Five Centuries in Ten Entries
The fastest complete tour of the story · 10 stops
One entry per turning point, from a birth in 1469 to a border crossing in 2019. If you read nothing else, read these ten — the whole shape of Sikh history is here.
1469 — where everything begins.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji, founder of the Sikh faith, was born in 1469 in the village of Rai Bhoi Ki Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in his honour. The year is settled; the month has been argued over for a century.
The first Sikh community: devotion, honest work, and the shared kitchen.
Guru Nanak established the first Sikh community at Kartarpur on the Ravi, where devotion, honest work and the shared kitchen became a daily practice — and where, before his death in 1539, he named a successor and handed on a book.
1604 — the scripture compiled and enthroned at Amritsar.
Guru Arjan compiled the volume known as the Kartarpur Pothi and installed it in the newly completed Harmandir Sahib in 1604 — the decisive act in a process of scripture-making that began long before him and continued long after.
1699 — identity, initiation, and a community under no lord but its own.
On Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa, initiated the first Panj Pyare, took initiation from them in turn, and gave the community a name, a discipline and an identity it has kept ever since.
The first Sikh state and the price paid for it.
After an eight-month siege and starvation, Banda Singh Bahadur and some seven hundred companions were taken to Delhi and executed in public batches through the spring of 1716 — an event two English merchants happened to witness and describe.
1799 — the rise of the Sikh Empire.
A nineteen-year-old Sukerchakia chief took Lahore and turned a confederacy of twelve misls into a single kingdom — one whose coins and seal still refused to carry his name.
1849 — the empire falls; colonial rule begins.
Ten years after Ranjit Singh's death, the East India Company annexed the Punjab, deposed a child Maharaja and took the Koh-i-Noor — ending Sikh sovereignty and beginning a colonial relationship that reshaped Sikh identity.
1919 — Amritsar under empire, a wound in living memory.
On Vaisakhi 1919, British Indian Army troops fired without warning on a penned-in crowd at Amritsar for around ten minutes. The commanding officer said afterwards that he had meant to produce a moral effect.
1947 — the homeland divided; the great migration.
A line drawn through the Punjab in five weeks divided the Sikh homeland in two, uprooted the entire Sikh population of the west, and left the birthplace of the faith on the far side of a closed border.
2019 — a rare door opened across the border, back to where it began.
Seventy-two years after Partition put it out of reach, a visa-free corridor opened to the shrine where Guru Nanak died — four kilometres of road that Sikhs had been able to see across the fields the entire time.