Guru Har Krishan Ji
1656–1664 · Eighth Sikh Guru
Who became Guru as a child and, remembered for his service to the sick during a Delhi epidemic, died of smallpox at the age of seven or eight.
The child Guru
Installed in 1661 at the age of five — his elder brother Ram Rai having been barred for tampering with scripture — Har Krishan held the Guruship for barely three years. The tradition dwells not on his age but on his bearing in it: congregations came to test a child and left having met a Guru.1
Service in the epidemic
Summoned to Delhi under Aurangzeb’s watchful policy, the Guru lodged at the bungalow of Raja Jai Singh — the site of Gurdwara Bangla Sahib today — as epidemic smallpox and cholera swept the city. The accounts remember him moving among the sick of every community with water and care, the well of the house held healing ever since; its sarovar still draws the ailing. Tending the afflicted, he contracted smallpox himself.1
“Baba Bakale”
Dying in 1664, aged about eight, he answered the question of succession with two words — Baba Bakale: the next Guru would be found at the village of Bakala. There the community identified his great-uncle, the meditative Tegh Bahadur, as ninth Guru. The youngest of the Gurus is remembered in the closing line of the daily Ardas, which invokes the sight of him as the cure of all sorrows.1
Before you go
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