The Evacuation of Anandpur

The siege

Anandpur had been fortified since its founding, and by 1704 it was under blockade by the hill rajas and Mughal forces from Sirhind and Lahore. The siege ran long. The accounts describe the defenders reduced to eating bark and leaves, and some Sikhs leaving — including the forty who signed a bedava, a disclaimer of the Guru, and went home to the Malwa.^1,5

Terms were eventually offered: leave the fort and you will not be touched. The undertaking was sworn on the Qur’an, and according to the Sikh accounts, on the emperor’s own authority.^1,4

The Sirsa

The column left in December 1704, at night, in winter. It was attacked before it had gone far, at the crossing of the flooded Sirsa river.

What happened there is the hinge of the whole episode. In the confusion and the water the party broke into three. Guru Gobind Singh went on with his two elder sons, Ajit Singh and Jujhar Singh, and a small body of Sikhs, towards Chamkaur. His mother Mata Gujri and his two youngest sons, Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh — roughly nine and seven — were separated from him and taken to Sirhind. Much of the Guru’s manuscript library went into the river.^1,5

Within about a week, all four of his sons and his mother were dead.

The oath

The Sikh tradition treats the breaking of that oath as the central fact, and it is not only tradition. The Guru said so himself, in writing, to the man responsible.

The Zafarnama — the letter in Persian verse he sent to Aurangzeb the following year — devotes fifteen of its hundred and eleven verses to the broken promise. Its argument is not a plea and not a lament; it is a charge, laid by a man who had lost everything to a sworn undertaking, against an emperor who claimed to rule by religious law.⁴

On the dates

The days given for this fortnight vary between accounts, and the variation is real rather than sloppy: it comes from the conversion between the Bikrami calendar the sources use and the Common Era, and the question was reopened by the Nanakshahi calendar reform in the twentieth century. December 1704 is secure. The individual days are argued over, and this site gives months rather than pretending otherwise.