Martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev Ji

The emperor’s own words

This is one of the few events in early Sikh history recorded by the man who ordered it. Jahangir wrote in his memoir that at Goindval there lived a Hindu named Arjan, dressed dar libās-i pīrī o shaikhī — in the garments of spirituality and holiness — who had drawn in simple-minded Hindus and even some ignorant Muslims, and whom they called Guru. The emperor called the Guru’s teaching a dokān-i bātil, a false shop or fraudulent trade, and the Guru himself a mardak-i majhūl, an inconsequential little fellow. He had long meant to close the shop or bring the man into Islam.^1,2

The occasion came with the rebellion of his son Khusrau. Fleeing north from Agra, the prince stopped at the Guru’s establishment; the Guru marked his forehead with the qashqah, the auspicious tilak. Jahangir treated this as proof and ordered the Guru’s property confiscated and the man handed over for siyāsat o yāsā.^1,2

Two outside witnesses

Two non-Sikh sources describe what followed, and neither is a Sikh account of martyrdom.

Father Jerome Xavier, a Jesuit at the Mughal court, wrote to his Provincial at Goa from Lahore on 25 September 1606 — within months of the event, and the earliest European mention of the Sikhs. He reports that “the Goru”, a figure “looked upon as a saint” and comparable in standing to the Pope, congratulated the fleeing prince and set the mark on his forehead; that the emperor had him arrested; that Hindus interceded and he was permitted to buy his freedom for a hundred thousand crusados, with a wealthy Hindu standing surety; and that when the money did not appear, that man subjected the Guru “to every kind of ill-usage”, which brought on his death.^3,4

The Persian Dabistan-i-Mazahib, written about forty years later by an author in direct contact with Sikhs, says the Guru was fined for having prayed for Khusrau’s welfare, could not pay, and was bound and held in the open outside Lahore, where he died of the sun, the summer heat, and injuries inflicted by the collectors.^3,5

Sikh tradition remembers the death in more terrible detail — seated on a heated iron plate with burning sand poured over him, the Sufi Mian Mir offering to intervene and being refused, the body given to the Ravi. Gurdwara Dera Sahib beside Lahore Fort marks the site.

What historians argue about

How to translate the order. Siyāsat o yāsā can be read strictly as punishment under Chingissid custom, or simply as “executed”. Ganda Singh rendered it “put to death with tortures”, and that reading became standard among Sikhs. Pashaura Singh goes further: he identifies the yāsā with the Mongol törä, under which persons of royal or honoured rank were killed without shedding blood — which would explain, and lend plausibility to, a death by heat and torture rather than the sword.^2,3 Fenech disputes this, on the ground that it requires Jahangir to have regarded the Guru as honoured or genuinely spiritual, when his memoir says the opposite in as many words; Fenech prefers Wheeler Thackston’s plainer reading.²

Who was to blame. From the eighteenth century a narrative takes hold in which the villain is Chandu Shah, a Khatri official at the Mughal court, who misled the emperor, paid the fine himself, took possession of the Guru, and tortured him to death in revenge for a rejected marriage proposal. This appears first in writing in the Mahima Prakash Vartak of 1741 and dominates Sikh sources until the nineteenth century — and it has the effect of absolving Jahangir almost entirely.³ Pashaura Singh raises the possibility that the Mughal state had reason to encourage it; Fenech notes the difficulty, which is that Jahangir stated his own order in a memoir written to be circulated as a gift among princes and family, not concealed.^2,3 Kesar Singh Chhibbar’s Bansavalinama of 1776 gives yet another version, in which the Guru is bound and thrown into the Ravi.⁷

Whether it was understood as martyrdom at the time. This is Fenech’s contribution and it is uncomfortable. No contemporary or near-contemporary source presents the death as martyrdom, resistance or defiance. That reading does not appear until the mid-eighteenth century, roughly a century and a half later; the term shahīd is not applied to Guru Arjan until well into the nineteenth. The death is not mentioned in the Bachitar Natak or in the Khalsa literature of the eighteenth century.^2,6 Fenech’s explanation is that Guru Arjan had no martyrologist — where Guru Tegh Bahadur had one — and that earlier Sikh writers saw him as a victim of the state rather than as its defier.²

McLeod, characteristically, reduced the whole thing to one sentence: the Guru “had in some manner incurred the displeasure of the Mughal authorities and in 1606 had died while in custody.”² Many Sikhs read that as a denial, and the wound has not healed. Fenech, McLeod’s own student, defends the reasoning while conceding the phrasing was needlessly bare — Jahangir’s memoir tells us exactly what the “some manner” was.²

Why it happened when it did

The charge concerned Khusrau, but the context was Ramdaspur. By 1606 the Guru presided over a town with its own economy, its own court, its own bards singing of him in royal metaphor, and — since 1604 — its own scripture. An imperial officer had already made an attempt on the establishment there.³ Khusrau’s rebellion did not create the problem; it supplied the occasion.

The turn to self-defence

The consequence was immediate and permanent. His son and successor, Guru Hargobind, girded two swords — miri and piri, temporal and spiritual authority — and raised the Akal Takht facing the Harmandir. Whatever seventeenth-century Sikhs called this death, the community’s posture after it was not the same as before.^8,9