The Day the Master Knelt to His Students

By the end of the seventeenth century, the Sikhs had learned a hard lesson about faith.

Twice now, their Gurus had been put to death for it. The fifth Guru, Arjan Dev, had been tortured to death. The ninth, Guru Tegh Bahadur, had been beheaded in Delhi for defending the freedom of people who were not even Sikhs. Gentleness and prayer, it turned out, were no shield against a sword.

The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, was Tegh Bahadur’s son. He had been only nine years old when his father chose to die. And when he grew up, he set out to make sure his people would never again stand defenceless.

What he did, on a spring morning in 1699, is one of the most dramatic and moving founding stories of any community anywhere. This is how the Khalsa was born.

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A faith under siege

The world Guru Gobind Singh inherited was a dangerous one.

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had turned the power of the state against those who would not conform, and the Sikhs were among the hunted. The wound was fresh and personal: it was Aurangzeb who had ordered the killing of the Guru’s own father in 1675.

There was rot on the inside too. The community had come to rely on regional deputies, the masands, to collect offerings and manage local congregations, and many of them had grown corrupt and grasping, standing between the Guru and his people.

Gobind Singh looked at the danger outside and the decay within and decided that half-measures would not do. His people did not just need reform. They needed to be remade.

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The drawn sword

He chose the great spring festival of Vaisakhi, in 1699, and the town of Anandpur Sahib. He sent out a call, and a huge crowd, said to be tens of thousands strong, gathered to see their Guru.

What they saw frightened them.

Guru Gobind Singh came before them holding a bare sword, and he asked a terrible question. Was there a Sikh among them, he said, who loved his faith enough to give his head for it, here and now?

A stunned silence fell. This was not what anyone had come for. Then one man, a shopkeeper named Daya Ram, rose and offered himself. The Guru led him into a tent. There was the sound of a blow, and the Guru stepped back out with his sword dripping red.

He asked for a second head. And a third. And a fourth, and a fifth.

Five times a man walked into that tent, and five times the Guru came out alone, his sword wet. The crowd believed it was watching its bravest men die, one by one.

The five who rose

Then the tent opened, and all five men walked out alive.

By the account Sikhs have kept, the Guru had been testing them, not killing them, measuring whether they truly meant their devotion. What mattered was that five men had been willing to die, and that willingness became the foundation of everything that followed.

He called them the Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved Ones. And who they were was itself a message.

A shopkeeper, a farmer, a water-carrier, a tailor and a barber, drawn from five distant corners of India and from castes both high and low, became the first of a new people.

In an age obsessed with caste and birth, the Guru had taken an ordinary tradesman and a so-called low-caste labourer and set them side by side as equals, the founding members of his order. That was not an accident. It was the whole point.

Sweetness and steel

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Next came a new ceremony, one still at the heart of Sikh life today.

The Guru prepared amrit, a sacred nectar, by stirring plain water with a double-edged sword while the sacred hymns were recited over it. As he did so, his wife, Mata Sahib Kaur, added sugar crystals to the water. For that act she is honoured as the Mother of the Khalsa.

The meaning was beautiful and deliberate. The steel of the sword would make his followers strong and brave. The sweetness of the sugar would keep them gentle and kind. They were to be, in the phrase the Sikhs use, sant-sipahi, saint-soldiers: fierce in the defence of the weak, but never cruel.

He stirred sugar into water with a sword, so that his people would be as strong as steel and as sweet in heart as honey.

The Guru who knelt

And then Guru Gobind Singh did something that no master before him had ever done.

Having given the amrit to his five, he stood before them, knelt, and asked the Panj Pyare to initiate him. The Guru asked his own disciples to make him one of them.

The teacher bowed to his students. The master asked to be made a member of the very order he had just created.

It was an astonishing act of humility, and it built something into the Khalsa at its very first moment. No one, not even the Guru himself, stood above the discipline he asked of others. The leader would be bound by the same vows as the newest member. From that day he was no longer simply Gobind Rai. He was Guru Gobind Singh, at once the master and the disciple.

One bowl, one name

The revolution did not stop there.

Every one of them drank the amrit from the same single bowl. In a society where a higher-caste person would not take water touched by a lower-caste one, this was a quiet earthquake. Untouchability, in that bowl, simply ceased to exist.

The Guru gave the men a new shared name, Singh, meaning lion, and the women the name Kaur, meaning princess. The old family names that announced a person’s caste were set aside. A member of the Khalsa was to be known by their character, not their birth.

He also gave them a visible identity, the five articles of faith often called the five Ks: uncut hair, a comb, a steel bracelet, a simple cotton garment, and a sword. A Sikh of the Khalsa would carry their faith openly on their body, unable and unwilling to hide it, even at times when hiding might have been safer.

What was really born that day

It is easy to describe the founding of the Khalsa as the moment the Sikhs became warriors, and that is true. After a long history as a peaceful devotional path, the community now had the will and the discipline to defend itself, and in the generations that followed the Khalsa would stand against the Mughal Empire and the invaders who came after it.

But that is only half of what happened at Anandpur.

The other half was quieter and, in its way, more radical. On that day a Guru knelt to his own students, a shopkeeper and a barber were made equal to a king, and men and women shed the names that had ranked them from birth. Courage was joined to compassion, and dignity was handed to people who had been told all their lives that they had none.

The two martyred Gurus had shown that a faith could be worth dying for. On Vaisakhi in 1699, their successor showed his people how to live for it, upright and unafraid. That is why, every spring, the festival is still kept with such joy. It is the birthday of a people who decided they would bow to no one but God.

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Sources & References

• Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Gobind Singh”) — the tenth Guru and the founding of the Khalsa in 1699.
• Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (Sikh history) — the Vaisakhi gathering, the Panj Pyare, the Amrit ceremony, and the meaning of the Khalsa.
• BBC Religions (Sikhism: the Five Ks) — the five articles of faith and what each of them represents.
• Rupnagar district administration (Anandpur Sahib) — the town in Punjab where the Khalsa was founded.