1 Introduction: The Cherished Five, Guru Gobind Singh, and the Khalsa

ਿਪ੍ਰਥਮੈ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਿਬੰਦ ਿਸੰਘ ਜੀ ਜਾਤ ਸੋਢੀ ਜਨਮੁ ਪਟਨੇ ਕਾ । ਵਾਸੀ ਅਨੰਦਪੁਰ ਿਬਸਨ ਅਵਤਾਰੁ । ਦਯਾ ਿਸੰਘ ਸੋਫਤੀ ਖਤ੍ੀ ਵਾਸੀ ਲਹੌਰ ਪੂਰਬ ਲਊ ਕਾ ਅਵਤਾਰ । ਮੁਹਕਮ ਿਸੰਘ ਛੀਪਾ ਵਾਸੀ ਦੁਆਰਕਾ ਨਾਮੁ ਦੇਵ ਅਵਤਾਰੁ । ਸਾਿਹਬ ਿਸੰਘ ਸਹੀਦ ਵਾਸੀ ਿਬਦਰ ਸੈਣ ਭਗਤ ਅਵਤਾਰ । ਧਰਮੁ ਿਸੰਘ ਹਠੀਲਾ ਜਾਟ ਧੰਨੇ ਕੇ ਅਵਤਾਰ । ਵਾਸੀ ਹਸਤਨਾਪੁਰ ਕੀ । ਿਹੰਮਤ ਿਸੰਘ ਝੀਵਰ ਵਾਸੀ ਜਗਨਨਾਥ ਦੀ ਫੰਦਕ ਕੇ ਅਵਤਾਰੁ ।¹Close

The first [of the Sikhs who made up the Khalsa] was Guru Gobind Singh ji who was of the Sodhi caste. He was born in Patna and resided in Anandpur. He was the avatar of Vishnu. Daya Singh was a Sophti Khatri who dwelled in Lahore and was the incarnation of the earlier [demigod] Lav [the son of Ram]. Muhkam Singh Chhiṃpa [the calico dyer] hailed from Dwarka and was the avatar of Namdev. Sahib Singh Shahid was a resident of Bidar and was the avatar of Bhagat Sain, while the indomitable Dharam Singh was a Jat whose previous identity was that of Bhagat Dhanna. Dharam Singh lived in Hastinapura. Himmat Singh was a Jhivar [water carrier] who lived in Jagganath and was the incarnation of [Bhagat] Phandak.

The quotation here from what appears to be a mid- to late-eighteenth-century manuscript copy of the little-known Sudharam Mārg Granth Pātśāhī Dasvīn (The Tenth Emperor’s Book of the Exceedingly Righteous Path) attempts to describe what is perhaps the most famous single grouping of Sikhs in the history of the Sikh tradition outside that of the Ten Sikh Gurus, namely, the pañj piāre or Cherished Five. According to popular Sikh tradition, the first men who made up the Cherished Five were the initial five Sikhs who volunteered, one after another, to tender their heads to the Tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708), when the latter asked for a Sikh to offer himself to his master as sacrifice. The Tenth Guru, tradition claims, had said that the willingness to sacrifice oneself, if need be, was the order of the day to face the strenuous trials that lay ahead for the Sikh Panth, plagued as it was by the tyranny of Mughal India and the internal dissension within the Sikh community caused in part by those who at one point in time were the deputies of the past Sikh Gurus, the masands. Displacing these two sources of grave conflict, tradition loudly concludes, would ensure that rāj karegā khālsā (the Khalsa will rule) would become a reality. Although not the first description of the events of that crucial day in 1699, the account from the mid-eighteenth-century gur-bilās text attributed to Koer Singh nevertheless sets the tone and the standard that virtually all later and contemporary narratives of the Khalsa’s creation follow (I will discuss Koer Singh more fully in chapters 4 and 5).

ਅਛਲ ਪੁਰਖ ਕੌਤਕ ਯਿਹ ਕੀਨਾ । ਜਿਹ ਤਿਹ ਬੋਲ ਸੰਗ ਸਭ ਲੀਨਾ । ਿਮਲੇ ਆਨ ਜਬ ਆਿਧਕ ਅਪਾਰਾ । ਿਦਪਤ ਜੋਿਤ ਕਿਹ ਬਦਨ ਸੁਧਾਰਾ । ਸਨਮੁਖ ਪੂਰਾ ਿਸਖ ਹੈ ਕੋਈ । ਸੀਸ ਭੇਟ ਗੁਰ ਦੇਵੇ ਜੋਈ । ਯ ਸੁਨ ਹੁਕਮ ਅਿਧਕ ਬਹੁ ਭਾਰੀ । ਭਯੌ ਿਬਸਮ ਯਿਹ ਸਕਲ ਸੰਸਾਰਾ । ਤੀਨ ਬੇਰ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਮੁਖ ਜਬ ਕਹ੍ਯੋ । ਪਾਿਨ ਜੋਰ ਸੇਵਕ ਇਕ ਆਯੋ । ਗਿਹ ਤਾਕੀ ਭੁਜ ਖੜਗ ਿਨਕਾਰ੍ਯੋ । ਤੇਜ ਅਿਧਕ ਇਹ ਿਬਿਧ ਤਨ ਧਾਰ੍ਯੋ। ਝਟਕਾ ਕਰ੍ਯ ਅਜਾ ਸੁਤ ਜਾਈ । ਰੁਧਿਰ ਪ੍ਰਵਾਹ ਚਲ੍ਯੋ ਤਬ ਧਾਈ । ਸ੍ਰਣਤ ਪੁਲਤ ਖੜਗ ਲੈ ਹਾਥਾ । ਪੁਿਨ ਬਾਹਰ ਆਯੋ ਜਗ ਨਾਥਾ । ਮਾਂਗ੍ਯੋ ਅਵਰ ਸੀਸ ਇਕ ਆਈ । ਯੌ ਲਿਖ ਿਬਸ ਮੈ ਭਈ ਲੁਕਾਈ । ਤੀਨ ਬੇਰ ਸਿਤਗੁਰ ਜਬ ਗਾਯੌ । ਸੇਵਕ ਿਨਸਰ ਇਕ ਤਬ ਆਯੋ । ਤਾ ਕੀ ਭੁਜਾ ਪਕਰ ਗੁਰ ਦੇਵਾ । ਲੈ ਗ੍ਯੋ ਤੰਬੂ ਅਿਹ ਅਭੇਵਾ । ਝਟਕਾ ਕਰ੍ਯੋ ਤੈਸ ਿਬਿਧ ਜਾਈ । ਰਿਧਰ ਪ੍ਰਵਾਹ ਚਿਲਯੋ ਜਬ ਧਾਈ । ਪਾਂਚ ਅੰਗ੍ਰ ਕਰ ਸੀਸੁ ਸੁ ਕਾਟਾ । ਰੁੰਡ ਮੁੰਡ ਨੀਮੰ ਕਰ ਬਾਟਾ । ਪਾਂਚ ਿਸੰਘ ਸਿਤਗੁਰ ਇਮ ਲ੍ਯਾਏ । ਹਾ ਹਾ ਕਾਰ ਸਕਲ ਪੁਰ ਛਾਏ ।²Close

At first the men expressed eager curiosity as they took the call [to come together at Anandpur on Baisakhi Day] to sangats everywhere. When all had then gathered at the fair, the resplendent Guru called out, ‘Is there any loyal Sikh here, devoted in body and spirit, who will offer his head to the Guru?’

Having heard the Guru’s command, the people became agitated and stunned. Three times the Guru issued the call, until one selfless Sikh came forward with palms brought together. Having grasped him, the Guru raised his arm to take out his sword. The power of his pure form was dazzling to behold! The Guru took this first volunteer into a tent. Sword in hand, the Guru beheaded a goat in the middle of the tent with a single stroke, after which blood oozed out from underneath the tent’s flaps.

The Lord of the world once again came outside, sword drenched with blood, and demanded another head. Seeing this, several people were terrified and rushed to hide. Three more times the call was given, and three more selfless Sikhs came forward, and [after them] a final one. Guru Dev took the last Sikh volunteer’s arm and led him away into the tent, and from the middle of it an identical mighty blow was heard.

The Guru had now severed five heads, five pods pruned from a great tree. The True Guru brought the five Singhs [together in the tent] while bewildered cries were heard among all those townsfolk gathered [outside].

Immediately after this point, Koer Singh then makes us privy to the crowd’s anxieties and concerns regarding the Guru’s state of mind as they collectively query what had transpired that elicited the Guru’s resolve to slaughter Sikhs like goats (9:16); was it perhaps the influence of the terrifying goddess Kali? (9:18). After a few more questions of this sort, Koer Singh concludes,

ਉਤੈ ਲੋਕ ਯੋਂ ਭਾਖਈ ਇਤ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਯਾ ਿਬਿਧ ਠਾਨ । ਿਨਕਸੇ ਤੰਬੂ ਤਾਿਹ ਤੇ ਸੰਗ ਿਸੱਖ ਸੁਠ ਠਾਨ ।³Close

While all of this talk was going on, the True Lord was wholeheartedly resolved. He exited the tent accompanied by the [five] Sikhs, the glory of all of whom was evident.

Finally, the pious now understand the Guru’s call for heads, proclaiming its wonder (dhan dhan!) and that of both the Guru and the still-living five (9:24).

