When one man defied an Empire: Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom
BLURB
Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 was India’s first great stand for freedom of conscience. His defence of the persecuted Kashmiri Pandits anticipated the principles now enshrined in global human-rights charters. Three and a half centuries later, his message remains central to India’s pluralist ethos.
Long before constitutional guarantees or modern rights charters, India witnessed a defining assertion of freedom of conscience. It came not from a monarch, parliament, or court, but from the scaffold at Delhi’s Chandni Chowk on 24 November 1675, when Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, chose martyrdom to defend the right of Hindus to practice their faith. Born in 1621 in Amritsar, Guru Tegh Bahadur was a saint, poet, warrior, and thinker whose 115 hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib emphasise detachment, fearlessness, compassion, and the sovereignty of the human soul. His life and writings prepared a society to confront intolerance with moral courage.
Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom, often remembered for its religious greatness, also deserves recognition as a foundational chapter in India’s political evolution. It was the earliest and clearest assertion in Indian history that the conscience of an individual is sovereign, that even the mightiest empire cannot command belief, and that the defence of faith includes the defence of another’s freedom to worship differently. It was a rebellion not of armies, but of spirit, not for territory but for moral principle, and in many ways it marked the moral beginning of India’s long journey towards freedom of faith, pluralism, and civic dignity.
To appreciate the magnitude of the Guru’s stand, one must recall the climate of Aurangzeb’s reign, which began in 1658 and grew increasingly doctrinaire. In the 1670s, when his campaign of forced conversions spread terror across parts of the Mughal Empire, the blow fell most brutally on the Kashmiri Pandits. Their temples were desecrated, their religious practices prohibited, and their leaders threatened with death unless they embraced Islam. Desperate and distraught, a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits travelled to Anandpur Sahib to seek Guru Tegh Bahadur’s intervention. They approached him not as the chief of a sect but as a moral guardian of the vulnerable. They saw in him someone who could protect dharma in the highest sense — the right to faith, to worship, and to live with dignity. That they turned to a Sikh Guru rather than to a Hindu king or a rival army is itself telling. It reflected the moral authority the Guru commanded across communities.
By this time, Sikhism had a distinct and firmly rooted identity, built on equality, service, and the rejection of dogma and caste barriers. Yet Guru Tegh Bahadur’s vision transcended the boundaries of his own tradition. He responded to the Pandits not as the representative of a community defending its own, but as the custodian of a universal principle. He affirmed that faith cannot be coerced and conscience cannot be subjugated, and that the protection of another’s belief is as sacred a duty as the protection of one’s own.
When the Guru observed that religious persecution unleashed by Aurangzeb could be confronted only through sacrifice by an exalted soul, his nine-year-old son, Gobind Rai, later Guru Gobind Singh, answered with startling clarity that there was no spiritually exalted soul greater than his father. Guru Tegh Bahadur understood instantly that the sacrifice had to be his. He did not negotiate, raise an army, or propose retaliation. Instead, he offered himself as the solitary challenger to imperial coercion. This willingness to embrace martyrdom for the religious freedom of others is unique in world history. It was an act of absolute moral courage, for it sought no victory except the triumph of a principle.
The Guru was arrested at Agra, imprisoned at Delhi’s Red Fort, tortured, and repeatedly asked to embrace Islam. He refused every inducement and threat. When persuasion failed, the Mughal court killed his Sikh companions, one by one, to break his resolve. Inspired by the Guru’s leadership and true to his teachings, his Sikhs cast away fear and embraced death with unshakable faith. Bhai Mati Das was sawn alive; Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton, smeared with oil, and burned; and Bhai Dayal Das was boiled to death in a cauldron. None renounced their faith or abandoned their Guru. Their courage elevated martyrdom from religious testimony to moral protest, asserting the dignity of human conscience against the weight of imperial power.
The Guru was mercilessly beheaded on 24 November 1675 in full public gaze, where Gurudwara Shishganj is located in Delhi today. What followed the beheading was no less heroic. Bhai Jaita, later known as Bhai Jiwan Singh, carried the Guru’s severed head from Delhi to Anandpur Sahib, evading capture with remarkable ingenuity. Lakhhi Shah Lubana, a humble cart driver, placed the Guru’s body in his cart, took it home, and set his own house on fire to perform the cremation, since open cremation was forbidden. These men came from different castes and backgrounds — Arora, Brahmin, Khatri, Lubana — yet in that moment of crisis, they stood united in devotion and purpose. They demonstrated that in the Guru’s path, caste dissolves entirely, and the humblest individual can rise to unforgettable greatness.
The Guru’s martyrdom did not end with his death. It sowed the seeds of spiritual resistance that later flowered into the Khalsa under Guru Gobind Singh. The Khalsa was not merely a religious brotherhood but a disciplined community committed to justice, equality, fearlessness, and service. Over the following centuries, this spirit shaped Sikh history and, ultimately, the history of India. Banda Singh Bahadur dismantled the Mughal regime in Sirhind and asserted the dignity of peasants. The Sikh misls challenged Mughal and Afghan dominance. Maharaja Ranjit Singh built a plural, inclusive kingdom admired even by his adversaries. The Singh Sabha reformers revived the Panth’s intellectual and social foundations. Kartar Singh Sarabha, Bhagat Singh, and Udham Singh carried the torch of freedom into the modern age. Sikh soldiers serving India after independence inherited the same legacy of courage, discipline, and sacrifice. The moral stamina that sustained India’s freedom, integrity, and civic courage can trace its origin to the moment when Guru Tegh Bahadur offered his life at Chandni Chowk.
The principles for which he died were so universal that they resonate well beyond the borders of India. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirm that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion — a right Guru Tegh Bahadur defended with his life nearly three centuries before the world formally recognised it. His stand anticipates, and in many ways prefigures, the modern global consensus on the sanctity of conscience. That a seventeenth-century Indian spiritual leader articulated this principle at the cost of his life is a tribute both to him and to the civilisational ethos he embodied.
As India marks 350 years of this epochal martyrdom, the question is not only how we remember Guru Tegh Bahadur, but how we inherit him. His legacy urges us to uphold truth without fear, protect the vulnerable without hesitation, and guard the sovereignty of conscience without compromise. It challenges us to build a society where freedom of belief is not merely tolerated but cherished as a civilizational value. His martyrdom remains the highest expression of India’s pluralistic ethos — that the true measure of a nation lies in how it protects the moral freedom of its people.
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2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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- Guru Tegh Bahadur, the Harbinger of freedom of conscience in India - November 26, 2025
