Person · seventh Sikh Guru
Guru Har Rai
The seventh Guru, who took the gaddi in March 1644 at fourteen and kept his grandfather’s army without using it. He treated Dārā Shikoh — sending medicinal plants when Shāh Jahān asked, despite what the Mughals had done to the Sikhs — and when Aurangzeb summoned him in 1660 over that support he sent his elder son Rām Rai, who altered a verse of scripture to please the emperor and was disinherited for it.
- Date
- 1630 - 1661 CE
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Asked why he helped a Mughal prince whose forebears had persecuted the Gurus, he is said to have answered that if a man plucks flowers with one hand and gives them away with the other, both hands keep the fragrance. He hunted without killing, keeping the animals at Kiratpur, and planted the Naulakha Bagh there; the anniversary of his accession, 14 March, is now kept as Sikh Environment Day.
Little survives from his own time. He left no writings that can be securely attributed to him, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lives of him contradict each other.
Connections (5)
- Life routeGurdwara Amb Sāhib, Mohali
The shrine marks his meeting with Bhai Kuram, a Labana trader, at the village of Lambian. Har Rai’s guruship was spent moving through this country between Kiratpur and the Shivalik states rather than fighting in it, and the gurdwaras that remember him — this one, and the places along that road — commemorate encounters and cures instead of battles, which is the whole character of the seventh Guru against the sixth and the tenth on either side of him.
- Power passed toGuru Hargobind
Guru Hargobind raised an army, built the Akal Takht and fought the Mughals four times; he then passed the guruship over his own surviving son Dhir Mal to a fourteen-year-old grandson, with instructions to keep the army and avoid the war. Har Rai did exactly that for seventeen years, which is why the seventh guruship looks empty next to the sixth and is not.
- Power passed toGuru Tegh Bahadur
Har Rai disinherited his elder son Rām Rai for altering a line of scripture to please Aurangzeb, and named his five-year-old younger son Har Krishan instead; Har Krishan died of smallpox at eight, and the succession passed to Tegh Bahādur, Hargobind’s youngest son, at Bakala. Aurangzeb had Tegh Bahādur executed at Delhi in 1675, so the accommodation Har Rai kept lasted one generation past him.
- Life routeBaba Bakala
Bakala is where the succession Har Rai set in motion came to rest. After Har Krishan died at Delhi in 1664 having named no one but “Bābā Bakāle”, the Sikhs went to the village and found Tegh Bahādur among several claimants there — the gurdwara marks the recognition. It is the one place that shows what the seventh Guru’s disinheriting of his elder son eventually cost and settled.
- PatronageAmritsar
Guru Har Rai maintained Amritsar as an important Sikh centre during his guruship, though he spent much of his time at Kiratpur Sahib. The institutions and sacred spaces established by earlier Gurus continued to sustain Amritsar’s importance within the Sikh community and its network of congregations.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Guru Har Rai”; the standard Sikh historical literature.
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