By such disposition to sacrifice body and life, Sikhs were to signify their utter loyalty to their Guru and their community, indeed to humanity itself, becoming the nucleus of what became on that first day of the Indian month of Baisakhi in sammat 1756 (30 March 1699 CE) the Sikh Khalsa, complete with its sartorial and behavioural injunctions. Because of the commitment of these first five, tradition continues, they were administered the nectar of the double-edged sword: water contained in a steel bowl in which the Tenth Guru’s wife, Mata Jito, had sprinkled sweets over which sacred verses were recited, after which it was stirred by the khaṇḍā or two-edged sword. Such an action infused the elixir with the spirituality of the saint (imparted by the reading of scripture) and the might of the soldier (conveyed by the use of the khaṇḍā). Afterwards, the Tenth Guru embraced each of them and called them piāre, or beloved, and commanded from that point onwards that any collection of five Sikhs selected from within any Sikh saṅgat (congregation) who observe the Khalsa discipline could represent and collectively embody the institution of the Panj Piare. The implication in this rousing narrative is that all members of this group—past, present, and future—must possess the character and resolve of the first Five, to be willing to ‘place their heads on the palms of their hands’⁴Close in the pursuit of righteousness, justice, and truth. The grandeur and importance allocated to this organization is made complete in this predominant telling when the Panj Piare as the collective Khalsa grant admission into their order to the Tenth Guru himself. The story thus implies that the Panj Piare play an important role not only in Khalsa Sikh ritual and ceremony, invested with the authority to initiate all new converts, but also in the united decisions made on behalf of the entire Khalsa Panth.⁵Close

As the institution of the Panj Piare does play just such roles, all Panj Piare since that fateful day are, in effect, chronologically and spatially collapsed into the original Panj Piare noted earlier, an understanding that gives current Five Beloveds (and the place at which the original five were initiated) their sanctity and authority. It is with this in mind that all Sikhs have been asked (since that time, tradition notes) to serve the Piare first in all congregations in which praśād, or sanctified food, is distributed. Along with this recognition, Panj Piare also initiate many Sikh rituals and lead ceremonies such as nagar kīrtan, inaugurate kar sevā (the cleansing of a sarovar, or sacred pool attached to a gurdwara), collectively lay the cornerstone of a new gurdwara, and, perhaps most important, officiate at the admission of all those Sikhs who seek entrance (or re-entrance)⁶Close into the Khalsa order of which the five are the fundamental part—the Sikh rite of khaṇḍe kī pāhul (also khaṇḍe dī pāhul or ammrit sanskār), the initiation of the double-edged sword.⁷Close Put simply, the initial five Sikhs admitted to the Khalsa form the archetype of all subsequent Panj Piare throughout the history of the Sikhs, and it is for just such a reason that Sikhs are asked to recall the first Panj Piare in the text of the Khalsa Sikh Ardas, the Sikh prayer collectively recited at the end of all ceremonies, and, quite significantly, that the Piare are mentioned in this prayer immediately before reference to the Tenth Guru’s four beloved sons, the chauhān/chār sāhibzāde, indicative of their status (and that of later Panj Piare and, by extension, the entire Khalsa) as the children of Guru Gobind Singh.⁸Close By this token, therefore, all those spaces in which initiation takes place symbolically become Anandpur,⁹Close and all those initiates who approach the Panj Piare for admittance into the Khalsa take on the symbolic form of Guru Gobind Singh, who himself, according to tradition, was initiated into the Khalsa immediately after he had admitted the first five through khaṇḍe kī pāhul.¹⁰Close In this case, the very Guru of the Sikhs becomes the disciple while in the presence of the Panj Piare, a facet of Sikh tradition that we hear of in the poetry of the second Bhai Gurdas who is also referred to as Bhai Gurdas Singh.¹¹Close

One can thus easily see that the first Panj Piare are held in very high esteem and are thereby said to play important roles in the popular history of the Sikhs, despite the fact that there is no evidence to this effect or any serious scholarship on the Panj Piare as far as I am aware, including posing some of the most basic questions regarding the historical institution’s very origins and existence, a situation engendered likely by the paucity of information regarding the Khalsa Panj Piare.¹²Close The popular (though remarkably brief) history of the Five, however, is quite well known and proclaims that three of the Panj Piare died valiantly fighting during the evacuation of Anandpur in 1704–05 and the subsequent Battle of Chamkaur (perhaps accounting for Sahib Singh’s nom de guerre, śahīd, or martyr, though this is unlikely, as I shall later note). It also proclaims that the two Piare who survived Chamkaur, Dharam Singh and Daya Singh, fought alongside the emperor Bahadar Shah at the Battle of Jajau; delivered the Tenth Guru’s famous Persian epistle, the Ẓafar-nāmah (Epistle of Victory) to the emperor Aurangzeb; and both later died in the same locale that had seen the death of the Tenth Master, Nander.¹³Close In regard to these two particular Piare, moreover, there are also stories augmenting their role as saintly warriors with that of kīrtanīā (performer of kīrtan). According to traditions that circulate in the field of gurbāṇī saṅgīt (classical Sikh music), for example, Bhai Dharam Singh is claimed to have established two primary institutions of musical learning, the Sekhwan and the Girwari Taksals, in Ferozepur and Hoshiarpur, respectively, while Bhai Daya Singh is remembered as having provided Guru Gobind Singh and his Khalsa much-needed focus during the battle along the bank of the Sirsa River after the evacuation of Anandpur in 1704 by performing a beautiful kirtan of Āsā dī Vār.¹⁴Close

The existence of the Panj Piare is not only implied in Sikh literary and oral traditions and commemorated in Sikh ritual traditions, but it has been built onto the very landscape of India. To commemorate the march southwards from the villages of Dina-Kangar to Aurangzeb, there is in Aurangabad a gurdwara dedicated to the principal Piara, Bhai Daya Singh.¹⁵Close This is not the only member of the Cherished Five to have a gurdwara erected in his memory. In Bet Dwaraka, Gujarat, for example, is Gurdwara Bhai Muhkam Singh, while in the village of Saifpur about three kilometres from Hastinapur along the bank of the Ganga, one finds a gurdwara in honour of Bhai Dharam Singh. There is also Gurdwara Bhai Sahib Singh, which is in Bidar, Karnataka.¹⁶Close For all these reasons, it is therefore no surprise that the Piare are often singled out in Sikh histories as Sikhs of a most exemplary character.

Although all the Cherished Five are revered and treated equally in Sikh memory today, early manuscript and other narrative sources dealing with the Piare do often single out Bhai Daya Singh as the primus inter pares, or first among equals, especially in mid- to late-eighteenth-century Sikh accounts. It is in these earliest Sikh sources prepared after the death of Guru Gobind Singh that it is Daya Singh alone, rather than both Daya Singh and Dharam Singh, who delivers the Ẓafar-nāmah to Aurangzeb.¹⁷Close It is possibly for such reasons that later Sikh writers attributed one of the primary sources of the Sikh Rahit to Daya Singh, the rahit-nama that bears his name.

Although early literary evidence of the Panj Piare is on the surface lacking, there are nevertheless tantalizing hints to the Piare’s existence. In certain writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, for example, especially the Rāg Āsā, which is appended to only select manuscripts of the Dasam Granth but excluded from today’s standard printed text, we find two such references that may indicate the Panj Piare, although the fact that these five are nameless should elicit our caution in establishing this equation as beyond doubt:

ਹਮਾਰੇ ਸੰਗੀ ਪੰਚ ਬੀਰ ਹੈ ਬਚਨ ਗੁਰੂ ਕਾ ਲੈ ਜਾਵਹੁ ਰੇ ।

My companions are five warriors who have embodied the command of the Guru.

And:

ਸੰਗ ਹਮਾਰੇ ਸੰਤ ਮਨਡਾਲੀ ਏਇਹ ਸੀਸ ਗੁਰੂ ਕਇ ਲਇ ਜਾਵਹੁ ਰੇ ।¹⁸Close

In my company is a collection of saints who have given their heads to the Guru.

With the spirit of these comments in mind, it appears that by the early nineteenth century, in examples of gur-bilās literature, five Sikhs working collectively as the Panj Piare possessed magico-divine powers to rival those of the traditional Siddhas themselves, as Ratan Singh Bhangu makes explicit in his famous Srī Gur-panth Prakāś in an episode dealing with the magical might of Guru Gobind Singh’s apparent deputy, Banda:

ਸਿੰਘ ਪੰਜਨ ਤੇ ਅਰਦਾਸ ਕਰਾਵੈ । ਜੋਊ ਮਾਂਗੈ ਸੋਊ ਦਿਵਾਵੈ ।¹⁹Close

That person who laid a request before five Singhs had his desires fulfilled.

It appears that by Bhangu’s time, at the very latest, a group of five Sikhs have been imbued with the magical might of the much larger sangat. Just such power of the sangat, for example, is underscored by Daya Ram Abrol in his 1733 CE compilation of Guru Nanak’s hagiographical narratives, which survives as the B40 Janam-sākhī. We hear the following in one sakhi, for example, in which is related the tale of a raja and rani who are both hopeful about future children:

ਅਤੇ ਧਰਮਸਾਲੇ ਜਾਇ ਕੇ ਸੰਗਿਤ ਗੁਰੂ ਬਾਬੇ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਪਾਿਸ ਅਰਦਾਿਸ ਕੀਚੇ ਸੰਗਿਤ ਿਵਚ ਗੁਰੂ ਹੈ ।²⁰Close

[Now] let us go to the dharmasālā and petition before the sangat since the [eternal] Guru is present within it.

Such anecdotes as those in Bhangu strongly intimate that the Panj Piare may act in many ways like a traditional Punjabi pañchāit (an assembly of five) which I introduced in the prologue, a collection of five village elders who make up a village council endowed with the right to arbitrate and settle disputes between individuals and villages.²¹Close These five Sikhs may also reflect a more Sikh version (if you will) of the famed pāñch/pañj pīr, five Muslim saints generally known, particularly in the Punjab, as the five spiritual beings who prominently figure in the famous Punjabi-language qissah of Hīr Rānjhā by Waris Shah. I will have more to say about this possible association later, closer to the end of this book.²²Close And so it is no surprise that popular Sikh history loudly proclaims that ‘at crucial moments of [Sikh] history, Pañj Piāre have collectively acted as supreme authority, representing the Guru Panth’. Usually, those crucial moments include the Battle of Chamkaur, during which the Panj Piare commanded that Guru Gobind Singh hurriedly leave the Sikh fortification at Chamkaur when his capture seemed imminent as they were direly pressed by combined Mughal and Pahari forces immediately after the evacuation of Anandpur in 1705 CE. Such claims, despite their regular repetition, are rarely followed by any examples outside of those to which I have already referred.²³Close Such assertions are not frequently substantiated, for good reason.

