Guru Har Rai Ji

The gentle Guru under arms

Grandson of Guru Hargobind, Har Rai became seventh Guru in 1644 at fourteen. He kept the military establishment his grandfather had built — some two thousand two hundred horsemen, by the traditional count — yet fought no wars; the tradition remembers him instead for tenderness so scrupulous he grieved a flower broken by his robe. At Kiratpur he maintained a dispensary of herbal medicine whose rarities, the chronicles record, once supplied a cure for the ailing son of the emperor Shah Jahan himself.¹

Dara Shikoh and the emperor’s summons

In the Mughal war of succession the Guru gave blessing — and, by some accounts, safe passage — to the mystic prince Dara Shikoh as he fled Aurangzeb’s armies. The victorious Aurangzeb summoned the Guru to Delhi to answer for it; he sent his elder son Ram Rai in his place.¹

The word is inviolable

At court, Ram Rai altered a word of Guru Nanak’s scripture to soothe the emperor — and his father disowned him for it, barring him from the succession. The lesson outweighed the diplomacy: the bani is not to be bent, not even before an emperor, not even by a Guru’s son. Before his death in 1661 Guru Har Rai installed his younger son, Har Krishan, a child of five.¹