Bhai Mani Singh

The custodian

Bhai Mani Singh served Guru Gobind Singh and was among the Sikhs of Anandpur. After 1708, with the Guruship vested in the scripture and the Panth under proscription, Mata Sundari sent him from Delhi to take charge of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, whose management was then contested.

He held it for roughly three decades — the stretch in which the community had no living Guru, no state, and no safety. His work was scriptural and organisational: teaching, preparing copies of the Guru Granth Sahib, training the men who would carry that work on, Baba Deep Singh among them.^1,2,3

1738

The Mughal governor at Lahore, Zakariya Khan, had made assembly at Amritsar effectively impossible. Bhai Mani Singh applied for permission to hold the Diwali gathering there, and it was granted against a payment of five thousand rupees — a sum to be raised from the offerings the gathering itself would bring in.

He then learned that troops were being positioned to fall on the assembly once it had convened. He sent word out warning Sikhs not to come. They did not come, the offerings were not made, and the fee could not be paid.

He was arrested for the debt. The accounts hold that he was offered his life in exchange for conversion, refused, and was executed at Lahore by dismemberment, joint by joint.^1,2,3

Why the shape of it is remembered

The mechanism is the part Sikh memory holds onto. The permission was real, the fee was real, and the trap was set inside both — so the charge he died on was non-payment of a licence fee for a gathering the state had itself made impossible to hold.

Eight years later the same administration pursued Sikh bands into the marshes at Kahnuwan. Ten years after that the Harmandir Sahib he had kept was blown up, and the man who marched on Amritsar to answer for it was one of his own students.^1,2,3