A scan of early- to mid-eighteenth-century sources—Sikh, Mughal, or otherwise—in print or manuscript (of which I am aware) documenting the post-Guru period of the Sikh past finds no specific mention of any Panj Piare interventions at all in the history of the eighteenth century. Perhaps in those moments when the sarbat khālsā came together to deliberate a decision that was to be taken on behalf of the entire Panth, and when such a decision was agreed upon in the presence of both the Guru Granth Sahib and the Dasam Granth, thus becoming gurmattā—a declaration of the eternal Guru that was ideally binding on all Sikhs—a Panj Piare may have been formed, perhaps implied in the realization of such gatherings of the ‘entire Khalsa’ (sarbat khālsā) of which we are aware, as it is today in Panthic decisions distributed from the Akal Takht.²⁴Close

Rai Jasbir Singh takes Shamsher Singh Ashok’s general declaration a step further in his brief study of the Precious Five. Collating the previous few, albeit implied references to the Panj Piare that we do see in eighteenth-century Sikh hagiography, Rai Jasbir Singh declares:

ਪੰਜ ਪਿਆਰਿਆਂ ਦੀ ਸਿਰਜਣਾ ਸਿੱਖਾਂ ਤੇ ਪੰਜਾਬ ਦੇ ਇਤਿਹਾਸ ਦੀ ਅਜਿਹੀ ਅਹਿਮ ਘਟਨਾ ਹੈ, ਜਿਸ ਨੇ ਪੰਜਾਬ ਦੀ ਮੱਧਕਾਲਿ ਸੋਚ ਵਿਚ ਪਰਿਵਰਤਨ ਲਿਆਂਦਾ ਅਤੇ ਆਧੁਨਿਕ ਸੋਚ ਦਾ ਦਰਾਜ਼ਾ ਖੋਲ੍ਹਿਆ ।²⁵Close

The creation of the Panj Piare is an occurrence that is equally important for the histories of both the Sikhs and the Punjab, a circumstance that transformed the medieval ethos of the Punjab and opened the gateway towards a more modern mindset.

And he assumes by this token that all subsequent Panj Piare do likewise. Yet the lack of evidence—notwithstanding the question of how this transformation came about by the formation of the first Panj Piare—is neither questioned nor answered but simply taken for granted. Nor does Rai Jasbir Singh bother to define what is meant by either maddhkāli soch or ādhunik soch, ‘archaic’ and ‘modern principles’, respectively, apart from claiming that the medieval ethos was changed by a shift to a more ‘panchayat-like’ (panchāitī sansthā) character, which, as mentioned earlier, appears to suggest the democratic principles of modern nation-states, a secular interpretation about which we often hear in regard to the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadar.²⁶CloseHis reader is thus left to his or her own devices to actually fill in these very substantial blanks. One may assume that the so-called medieval mindset to which he refers (and which he tacitly and negatively judges as quite retrograde) alludes to both the type of absolute monarchy of the caricatured ‘Oriental Despot’, for which the emperor Aurangzeb is often chastised, and the enchanted framework of Indo-Islamic India so beautifully excavated in A. Azfar Moin’s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, in which, among other things, the patterns in poetry, dreams, strange occurrences, colours, numbers, word formations, astrological signs, and bodily portents were all understood to reflect an enchanted cosmological framework that one could interpret through an understanding of such signs and their combinations, and to put this knowledge to use in the performance of both sacred kingship and sainthood, two facets often considered separately in scholarship on the Mughal and Safavid empires that Moin effortlessly reconnects and which can both be seen to intermingle in the few available narratives of the Panj Piare, which in its institutional capacity appeared, at least in traditional accounts, to engage in such performances, or so we are led to assume.²⁷Close Rai Jasbir Singh’s wide-ranging claim regarding the creation of the Panj Piare therefore requires examining, once again, the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships of religious imaginaries and sovereign power in eighteenth-century Punjab in the context of a changing Mughal Empire and an evolving Sikh Panth. These are questions to which I will return in later chapters.²⁸Close

Let me hasten to add that what is nevertheless remarkable about the passage from the Sudharam Mārg Granth Pātśāhī Dasvīn that begins this chapter is one of the three associations noted in that epigraph, namely, the karmic affiliation of the Treasured Five with the well-known non-Sikh, low-caste Sants Namdev, Sain (also known as Sen), and Dhanna; the not-so-well-known phandak,²⁹Close and the demigod Lav, the son of the Hindu tradition’s Lord Ram, affiliations that are rarely, if ever, mentioned today. That Guru Gobind Singh himself is associated with the Hindu god Vishnu (and Vishnu’s incarnation Lord Ram as well) is less surprising, as such connections occur frequently in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sikh literature, beginning with Sainapati’s Srī Gur-Sobhā,³⁰Close and this correlation generally persists in today’s Sikh imaginary, despite the Tenth Guru’s adamant disavowal of his apparent avatar status in his so-called autobiography, the Bachitar Nāṭak.³¹Close

All three of the associations we find in the Panj Piare narrative—caste, location, and karmic affiliation—were clearly salient features among Punjabi Sikhs in the mid- to late eighteenth century, features that we find throughout the literature of the era. I will examine each of these in turn over the course of this book.

Chapter 3 will focus more exclusively on the only one of these three associations that is gradually phased out, to the point where today it is no longer a feature of popular Sikh memory, and that is the karmic association. I will return to the other two connections, caste and place, in the following chapters. In chapter 2, however, we will turn towards two of the features of the Panj Piare tradition that are at the moment so commonplace as to be taken for granted: the number and names of the Enthralling Five.

But before this, I would like to insert a rather lengthy interlude, spending the remainder (and bulk) of this introductory chapter attempting to go beyond some of the more common reasons proffered for the creation of the organization at the core of which lie the Panj Piare: the Khalsa. And this, in turn, will help us better understand the evolution of the institution that was and is the Panj Piare, for although Sikh tradition weaves together a narrative in which the Khalsa emerges from those first five Sikhs, traditional manuscript sources make implicit that the reverse is likely to be more accurate historically, that the Panj Piare as a category and as an institution emerges well after the formation of the Khalsa, probably sometime in the mid- to late eighteenth century.

The reasons that are often articulated for the Khalsa’s inauguration are very well known and include its creation as a more robust martial response to growing Mughal hostility in the wake of the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadar in 1675, as well as the need to tie the India-wide community of Sikhs ever more firmly to Guru Gobind Singh through the eradication of the masands, the Guru’s intermediaries. These agents, since their inception in the mid-sixteenth century by the Third and Fourth Gurus, Guru Amar Das and Guru Ram Das, respectively, had become most corrupt by the late seventeenth century. Recently, Purnima Dhavan has provided us with a far more nuanced interpretation of the Khalsa’s founding, analysing the multiple changing and evolving variables that established the equation of its formation, features including the peasant and martial communities that roamed the Indian countryside during the eighteenth century who were bound by multiple overlapping loyalties, and the evolving nature of the Sikh Rahit in response to the multifaceted situation that confronted Sikh soldiers and peasants and the cultural, religious, and political forces that worked upon them. Hers is easily the most robust and sophisticated challenge that the traditional interpretation of the Khalsa’s development has confronted. In many ways, what appears in the following pages has her insightfully textured study very much in the background.³²Close In the background, too, will be the intriguing study by Jeevan Deol, some two decades back now, of (at the risk of streamlining Deol’s important contribution) the ‘Rajputization’ of the Sikh tradition, the process whereby military labour groups, including the Sikhs, adopted the august pedigrees, characteristics, and ideologies generally associated with the well-established martial Rajput lineages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³³Close

My need to return to this inauguration is exacerbated by the fact that Dhavan’s wonderful analysis situates the focus predominantly in the post–Guru Gobind Singh period, although her early chapters do include works produced during the Guru’s time. Of course, this shift of focus is desperately necessary in order to return agency to the Sikh peasants, soldiers, and leaders who are denuded of this by the relatively straightforward and triumphalist narrative of the Khalsa, which lays agency squarely at the door of the Guru and his instructions. This is a need that Dhavan’s text eminently fulfils. I would like to expand her focus back to the period of Guru Gobind Singh for my own purposes, however. And in the process of doing so, I discover that at the heart of the traditional narrative of the Khalsa’s foundation is a story whose contours are very much suggestive of the mimetic embrace of sacred kingship and sainthood that lies at the heart of Moin’s aforementioned study of Mughal, Safavid, and Timurid imaginaries throughout the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.³⁴Close And although such an embrace may be relatively new to the historiographical study of Mughal and Safavid polities, it is indeed nothing novel to the study of Sikh history, with its common trope (at least since the early nineteenth century) of mīrī-pīrī, the combination of the gentlemanly involvement in courtly, martial, political, and other affairs that marks the courtier and the spirituality that is the hallmark of the saint. This idea, according to tradition, was first articulated by the Sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargobind (1595–1644 CE) and materialized concretely with his construction of the Akal Takht, the Throne of the Timeless, which sits just off the parikarma right across from today’s Golden Temple in Amritsar. This is an embrace that is quite difficult to unravel.

