning any such persecution there.
Louis E. Fenech declines to render a verdict, citing how few primary sources survive from the period. He argues that Sikh accounts deliberately coded the execution as martyrdom. The aim, he says, was to produce pride in readers rather than trauma. Fenech reads the janju and tilak mentioned in the Bachittar Natak as references to Tegh Bahadur's own sacred thread and frontal mark. That would mean the Guru died defending his own faith rather than someone else's.
Barbara Metcalf points to a different thread: Tegh Bahadur's family ties to Dara Shikoh. Aurangzeb had already summoned both Guru Har Rai and Guru Har Krishan to his court to answer for their rumored support of Shikoh. Combined with Tegh Bahadur's preaching and his role as a military organizer, Metcalf argues, these ties gave the execution both a political and an Islamic justification. Within years, memorials would rise on the very ground where he was executed and where his body was cremated.
Guru Tegh Bahadur composed 116 hymns across 15 ragas. His son, Guru Gobind Singh, later placed them in the Guru Granth Sahib on pages 219-1427. They cover subjects including human attachment, the body, the mind, sorrow, dignity, service, death, and deliverance.
The Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib now stands over the site of his beheading in Delhi. Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib, also in Delhi, marks the spot where a disciple burned down his own house to cremate the Guru's body. A separate site, Gurdwara Sisganj Sahib in Punjab, marks where Bhai Jaita brought the Guru's severed head for cremation. Bhai Jaita was later renamed Bhai Jiwan Singh under Sikh rites. This happened in November 1675, in defiance of Mughal authority.
Pashaura Singh described the execution's effect this way. 'If the martyrdom of Guru Arjan had helped bring the Sikh Panth together, Guru Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom helped to make the protection of human rights central to its Sikh identity.' Wilfred Smith wrote that 'the attempt to forcibly convert the ninth Guru to an externalized, impersonal Islam clearly made an indelible impression on the martyr's nine-year-old son, Gobind, who reacted slowly but deliberately by eventually organizing the Sikh group into a distinct, formal, symbol-patterned community.' It inaugurated the Khalsa identity.
The classical Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah called Tegh Bahadur 'Ghazi,' an honorific for a warrior, in one of his poems. Later tradition also gave him the titles Dharam di Chadar, protector of dharma, and Hind di Chadar, protector of India or Hinduism. Harinder Singh of the Sikh Research Institute argues these titles flatten a more complicated legacy. Every year on the 24th of November, Shaheedi Divas, parts of India still mark the day as a public holiday in his memory.
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Common questions
Who was Guru Tegh Bahadur?
Guru Tegh Bahadur was the ninth of ten Sikh gurus, leading the Sikhs from 1664 until 1675. He was born in Amritsar in 1621 as the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, and became a spiritual scholar and poet whose hymns are part of the Guru Granth Sahib.
When was Guru Tegh Bahadur executed?
Guru Tegh Bahadur was publicly beheaded on the 11th of November 1675 in Chandni Chowk, a market square in Delhi, on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Why did Aurangzeb order the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur?
Sources disagree on the reason. Sikh accounts say he defended the freedom of non-Muslims against Aurangzeb's intolerant policies, while Mughal accounts say he was forcibly collecting taxes from non-Muslims in Punjab. Rival family members seeking the guruship also stirred Aurangzeb's hostility toward him.
Where did Guru Tegh Bahadur found the city of Anandpur Sahib?
Guru Tegh Bahadur founded Anandpur Sahib in the foothills of the Himalayas in 1664, after buying the site from Rani Champa of Bilaspur for 500 rupees.
How was Guru Tegh Bahadur chosen as the ninth Sikh guru?
Guru Tegh Bahadur was identified through a test devised by the trader Makhan Shah Labana, who had vowed 500 gold coins to the true guru after surviving a shipwreck. Every other claimant in Bakala accepted a token offering of two gold coins, but Tegh Bahadur pointed out it fell short of the promised sum. A Sikh congregation led by Diwan Dargha Mal then installed him as guru in August 1664.
What happened to Guru Tegh Bahadur's body after his execution?
Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, marks the site of his beheading, and Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib in Delhi marks where a disciple cremated his body after burning down his own house. His severed head was carried to Punjab by Bhai Jaita and cremated at what is now Gurdwara Sisganj Sahib.
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