The Execution of the Younger Sahibzade

The tower

Separated from the Guru at the Sirsa, Mata Gujri and her two youngest grandsons — Zorawar Singh, about nine, and Fateh Singh, about seven — were sheltered and then betrayed to the authorities. They were taken to Sirhind and held by the provincial governor, Wazir Khan, in an open tower through the December cold.^1,3

The offer

The boys were brought before Wazir Khan and offered their lives in exchange for conversion to Islam. The accounts describe this being put to them repeatedly across successive days, with inducements attached.

They refused. They were executed — bricked into a wall, in the tradition’s memory of it, and there is some variation between accounts on the manner. Mata Gujri, then about eighty, died in the tower on the same day.^1,3

The site is now the gurdwara at Fatehgarh Sahib, and the days are marked every December as the Shaheedi Jor Mela.

What is disputed, and what is not

The dialogue attributed to the boys before Wazir Khan comes from the Sikh chronicle tradition rather than from the Mughal record, and it has been elaborated over three centuries of retelling. It should be read as the tradition’s account of what the refusal meant, not as a transcript.

That two children of that age were held, pressed to convert, and killed in Mughal custody at Sirhind in December 1704 is not in that category. It is attested across Sikh and non-Sikh sources alike, and no serious account disputes it.²

Todar Mal’s ground

One detail from the aftermath is worth keeping because of what it says about the conditions. Diwan Todar Mal, a local banker, sought to cremate the bodies and had to buy the ground to do it. He was made to pay by covering the plot with gold coins laid out edge-upward — the most expensive land transaction, by area, in the history of the region, as the story is usually told.

Sirhind, six years later

In 1710 Banda Singh Bahadur broke Wazir Khan’s army at Chappar Chiri and took Sirhind. Wazir Khan was killed in the battle.

The campaign that founded the first Sikh state began as an answer to what happened in that tower, and the district today is called Fatehgarh Sahib — the fort of victory — after the younger of the two boys.