Unfortunately, we can never really know exactly what transpired on that fateful day in 1699 (we are not even sure that the event occurred in late March 1699), as both J. S. Grewal and Hew McLeod have noted over the years.³⁵Close That it would become a seminal event in Sikh history was beyond doubt, since it is mentioned and memorialized in every post-1708 Sikh account of the Tenth Guru’s life and symbolically recreated every time a Sikh novitiate is initiated into the Khalsa. This significance would not have been lost on contemporary Sikhs outside of Anandpur and throughout India. While the early hukam-name of Guru Gobind Singh refer to his Sikhs collectively as sangats and call upon these respective communities to send specific goods and monies to the Guru, and either prepare for the Guru’s visit or ready themselves for a visit to Anandpur, the Tenth Master’s later written instructions refer to his disciples as Khalsa, often requesting that they make their way to Anandpur with weapons girded and disregard those who had previously represented the Guru, thus indicating more than simply a change in nomenclature (even speaking from the perspective of denotation, one notes that the term khālsā appears prior to the period of Guru Gobind Singh, in the hukam-name of his grandfather Guru Hargobind and those of Guru Tegh Bahadar, as—perhaps—a reference to those sangats that had a direct relationship with the Gurus rather than an indirect association through the institute of the masands).³⁶Close In these very written instructions of Guru Gobind Singh, moreover, we can also trace the beginning evolution of the term khālsā from its initial designation as those groups of Sikhs who had a direct relationship with the Tenth Guru, thus obviating the necessity of the masands, a designation that nicely aligns with the more instrumental usage of the term under the Mughals (historically referring to those lands or other things and individuals producing revenue directly for the Mughal emperor and the central treasury), to the Khalsa of the Wonderful Guru Vahigurū in later hukam-name issued just before the death of the Guru in 1708. Although we find both a more restricted and less restricted sense of the term in hukam-name issued by both Banda in the 1710s and the widows of the Tenth Guru in the 1720s, the implication of the Khalsa’s spread worldwide that we can detect in the Guru’s final hukam-name becomes explicit in a written instruction dated 1759 to, ultimately, the entire Sikh community.³⁷Close

A short stopover in the town of Anandpur and its many gurdwaras and forts, moreover, confirms this significance as doubtless, demonstrating that the memory of the event has been injected into the town’s very brickwork. Indeed, throughout today’s much-truncated state of the Punjab, sites associated with the event are everywhere.³⁸Close This was an occurrence that may be interpreted as the culmination of Guru Gobind Singh’s life and teachings, perhaps underscored by the fact that just a month before the traditional date of the Khalsa’s inauguration (by which time we may assume the Tenth Master had most certainly made up his mind about the new order), Guru Gobind Singh and his wife, Jito, named their newborn son Fateh Singh, fateh, of course, derived from the Arabic-Persian (fatḥ), and being the Punjabi word for victory.³⁹Close This understanding of the Khalsa is one that we find, for example, in the earliest source to narrate the creation of the Khalsa, Sainapati’s Srī Gur-Sobhā.

By comparison with later descriptions of the birth of the Khalsa, Sainapati’s narrative is quite a meagre one, omitting altogether the subject around which this monograph revolves, the Panj Piare. The lion’s share of Sainapati’s account of the Khalsa’s birth occurs in Chapter 5. Here the majority of the text is largely devoted to explicating certain parts of what would become the Rahit (although there is no reference within to the rahit-namas), particularly the commands that Sikhs from his point forward disassociate from the masands, end the performance of bhaddar, or tonsure, and keep clear of the five reprobate groups, the pañch kī kusaṅgat, a number of which (the Minas and Ram Raiyas in particular) had established parallel Sikh guru lineages that occasionally troubled the most standard line of Sikh Gurus.⁴⁰Close Interspaced between these injunctions are brief descriptions of the sangat’s reaction to the Guru’s proclamations—the disturbances it engenders especially in Delhi, the effulgence the world witnessed by the creation of the Khalsa, and also pithy descriptions of that order’s initial inauguration, a representative example of the latter of which occurs at 5:33:

ਖੰਡੇ ਕੀ ਪਾਹੁਲ ਦਈ ਕਰਨਹਾਰ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਸੋਇ । ਿਕਓ ਦਸੋ ਿਦਸ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਤਾ ਿਬਨ ਅਵਰ ਨ ਕੋਇ ।⁴¹Close

The Lord and Creator dispensed the sanctified nectar of the double-edged sword and [by so doing] inaugurated the Khalsa throughout the world [daso dis: the ten directions].⁴²Close Like the Khalsa there is no other [avar na koi].

This is more or less all we hear of the Khalsa’s creation, although it is repeated with slight modifications elsewhere, brief lines of which also appear in 5:4–5, 34; yet even in this paltry offering, here Sainapati tacitly indicates the equation between Guru and Khalsa through the phrase avar na koi. This expression (and those like it, for example, avar na dujī, ‘there is no second’, often in regard to place) is one of the more common descriptors we find peppered throughout the Guru Granth Sahib, especially in Sirī rāg (fitting, as this raga is claimed to be the king of ragas), attempting to express in negative terms the ineffable nature of the Eternal Guru.⁴³Close That Sainapati appropriates this language is quite demonstrative of his opinion about the Khalsa as the Guru, a judgement to which he makes us consistently privy throughout Chapters 5 and 6 of Srī Gur-Sobhā.

Furthermore, even these brief descriptions speak to the spectacle-like character of the event, the performance of which occurs on the stage that is Anandpur in front of a large public audience:

ਪੁਰ ਆਨੰਦ ਗੋਿਬੰਦ ਿਸੰਘ ਗੁਰ ਅਬ ਕਿਬ ਕਰਤ ਬਖਾਨ । ਿਗਰਦ ਪਹਾਰ ਅਪਾਰ ਅਿਤ ਸਿਤਲੁੰਦ੍ਰ ਤਿਟ ਸੁਭ ਥਾਨ । ਚੇਤ ਮਾਸ ਬੀਿਤਉ ਸਕਲ ਮੇਲਾ ਭਯੋ ਅਪਾਰ । ਬੈਸਾਖੀ ਕੇ ਦਰਸ ਪੈ ਸਿਤਗੁਰੁ ਕੀਯੋ ਿਬਚਾਰ ।⁴⁴Close

I would now like to discuss [those matters which] Guru Gobind Singh initiated at the town of Anandpur, surrounded as it is by limitless mountains and located on the bank of the River Satluj. The month of Chet had passed and the great melā held at Anandpur began. There, on the festival of Baisakhi, the True Guru provided his darshan and reflected [on the world’s condition and its cure].

Its remedy, as we discover, is the Khalsa:

ਹੋ ਕੋ ਉਦਾਸ । ਖਾਲਸਾ ਪ੍ਰਗਾਸ । ਅਪਰੰ ਅਪਾਰ । ਸੰਭਾਰਵਾਰ ।⁴⁵Close

Why do you mourn? The Khalsa, unbounded, the support of the world, has come into the light!

As we can note here at the beginning of the fifth dhiāī, the transformation of this seminal inauguration, its conversion into as wonderful a drama as the Tenth Guru himself,⁴⁶Close is well suited to the performative nature of both kingship and sainthood in the person of the sovereign in late-seventeenth-century northern India and Iran. And although the famous (or infamous) narrative dealing with the decapitation of goats and the ultimate emotionally charged exposure of the Panj Piare/Khalsa is absent in Sainapati, the dramatic build-up to a stark revelation, that is to say, the hint of a reveal akin to ‘pulling back the tent flap to gasps’, is nevertheless implied:

ਗੋਿਬੰਦ ਿਸੰਘ ਕਰੀ ਖੁਸ਼ੀ ਸੰਗਿਤ ਕਰੀ ਿਨਹਾਲ । ਕੀਉ ਪ੍ਰਗਟ ਤਬ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਚੁਿਕਓ ਸਕਲ ਜੰਜਾਲ ।⁴⁷Close

Gobind Singh delighted the congregation of Sikhs and blessed them. He then revealed the Khalsa, [the appearance of which] severed the many snares [of māiā].

Sainapati’s profound emotional and aesthetic investment in the Khalsa not only speaks to his loving fondness for the institution and for the Tenth Guru, its founder, but also projects these desires into the community’s future, allowing us to assume that Sainapati’s intended audience of Sikhs and Khalsa Sikhs is always close to our author’s mind. In this regard, therefore, one can claim that Sainapati’s text not only describes a performance but is itself a performative text and thus instructive and edifying, a didactic text demonstrating and thus giving an immediacy to the courage that would be required in the days ahead, those days without the physical presence of Guru Gobind Singh, if the Sikhs were once again to secure Anandpur. This was a text that, when uttered, was prepared to do something in the world rather than simply report an event.⁴⁸Close The town of Anandpur, associated as it was with the Tenth Guru, was, like the Khalsa itself, the legacy of Guru Gobind Singh; its retrieval would have therefore served the spiritual and emotional well-being of the Khalsa. It is no surprise in this light that Sainapati ends his text with an appeal to retrieve the City of Bliss.⁴⁹Close  Srī Gur-Sobhā is thus as much prescriptive as it is descriptive.

I am aware that these claims may be overstating the point, since Sainapati demonstrates no overt attempt to figure political dominion into the Khalsa’s calculus in the fifth chapter of Srī Gur-Sobhā; there appears to be no effort to delineate the process involved for rāj karegā khālsā to manifest in the future.⁵⁰Close Sainapati highlights the sole purpose for the order’s creation in the following way, not to rule, but claiming rather that

ਅਸੁਰ ਸੰਘਰਬੇ ਕੋ ਦੁਰਜਨ ਕੇ ਮਾਰਬੇ ਕੋ ਸੰਕਟ ਿਨਵਾਰਬੇ ਕੋ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਬਨਾਯੋ ਹੈ ।⁵¹Close

The Khalsa was made to destroy demons, to demolish the wicked, and to alleviate suffering.

In other words, the purpose was to do those very same things for which the Sikh Gurus were commissioned by the Eternal Guru in Sikh hagiography. As Dhavan notes, Sainapati works ‘comfortably within the Sikh hagiographic genre of the sakhī’, and here is proof.⁵²Close But the claim I make here does not, in fact, overly embellish the narrative we find in Srī Gur-Sobhā, the latter’s poetic character notwithstanding, since more profanely temporal sovereign elements are covertly indicated in this initial account, features that are bubbling below the surface of this first description and the narrative in which it is placed, and these cues would not have been missed by Sainapati’s earliest audiences, made up largely, one may assume, of the devotees of Guru Gobind Singh. That these political overtones are detectable in Srī Gur-Sobhā makes sense intertextually, since Sainapati is the poet to whom is ascribed one of the more important texts interpreted in the Tenth Guru’s darbar, the work of the legendary Brahman statesman Chanakya, better known as Kautilya. Sainapati’s Brajbhasha translation of Kautilya’s nītī aphorisms appears as the manuscript Chānākā Rajnītī, or Chanakya’s Political Maxims.⁵³Close

Sainapati, for example, consistently describes Guru Gobind Singh in glowing metaphors: he is the kartār or creator, prabhu the Lord, parameshvār the Highest Lord, and so on. Among these lofty descriptions, we also find many that are derived from imperial precedent. The Tenth Sikh Master is rāj rājā dhirājam (king of the king of kings), pātiśāh (emperor), shāh shāhan/shāhan shāh (king of kings), and gharīb nivās (protector of the poor), among others, terms we also find in Guru Nanak’s own descriptions of the divine,⁵⁴Close making it quite clear that for Sainapati and his Sikh and other audiences, Guru Gobind Singh is both a spiritual figure and a world ruler. This interpretation is quite common in the study of the Tenth Master and, as mentioned, lines up with one of the most common tropes in Sikh historiography, mīrī-pīrī.⁵⁵Close Later Sikh sources will catch hold of this visceral sentiment and weave together a profound tapestry demonstrating the sovereignty of the Khalsa, the nature of which is delineated in such texts as the Sarabloh Granth and the var attributed to one Bhai Gurdas Singh that is often appended to the text of Bhai Gurdas’s Bhalla’s vārān as the forty-first in that collection. Throughout Sainapati’s narrative, the Tenth Guru is suffused with that very kingly/saintly light of the divine of which we hear in both Quranic and Persianate accounts, the nūr that is the Quranic divine and the farr of Iranian and Mongolian accounts of the Indo-Timurid line. The latter refers to that light infused into legitimate and true monarchs through the legendary matriarch of the Mongols, Alanqua. It is through the amrit that the light, or joti, of the divine is imparted to the Khalsa, which in turn shines brightly throughout the spiritual domain of the Tenth Guru, the Sikh version of wilāyat, indeed, throughout the world, bathing it in light.⁵⁶Close What Sainapati implies is that this divine effulgence emanating from the Khalsa contributes to a Khalsa Sikh digvijaya, a conquest of the space covered by the four cardinal directions of the world:

ਕੀਓ ਹੈ ਪ੍ਰਕਾਸ ਲਾਸ ਚਮਕੀ ਚਹੂ ਓਰ । ਤਹਾ ਜੋਿਤ ਲਜਾਈਵੰਤ ਭਯੋ ਸੂਰਜ ਅਰ ਚੰਦ ਹੈ । ਜਾ ਕੋ ਦਰਸਨ ਐਸੇ ਦੁਰਮਿਤ ਮਲ ਸਗਲ ਖੇਤ । ਿਬਨਸਿਤ ਸਕਲ ਪਾਪ ਛੂਟਤ ਸਿਭ ਬੰਦ ਹੈ । ਖਾਲਸੇ ਮੈ ਸਫਲ ਸੇਵ ਕਰਤ ਹੈ ਸਗਲ ਦੇਵ ।⁵⁷Close

[Guru Gobind Singh] imparted the light [joti] [to the Khalsa] and this suffused the four [cardinal directions] [chahū], a light [so grand] that both sun and moon [paled as these] were shamed in comparison. The sacred sight engendered by this light caused wicked thoughts to be altogether eradicated. And with sins destroyed, one became free from all fetters [binding one to the transmigratory wheel]. Success lies in the Khalsa’s service. The gods entire serve the Khalsa.

Perhaps in this context, epithets of the Tenth Guru such as Jagadishwār, Master of the World (20:9), take on enhanced meaning. This last implication in Sainapati’s quotation, furthermore, is a logical extension of the doctrine of Guru Panth, first articulated by our poet, proclaiming the identification of the Khalsa with the Guru (6:12).

The equation seems clear, and although undeclared by Sainapati, what is taking place in Chapter 5 is not only the performance which will be regularly re-enacted as the basis of the ritual of ammrit sanskār but also a tacit coronation ceremony in which the Khalsa (and by extension the Panj Piare in subsequent accounts) is ‘crowned’ by the Guru—in much the same way that Guru Nanak ‘crowns’ Guru Angad in the hymn by Satta and Balwand—and its body, both individual and collective, cast into the mould of the world’s saviour, perhaps a prophesied one insofar as Sainapati is concerned, an implication drawn out in the final chapter of Srī Gur-Sobhā, in which the return of and to Anandpur through the reoccupation of the fort of Anandgarh is repeatedly prophesied.⁵⁸Close In Srī Gur-Sobhā, the Tenth Guru transforms his Sikhs into Khalsa in his capacity as both the Guru and the pātiśāh, drawing upon a language from the imperial domain in the close alliance that also sees emperors do the inverse, express their sovereignty in ‘the manner of Sufi saints and holy saviours’.⁵⁹Close And this is despite the fact that the Guru’s order is referred to as the khālsā, derived from the imperial Persian term k hālsah, designating the land and its yield or those immediate persons over which and whom the king has direct authority.⁶⁰Close

It should be further noted that what we see in Sainapati is a ceremony in which, unlike the inaugurations or coronations of the rāṇās in the nearby Pahari kingdoms, Brahmans play no officiating role—unsurprisingly, since Sainapati rebukes them and their fondness for tonsure in the lines following the inauguration of the Khalsa in Chapters 5 and 6 of Srī Gur-Sobhā—effectively eliminating their significance in the power dynamics of Pahari polities, at least in that of Anandpur. This absence appears to have struck many later Sikh writers as odd, as their relatively clumsy attempts to write Brahmans into the story of the Khalsa’s inauguration (and in most cases ultimately dismiss them) appear to suggest (for which see later chapters of this book).⁶¹Close The fact that later writers would so diligently refer to these representatives of high-caste Hindu traditions is suggestive of the latter’s prominence in the ritual life of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Punjab. Indeed, in Srī Gur-Sobhā, the ridicule to which the Hindu tonsure ceremony performed by Brahmans is subjected appears to be a further, though veiled, critique of their ritual role in seventeenth-century Punjab, and the space given to this ritual is, of course, indicative of its prevalence among certain sections of the Sikh Panth. Here in the condemnation of tonsure, we also may see an implied ritual and symbolic inversion that comes to mark the Khalsa tradition of Guru Gobind Singh.⁶²Close The early Sikh antipathy towards Brahmans is perhaps best captured in the Sākhī Rahit kī that is appended to the Ḥazurī Rahit-nāmā and attributed to Bhai Nand Lal.⁶³Close

While the symbolic equation between a coronation and the first (and subsequent) Khalsa inauguration ceremony is a point that Sikhs have made many times, indeed, often stating that the turban is a symbolic crown in routine conversation to this very day (of course, reflecting contemporary worldwide Sikh concerns), there is another widely visible element in Sainapati that elevates this ceremony to the level of the unique. Here what we see, symbolically, is the Tenth Guru crowning the Khalsa through the amrit ceremony, an inversion of all previous coronation ceremonies. Such a reversal is along the same lines as those we note in the vārān of Bhai Gurdas in which the sangat drinks the footwash of the initiate upon the latter’s entrance into the Panth’s fold, but unlike the ceremony described in the vārān, in the khaṇḍe dī pāhul ritual, we see the effortless intersection of the sacred and profane. Here in Sainapati, it is the king who elevates his subjects to his level, while simultaneously it is the pīr, s hayk h, or guru who exalts disciples, the sikkh, chele, and murīdān, situating them on a footing equal to that of the Master—again, an extension of earlier Sikh traditions that note that when Guru Nanak passed guruship onto the disciple Lehana, that disciple became Guru Angad, and Guru Nanak became the former’s Sikh.⁶⁴Close Perhaps it is in the light of this tradition in which Guru Nanak is no longer Guru (which appears in Bhai Gurdas’s first var) that later gur-bilās and rahit writers saw a need to pass guruship back to Guru Gobind Singh through his initiation into the Khalsa, effectively cementing the idea articulated by the second Bhai Gurdas that Guru Gobind Singh was āpai gur chelā, both Guru and disciple, and that he was both simultaneously, and what a wonder that was.⁶⁵Close Here in Sainapati, we see that the Tenth Guru is defusing the hierarchies that were so prevalent in Indo-Islamic Punjab, hierarchies we find not only in Hindu traditions and among Hindu caste but also in Indian Islam, and indeed those in the darbar of earthly monarchs such as the Mughals, with the radical proposition that the community is the Guru and the seasoned disciple the master.⁶⁶Close And this is underscored at the same time, as I have elsewhere claimed, once the elevation to royalty implied here takes place. For once this occurs, royalty is effectively eliminated by transforming everyone into royalty—well, that is, converting to monarchs all those who seek and are granted admission into the Khalsa. That this idea had some traction among Sikhs of the eighteenth century is certainly implied in the observations of certain Persian chroniclers, although how effectively it was integrated into the quotidian life of Khalsa Sikhs can only be conjectured—it is, however, clear from the eighteenth-century rahit-namas that the Khalsa Sikh was elevated above all others.⁶⁷Close It is only approaching the end of the text that Sainapati makes this dissolution of royalty from an individual to the collective community—tacit in Chapter 5—explicit:

ਤਾਹ ਸਮੇ ਗੁਰ ਬੈਨ ਸੁਨਾਯੋ । ਖਾਲਸਾ ਆਪਨੋ ਰੂਪ ਬਤਾਯੋ । ਖਾਲਸ ਹੀ ਸੋ ਹੈ ਮਮ ਕਾਮਾ । ਬਖਸ਼ ਕੀਉ ਖਾਲਸ ਕੋ ਜਾਮਾ ।⁶⁸Close

At that moment the Tenth Guru replied: ‘The Khalsa, which I love, is my embodiment. I have given the Khalsa my cloak of authority (jāmā).’

This buried critique of corruptible royalty, which rings throughout the Dasam Granth (and the Adi Granth) as well as in Sainapati, may be among the many reasons that Guru Gobind Singh chose Ferdausi’s S hāh-nāmah as the mythic template for his caustic letter to the emperor Aurangzeb, the Ẓafar-nāmah. As I have noted elsewhere, despite the title of Ferdausi’s masterpiece, the Book of Kings, it is a maṡnavī that provides a thorough and sobering re-evaluation of kingship, sparing no condemnation for those rulers—the vast majority of the fifty kings whose stories appear in the S hāh-nāmah—who violate oaths, principles, and righteousness.⁶⁹Close The inversion of the veiled coronation ritual which I find strongly implied in Sainapati is brought into brighter light in later accounts of the gur-bilās genre when the Panj Piare returns the favour by bringing Guru Gobind Singh into the Khalsa’s embrace through administering to him the sacred elixir.⁷⁰Close

That Sainapati does not explicitly demonstrate a more overtly imperial dimension in his description of the inauguration in Srī Gur-Sobhā, my comments above notwithstanding, is nevertheless quite surprising, given the fact that in other chapters of his text, Sainapati relies on the Tenth Guru’s Bachitar Nāṭak in the construction of his narrative. The execution of Guru Tegh Bahadar, for example, and also his description of the many battles in which the Guru engages against the hill chieftains are clearly drawn from the Wonderful Performance we find in today’s Dasam Granth. Why this is unexpected is that in this earlier account of the Tenth Guru’s life, there are claims to political power, quite forceful ones, in fact, that demonstrate that embrace of kingship and sainthood about which Moin so persistently speaks. Even less forceful claims appear. One may recognize this concern with the political and kingly power that Sainapati ignores in regard to the creation of the Khalsa in other compositions both attributed to him (the Chānākā Rajnītī, for example) and those included in the Dasam Granth. The Guru’s poetic musings on the goddess, which account for a good deal of the Tenth Master’s text today (as well as some of the poems that were not incorporated into the Dasam Granth), may be cited here, keeping in mind, of course, that goddesses were long associated with the acquisition of just such power and in the subsequent preservation and protection of the kingdom acquired.⁷¹Close Take, for example, the beginning of the extraordinary eighth dhiāi, which is titled rāj sāj kathan, The Story of Ruling (also The Tale of the Ornament of Rule), a title that attests to at least one dimension of the complex sovereignty that appears to be advocated and apparently embodied by Guru Gobind Singh:

ਰਾਜ ਸਾਜ ਹਮ ਪਰ ਜਬ ਆਯੋ । ਜਥਾਸਕਿਤ ਤਬ ਧਰਮੁ ਚਲਾਯੋ ।⁷²Close

When the task of rule came to me I spread dharam to the best of my ability.

The wording here is quite intriguing. The ‘undertaking of rule’, or rāj sāj, ‘comes’ (āyo) to the Guru (ham par) at a particular time (jab);⁷³Close it is not pursued, nor is it grasped or desired, through his own agency in any of the traditional ways articulated, for example, in early Common Era composite Indic texts concerned with kingship and the duties of a king such as the Dharamshastras and Arthashastra—in which the Tenth Master, like the Mughals, would have been well versed, given the literary interests he pursued in the Dasam Granth.⁷⁴Close There is, moreover, no task accomplished to prove his mettle for the mantle of rule. Guru Gobind Singh is, put simply, gifted with the prospect by the Eternal Guru by virtue of his descent within the Sodhi line (or so we assume), a lineage to which we are made privy in the fourth and fifth chapters of the Bachitar Nāṭak, a bequest often pointed out by the author (and also noted in the Ẓafar-nāmah), and when so singled out, the account states it ‘comes to’ him.⁷⁵Close Perhaps in this line, Guru Gobind Singh has the words of Guru Nanak in mind, in which the First Master makes it clear that rāj is one of the gifts of the divine but in no way divine itself, an understanding followed up by the notion that the embrace of rāj is ‘no better than any other earthly pursuit or possession’.⁷⁶Close The Tenth Guru then uses this gift as an opportunity to ‘spread dharam’ (dharamu chalāyo) ‘according to his own power’ (jathā śakti), and although the specifics of dharam are left unsaid at this point (as are those of rāj), we, like the Tenth Guru’s general eighteenth-century audience, may assume that what is likely meant is something vaguely akin to ensuring that truth, justice, and righteousness remain steadfast; that cosmic order remain intact; and that those opposed to such principles are destroyed—after all, the fifth dhiāi of the Bachitar Nāṭak notes that it was for this generally understood dharam that Guru Tegh Bahadar was martyred⁷⁷Close and for the spread of which Guru Gobind Singh was commissioned by the Eternal Guru (6:29)—rather than the more restrictive sense of Khalsa dharam that would not fully emerge until a few years after this text was written, refined, for example, in the succeeding Rahit literature and Srī Gur-Sobhā.⁷⁸Close

This is a powerful claim, given the examples of rāj with which Guru Gobind Singh would have been familiar at this point in his life (late seventeenth century), examples far from dharmic, as the activities of both his Pahari Rajput neighbours and the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb would indicate.⁷⁹Close In fact, the Tenth Guru writes about these very things, noting initially, for example, the capricious nature of rulers such as Fateh Shah, whose baffling and hostile behaviour towards the Sikhs is here singled out just a few lines after the Guru arrives at Paonta Sahib in 1685 and later attesting to Aurangzeb’s indiscretions in the Ẓafar-nāmah.

It becomes quite clear from this point forward that the dharam of which the Tenth Guru writes included within its range force and violence. The Tenth Guru’s residence in Paonta Sahib, at least insofar as the Bachitar Nāṭak is concerned, is the arena in which Guru Gobind Singh can develop his ideas of dharam, and since Guru Gobind Singh spends the vast bulk of his Bachitar Nāṭak from this point onwards relating his use of force when, apparently ‘all other means had failed’, it seems safe to say that within the orbit of his dharam was also yudh, or war. Dharam yuddh was an undertaking required not only to confront the hostility of the Guru’s neighbours but also to align the political fabric with the spiritual values of the Sikh Gurus.⁸⁰Close Indeed, Guru Gobind Singh or one of his darbari poets makes this point clearly in an oft-quoted passage at the end of the celebrated Kriṣanāvtār:

ਦਸਮ ਕਥਾ ਭਾਗੌਤ ਕੀ ਭਾਖਾ ਕਰੀ ਬਨਾਇ । ਅਵਰ ਬਾਸਨਾ ਨਾਹਿ ਪ੍ਰਭ ਧਰਮ ਜੁਧ ਕੇ ਚਾਇ ।⁸¹Close

I have [here] completed the tenth chapter of the Bhagavata Purana in the common language. O Lord, my purpose was solely to engender that knowledge which leads to righteous battle.

In this regard, the narrative of the Battle of Bhangani in the eighth chapter forms the template for the Tenth Guru’s descriptions of the subsequent battles in which he engages. Narratives of his later battles thus offer very little, if anything, that is innovative in regard to or different from the dharam to which we are introduced in the Bhangani narrative, a Sikh dharam, if one will, that contests more traditional Indic interpretations of dharma with the latter’s focus on caste and hierarchy.⁸²Close

Let us be sure to make no mistake about the Tenth Master’s intentions: Guru Gobind Singh is here, in Bachitar Nāṭak 8:1, reiterating and effectively reinvigorating a claim made just less than two centuries earlier in rāg sūhī by the first Sikh Master, Guru Nanak (which appears as a refrain in the Guru Granth Sahib), the most significant words of which are often coupled and thus poetically balanced in the shabads of the subsequent Sikh Gurus and that of the rare Bhagat.

ਅੰਜਨ ਮਾਹਿ ਨਿਰੰਜਨਿ ਰਹੀਐ ਜੋਗ ਜੁਗਤਿ ਇਵ ਪਾਈਐ ।⁸³Close

The path of true yoga is trodden by living truthfully in a world walking away from truth (literally, ‘remaining pure [nirañjani] while immersed in lampblack [añjanu]’).

Guru Gobind Singh renovates the understanding of Guru Nanak in response to the new situations in which the Sikhs of Guru Nanak find themselves: Guru Nanak’s añjanu becomes the Tenth Master’s rāj sāj, which Sainapati’s text implies is as dark as charcoal dust and thus potentially venal, while the purity or nirañjani of the First Guru becomes the dharamu of Guru Gobind Singh. The remainder of the Bachitar Nāṭak may be taken as further extending this idea: the balance effected in Guru Nanak’s composition is tilted towards dharam in Guru Gobind Singh’s, towards the righteous. From this point forward, Guru Gobind Singh will effectively attempt to transform rāj, or the dark, into dharam, the light, thus reasserting and re-establishing in the light of his Dasam Granth compositions (and, indeed, the output of his kavī darbar) the golden ages of Indic times past, the rām rajya of the Ramayana, and the glorious reign of the Pandavas after the Kurukshetar war noted in the denouement of the Mahabharata. This is perhaps why the Tenth Guru’s compositions meditate on these two epics throughout the Dasam Granth. But as both Dhavan and other scholars before her have noted, Guru Gobind Singh’s rāj will differ from those about which we read in this deep mythic Indic past, as even kings as great as Rama and Yudhishthira, and even gods such as Shiva and Brahma, the Guru cautions, were eventually bound by conceit, fell prey to pride, and lost their way. The lineage of Guru Gobind Singh, it is hoped, will not, or so the Bachitar Nāṭak intones.⁸⁴Close Could the claim about the embrace of kingship and sainthood be any more straightforward? And in a single line of poetry? Here, in the person and the actions of the Tenth Guru, the two are effortlessly and effectively managed.

That the spread of dharam about which the Tenth Guru speaks came to include the creation of the Khalsa, an extension of himself and the sacred, given the Guru Panth doctrine (and Mughal precedent), and so the transformation of his personal rule or rāj to the rule of the collective organization, seems quite clear.⁸⁵Close The inauguration of the Khalsa may also speak to the Tenth Guru’s perspicacity, aware as he was of the changing nature of the Mughal state in the last decade or so of Aurangzeb’s life, as perhaps a way to confront the boastful claims of his Pahari neighbours by investing authority in the collective Khalsa. For Sainapati and his audience, to return to Srī Gur-Sobhā, such an understanding of what Bhangu will later call ‘in every saddle a king’ was so commonplace as to be taken for granted and thus, I would like to offer, required no overt statement of purpose. One can assume that Sainapati’s Srī Gur-Sobhā was recited with these or similar understandings of the Bachitar Nāṭak in the background; put another anachronistic way, Sikh audiences appear to have been certainly aware of an early-modern intertextuality. The rule of the Guru in Sainapati thus becomes the rule of the Khalsa. Perhaps one may conjecture that here Guru Gobind Singh (assuming that Sainapati was a relatively accurate reporter), well aware of the potential for adharam when rāj is invested in the rule of one person—rulers such as, for example Bhim Chand, Fateh Shah, and indeed Aurangzeb—was relieving himself of this rare temptation by divesting himself of such rule and investing it into his Khalsa. Certainly, in the light of my previous scholarship, what this is reminiscent of in my understanding is the fate of the great Iranian king Khusrau, the son of Seyavash, two of the rare characters of the deep Islamicate past whom Guru Gobind Singh admires in his Persian compositions.⁸⁶Close Khusrau, in an episode demonstrating a rare humility, recognizes the potential for corruption and opts to abdicate his rule rather than continue as monarch and fall prey to vice. In a symbolic sense, the inauguration of the Khalsa by the Tenth Master, as we note in Srī Gur-Sobhā, may be interpreted as an abdication.

Yet again, let us be sure not to overstate our claims. Both the Bachitar Nāṭak and Srī Gur-Sobhā recount Sikh history in the traditional genres in which accounts of the past were generally conveyed in northern India (à la Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam).⁸⁷Close These are poetic accounts whose purposes, among many others, were not only to communicate events of the past but also to enthral audiences and engender within their members various rasas, or poetic sentiments, perhaps in the hope of enhancing their reverence for the Sikh Gurus, the collective Khalsa, and Sikhism itself—and, as Anne Murphy has pointed out in regard to Sainapati’s text, to work through the Panth’s relationship with the Guru given the circumstances during which the work was produced, the early eighteenth century.⁸⁸Close Through the cadence and sound of their poetic measures and their recitation, the experience of these works would likely have been a visceral one. Indeed, it still is, and at the risk of sounding naive, one may perhaps liken these narratives, these artefacts of the past, to the common son et lumière shows one attends at the Red Fort in Delhi or Gobindgarh Fort in Amritsar in modern-day India. These, too, convey the past and in a performative way that harks back to late Indo-Islamic-period texts such as the ones noted here.

The domain of sovereignty—which in this case is the equivalent of rule (rāj)—that is elaborated in the Bachitar Nāṭak and Srī Gur-Sobhā, vague as this sphere may be in the poems, does not require specific elaboration, given the vehicle in which it is conveyed. In both texts, this occupied, one may hazard a guess, the level of trope in much the same way that victory is tropic in the Ẓafar-nāmah, which snatches a symbolic triumph out of the jaws of what was surely a military defeat. Eighteenth-century Sikhs who were the Tenth Guru’s contemporaries could most assuredly believe that the Tenth Sikh Master was sovereign as both divine Guru and temporal king of the world (and thus in the possession of supreme authority throughout the world), an understanding that likely inspired Khalsa Sikhs for generations afterwards, as we may discern in texts such as the apocryphal Sarabloh Granth (uday asat sāmudr prayantan abichal rāj milayo surpur ko, ‘The Khalsa was given a rule [which would forever be most] adamant, [from land] to sea, from the point that the sun rises to that at which it sets’),⁸⁹Close but this did not mean that one could disregard the Mughal state or its functionaries at the level of the everyday. Brute reality would certainly intervene, as it did in Anandpur in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and during the Banda and post-Banda periods of Sikh history, constantly reminding Sikhs and all Punjabis alike of ‘the Mughal dynasty’s centrality to order in everyday life and thence its authority to rule’.⁹⁰Close

The idea of rule in the Bachitar Nāṭak does move well into the worldly, thus emphasizing the tension between the ideal of mystical renunciation and the pursuit of temporal power that often occupied the imaginations of successive Mughal emperors and their courtiers—Guru Gobind Singh does, in fact, distinguish the dunīpatti, or the ‘protector of the world’, the profane domain of the emperor, from that of the dīnśāh or the king of religion⁹¹Close—and is interpreted in later periods as attempts to contest the claims to monarchy embodied within the Mughal emperor, as well as ultimately to transfer that worldly sovereignty or supreme authority to the Guru and the Khalsa themselves. Later Sikh tradition, for example, will emphasize the relationship between horses and the Sikh Gurus, such as the sixth, Guru Hargobind, and his grandson Guru Gobind Singh, knowing full well the strong associations horses and horsemanship possessed with warfare, rule, and power (links well established in the various cultures along the Silk Road thousands of years before the Sikh Gurus)⁹²Close—but such understandings tend to ignore the context in which the Tenth Guru is operating in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (and pay little heed to the writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh), highlighting desires that have animated Sikhs since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and do so even today. Indeed, by the time of Koer Singh’s gur-bilās, the mid-eighteenth century, ‘there are clearly state-oriented articulations of the meaning of sovereignty’.⁹³Close Certainly, Koer Singh’s description of the euphoria Sikhs experience after their victory at the Battle of Bhangani, their further territorial ambitions in its light, and the Tenth Guru’s request for patience in regard to these aspirations makes the claim to statist sovereignty quite unequivocally.⁹⁴Close

The simple fact is that the Tenth Guru’s implicit and explicit criticism of the emperor and present-day rule that we find peppered throughout the works attributed to him, most notably in the Ẓafar-nāmah,⁹⁵Close as well as the occasional praise of the Indo-Timurids that we also witness in the Dasam Granth, must be tempered by the reality that when in the new Mughal emperor Bahadar Shah’s presence on 4 August 1707, the Tenth Guru, who was allowed to enter the imperial presence armed, offered the emperor the gift of one hundred gold coins as tribute.⁹⁶Close Although one can certainly argue that this was simply an act along the lines of courtly protocol and meant very little—Sikh tradition notes, for example, that Guru Gobind Singh entered the imperial presence only at the explicit request of Prince Muʿazzam/Bahadar Shah himself, who required the Guru’s help to secure his position as Mughal emperor against his brothers,⁹⁷Close and although this is a request that aligns quite well with the networks and relationships diligently fostered and tended by imperial claimants to the throne,⁹⁸Close there is no evidence to substantiate the claim of Bahadar Shah’s apparent request—it nevertheless indicates either submission to the Mughal darbar or a demonstration of loyalty or both. As Kumkum Chatterjee reminds us in her study of Bengal’s tradition of history writing, ‘Mughal chronicles concerned with issues of governance gave preeminent importance to this issue, for revenue or tribute symbolized loyalty to a political superior and denoted the basic resource without which a political system could not function’.⁹⁹Close At the very least, in the Tenth Guru’s case, the gift of tribute appears to reveal a recognition of the legitimate sovereignty of the Indo-Timurid line, which it is worth reiterating is the only form of rule with which all the Sikh Gurus were materially familiar (Guru Nanak is, of course, the exception in this regard, born as he was during the period of the Lodi dynasty).

This is a (perhaps token) recognition, incidentally, which is conspicuously absent in later Sikh accounts detailing the meeting between the emperor and the Guru, but it is noted in Mughal chronicles.¹⁰⁰Close Let me hasten to add that I say ‘token’ in parentheses in light of the fact that, as far as I am aware, there is no explicit admission of fealty to the Mughal crown in any of the writings attributed to the Tenth Guru or the poets of his darbar, a point that later Sikh tradition has implicitly argued as resistive to Mughal authority. It is quite clear, moreover, that Guru Gobind Singh never met the emperor Aurangzeb but only the latter’s son. Tradition claims that this latter meeting took place even earlier than during the period of the Mughal succession crisis of 1707–8, just a few months after Bahadar Shah (then Prince Muʿazzam) was released from house arrest by his father, Aurangzeb, in 1695, an incarceration that began in 1687. That he entered the presence of the emperor armed is likely indicative of his pre-eminent status.

Such a deficiency notwithstanding, in the end, it appears most likely that Guru Gobind Singh sought the intercession of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the Tenth Master’s attempts to regain Anandpur, out of which he had been cast by a combined Mughal-Pahari force in late 1705 through (for lack of a better word) diplomacy—and this diplomacy, as we know from the Tenth Guru’s hukam-name, was successful, since he writes to the sangat of Dhaul in late 1707 to soon expect his return to Anandpur/Makhowal.¹⁰¹Close The apparent success of the Tenth Guru’s venture in securing the intervention of the emperor Aurangzeb and afterwards that of his successor Bahadar Shah (a success we my infer from Mughal sources) is itself indicative of my claim that, and to put it quite bluntly, Guru Gobind Singh had faith in the Mughal emperor, in him and his office, and in the Mughal darbar as a dispenser of justice, fairness, and equitability (the Tenth Guru alludes to these characteristics in his Ẓafar-nāmah, for instance, although he also points to their lack), despite the Tenth Guru’s past experience with, and later Sikh memories of, the empire and its denizens. And both of these attitudes towards the Mughal darbar and its occupants could be expressed simultaneously (such as in the Ẓafar-nāmah) within a single court, indeed, within a single individual, and were not particularly atypical of the period during which the Tenth Guru lived, as we can see, for example, in the tenuous relations between Mughal emperors and their Rajput courtiers.¹⁰²Close

It is worth noting that the values noted above, of justice and fairness and so on, were the bedrock of Mughal ideology, principles of much-valued ak hlāqī (moral and political wisdom), and some of the most important characteristics for which an emperor’s rule was praised or condemned, often far more significant than merely military might. These values were regularly revisited in Persian chronicles and in the writings of the many Muslim and non-Muslim scribes and poets of the Mughal court, such as the notable Hindu munshi of Aurangzeb’s reign, Nik Rai, as well as the famed Chandar Bhan Brahman whose Chahār Chaman (Four Gardens) offers us a rare glimpse into both the ideological underpinnings of the courts of both Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb and the daily routines and dispositions of the Mughal emperors.¹⁰³Close Men like Chandar Bhan and other non-Muslim courtly agents saw Mughal rulers such as Aurangzeb and Shah Jahan not as Muslim emperors but rather (and to paraphrase Rajiv Kinra) as emperors who just happened to be Muslim.¹⁰⁴Close It is no surprise in this light that Mughal chronicles strongly imply that Aurangzeb had agreed to meet with Guru Gobind Singh—likely to discuss the issue of the Tenth Master’s patrimony, the emperor here apparently exercising a concern with the Guru’s petition well in line with those similar concerns employed by Aurangzeb’s predecessors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan—but that the former’s death had prevented such a meeting from taking place. As recent studies of Mughal imperium have demonstrated, contemporary evidence makes clear that all of Akbar’s successors, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb alike, continued to pursue their great ancestor’s policy of ṣulḥulkul, which here may be translated as ‘hospitality and civility to all’, a phrase that collapses the ak hlāqī values noted earlier in a single statement; and the Mughal pursuit of this policy well into the eighteenth century is much contrary to the scathing caricatures of Aurangzeb, Bahadar Shah, and Farrukh Siyar that later Sikh tradition has erected¹⁰⁵Close alongside the blistering conclusions of the last three great Mughal emperors in general South Asian historiography.¹⁰⁶Close After all, many contemporary Mughal records are rather effusive in their praise of the emperor ʿAlamgir, especially committed, it appears, to aligning him nearly perfectly with the aforementioned values of Mughal civility. Indeed, even later regional accounts in some instances situate Aurangzeb within a Hindu mythical sphere, comparing him to none other than the Hindu god Ram.¹⁰⁷Close

Of course, the vast majority of these records are written by interested parties and must be read carefully and critically.¹⁰⁸Close Furthermore, our understanding of the Mughal practice of ṣulḥulkul should in no way suggest that Aurangzeb and his ancestors and successors did not ignore the policy of civility to all in regard to rebels and even more significantly towards their own family, especially their brothers and other apparent contenders for the throne, relations between whom were always deadly after the accession of Prince Salim/Jahangir.¹⁰⁹Close Nor does this general claim to ṣulḥulkul indicate that the Mughal emperors did not occasionally intervene in Sikh affairs, sometimes harshly, and contribute to the enduring image of the last great Mughal emperor as a ruthless zealot, an image whose cultivation began in his lifetime (as Kulke makes clear)¹¹⁰Close but was nearly reified twenty years after his death, in February–March 1707 (and which continues in India’s current political climate, despite mounting evidence that supplies a far more nuanced image of the last great Mughal emperor).¹¹¹Close In Aurangzeb’s case, there can be little doubt, for example, that Guru Tegh Bahadar was executed, if not under the direct orders of the emperor, then certainly with the emperor’s approval, put to death as he was in front of the imperial edifice of the Lal Qila, or Red Fort, in Shahjahanabad, an enduring symbol of the military and cultural might of the Mughal empire.¹¹²Close This act, in and of itself, alone excuses the general antipathy of Sikh authors towards ʿAlamgir, a hostility that saw a number of Sikhs react harshly, one in particular hurling two bricks at the emperor as he made his way back from the Jama Masjid to the Red Fort in Shahjahanabad (Delhi) in October 1676.¹¹³Close But the Tenth Guru was clearly aware of such Mughal values of civility, and Sikh tradition itself suggests this in a number of ways, including the Tenth Master’s familiarity with the conventions of Persian mystical poetry and the focus it places on the figure of the Guru’s most esteemed Persian poet, Nand Lal Goya, whose narrative places him, prior to his arrival in Anandpur, at the Mughal court as the principal munshi of none other than Aurangzeb’s elder brother and despised rival, Dara Shikoh.¹¹⁴Close Indeed, the Tenth Guru’s use of diplomacy and his understanding of its benefits are one of the most important lessons we acknowledge in his Ẓafar-nāmah, some of the more essential morals of which are drawn and adapted from (and indeed echo) Shaikh Saʿdi’s Persian masterpieces, the Būstan and Gulistān, two of the more prominent texts that contributed to a Mughal self-fashioning. Here, in the final years of Guru Gobind Singh, we see those lessons put to the test.¹¹⁵Close

The future arrival at Anandpur that we read of in the Tenth Guru’s hukam-name noted earlier would never occur, of course, since Guru Gobind Singh would accompany Bahadar Shah in his bid for Mughal rule and would die almost a year to the day after issuing these written instructions. But it nevertheless demonstrates an important point: it was in the domain of Anandpur to which the Tenth Guru’s earthly sovereignty or rule was limited, and he sought to secure and safeguard this patrimony by appealing to the Mughal emperor. It suggests, of course, a territorial sovereignty and a link perhaps between Sikh identity and territory.¹¹⁶Close The sovereignty he exercised here, though obviously a sub-imperial one (and thus, at least in part, political),¹¹⁷Close was therefore contingent on the recognition of the Mughal state. It was, moreover, a sovereignty along lines that were neither modern nor therefore statist but certainly aligned with activities and values we tend to associate with the Mughal darbar, the Mughal state, and the Mughal emperor. Although the Tenth Guru may not have exercised the same type of authoritarian assertions as those instituted by the Mughals, such as k hutbah o sikkah or the issuing of proclamations and the casting of coins, the Guru hunted, sought advice from his courtiers and likely nearby rulers, patronized poets and littérateurs, wrote his own poetry, was sensitive to the concerns of those who did not identify as Sikh, gave donations to shrines, collected monies, engaged in diplomatic correspondence, dispensed justice, fought with both neighbours and Mughal forces when the situation demanded this type of diplomacy, was sometimes the object of Mughal scrutiny as Aurangzeb’s 1693 and 1700 orders makes clear, was at other times the scrutinizer as the episode with Rostam Khan the khānzādā (‘son of the home’, in this case, the son of Dilawar Khan) demonstrates (Bachitar Nāṭak 10), and also built five forts around Anandpur for the protection of the town, its residents, and his Khalsa.¹¹⁸Close These acts may be understood as the culmination of the knowledge on statecraft that the Tenth Guru had fostered since the early days of the Anandpur darbar.¹¹⁹Close

These are courtly characteristics of the darbar that tradition supplements with claims that the Guru also treated everyone with fairness, equanimity, and generosity. And it was a limited sovereignty, as I have stated in other places, that, despite the Tenth Guru’s statements in Bachitar Nāṭak 8, struggled to accommodate dharam with rāj, a delicate balancing act that witnessed Guru Gobind Singh sometimes siding with Pahari rajas and at other times against them, sometimes censuring Mughal rulers and at others praising the heirs of Timur.¹²⁰Close It appears highly likely, moreover, that dharam occasionally lost out to the more brute contingencies of the day that rāj demanded, as we note in the multiple raids led by Sikhs in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening years of the eighteenth against villages such as, for example, Alsun (which was ransacked after the Battle of Nadaun)¹²¹Close in the Pahari kingdoms adjoining Anandpur, something about which Srī Gur-Sobhā also speaks, though in a highly sanitized manner.¹²²Close Perhaps it is for reasons such as these that Guru Gobind Singh evokes a sense of humility in Bachitar Nāṭak 8:1, noting his acceptance of rāj; after all, he is spinning the wheel of dharam as best he can, ‘according to his own ability’, a faculty that is all too human, and such words as these taken in the context of the entire Dasam Granth suggest that the Guru is fully aware of the fact that, despite one’s best efforts, exigencies sometimes see rulers and their subjects appropriate means that may fall out of dharam’s immediate purview, once again ‘when all other means have failed’,¹²³Close an understanding, for example, that may have served as the subject of one of the parchīān attributed to the Udasi Sikh Sewa Das.¹²⁴Close Ultimately, although rāj may well be God’s gift, as Guru Nanak implies in Japji 7, Guru Gobind Singh was well aware of the fact that it is nevertheless humanity that attempts to align that gift with the godly through its own agency.

At the same time, however, Guru Gobind Singh’s wilāyat (to borrow a term from Sufi understandings) or Sikh spiritual territory, if one will,¹²⁵Close was not restricted to Anandpur, as it was believed to have spread throughout the world by virtue of the light of guruship, which after 1699 was held to shine brightly in the Khalsa, in the gathering of any five Khalsa Sikhs, in any Panj Piare. With Khalsa Sikhs spread all over northern India during the time (as we can note from the sangats to which the Ninth and Tenth Gurus’ hukam-name had been dispatched), it may well have appeared to Sainapati and others that the Guru’s spiritual power, inherent in the idea of wilāyat, was worldwide. Sainapati lovingly extends this spiritual domain into the temporal, placing words to this effect in the mouths of the Tenth Guru’s own antagonists.¹²⁶Close A close reading of the Bachitar Nāṭak suggests that when the Tenth Guru speaks of rāj, however, of worldly rule in the context of this work, he is talking of his present in the situation of his patrimony Anandpur or areas nearby such as Paonta, and not rāj karegā khālsā, or the future rule of the Khalsa, a powerful but altogether vague statement that meant many things to many Khalsa Sikhs when those words were first articulated and then enshrined in the work of Bhai Nand Lal. Those implicit references to the Guru’s wilāyat, however, the territory in which his spiritual power is entrenched and over which it extends, is unlimited, as this is the very light of the divine who and which is present everywhere. This type of ‘spiritual’ rāj is a variety that also must have animated the thoughts of both Guru Gobind Singh and later Sikh poets, as it is perhaps most notably articulated in the famous var of Rais Satta and Balwand, whose ‘coronation ode’ in rāmkalī metre is particularly well known:

ਨਾਨਕ ਰਾਜੁ ਚਲਾਇਆ ਸਚੁ ਕੋਟੁ ਸਤਾਣੀ ਨੀਵ ਦੈ ।¹²⁷Close

Nanak set the kingdom in motion. He built its fortress, truth, on strong foundations.

There seems little doubt that despite the apparently proclaimed spiritual base of such power, it was nevertheless looked upon suspiciously by the Guru’s neighbours, reflecting the rather ambivalent relationship that existed between pirs and padishahs or sultans and shaikhs, especially when it was likely understood that those pirs were attempting to become padishahs, and this probably played a role in heightening Pahari concerns with the activities of the Tenth Guru and his Khalsa after its inauguration which one may gather also possessed this otherworldly/worldly authority.¹²⁸Close These concerns were not altogether new ones, of course, as Aurangzeb’s order of 1693 ce to prohibit large gatherings of Sikhs at Anandpur and his subsequent order of April 1700 to chastise ‘Gobind son of Tegh Bahadar’ indicate, the former an order that was likely prompted by hill-raja petitions to the provincial authority and imperial court.¹²⁹Close It is later writers who will often conflate this Anandpur-specific temporal sovereignty with those of spiritual dominion (both forms of rāj) to pursue their own understandings and aspirations for future Khalsa Sikh rule, an interpretation for which they can be forgiven in the light of the Tenth Guru’s epithet as Master of Past, Present, and Future.

I noted earlier that the joti of the divine is transferred into the Khalsa through the Tenth Guru’s amrit and subsequently emanates throughout the world whenever five Khalsa Sikhs gather. But this statement assumes something that the earliest Sikh sources prepared after the inauguration of the Khalsa fail to disclose: how many Sikhs actually volunteered on that fabled first day of Baisakhi? Let us turn now to that question and in so doing focus more specifically on what tradition underscores as the foundation of the Khalsa, the Panj Piare.