Place · takht town · India

Anandpur Sāhib

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Sikh tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

31.239, 76.503

Connections (12)

• Takht set withHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)

  Anandpur is where Guru Gobind Singh inaugurated the Khalsa in 1699, calling for five heads and initiating the five who offered them; the Akal Takht at Amritsar, built by Guru Hargobind in 1606, is the seat of temporal authority facing the Harmandir's spiritual one. The five Takhts span Punjab, Bihar and the Deccan, a directional set comparable in structure to the char dham, and decisions taken at them bind the community.

• Same eventSisganj Sahib, Old Delhi

  Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded at Chandni Chowk in 1675 for refusing to convert and for defending the Kashmiri Pandits' right not to, and his severed head was carried north by a disciple to his nine-year-old son at Anandpur, while his body was cremated in a house set alight to conceal it. Both sites are now gurdwaras. The execution is the direct cause of the Khalsa's founding at Anandpur twenty-four years later.

• Same eventFatehgarh Sahib

  After Anandpur was abandoned under siege in December 1705, Guru Gobind Singh's two younger sons, aged about six and nine, were captured with their grandmother and bricked alive into a wall at Sirhind on refusing to convert. Fatehgarh Sahib marks the spot. The episode is commemorated annually in the bitter cold of late December, and it is the emotional centre of the Sikh account of that winter.

• Guru Gobind lifePaonta Sahib, Sirmaur

  Guru Gobind Singh spent about four years at Paonta Sahib on the Yamuna, where he kept a literary court of fifty-two poets and where much of the Dasam Granth was composed, before returning to Anandpur. The two towns represent the two halves of his career — the Yamuna years of writing and the Anandpur years of the Khalsa and the wars — and they are less than a hundred and fifty kilometres apart.

• Guru Tegh Bahadur lifeBaba Bakala

  Guru Tegh Bahadur was living quietly at Baba Bakala when Makhan Shah Lubana, a trader who had vowed an offering after surviving a storm, tested the claimants and found him, shouting guru ladho re — I have found the Guru. He then founded Anandpur in the Shivalik foothills, outside easy Mughal reach, and it became the seat from which the ninth and tenth Gurus operated.

• Monastic foundationGuru Gobind Singh

  The Khalsa was instituted at Anandpur on Baisākhi 1699. Gobind Singh asked for five who would give their heads, took them one at a time into a tent, and brought them out alive; then he took initiation from the five he had made, which is the move nothing in the Indian tradition prepares you for.

• Monastic foundationGuru Tegh Bahadur

  Tegh Bahadur founded Anandpur in 1665 on land bought from the raja of Bilaspur, in the Shivalik foothills beyond easy Mughal reach. Thirty-four years later it was where the Khalsa was made, and for a decade after that it was besieged by the hill rajas and the empire together. Anandpur was abandoned under siege in December 1704, the family scattered at the Sarsa river crossing, and his two youngest grandsons were bricked up alive at Sirhind days later.

• CampaignBanda Singh Bahadur

  Banda's campaign of 1709 to 1715 ran out of the Shivalik country around Anandpur, and its land settlement is the part usually left out: for a few years the peasant cultivator in the eastern Punjab held his land outright. He was captured at Gurdas Nangal and executed at Delhi in 1716.

• CampaignMuktsar Sahib, Sri Muktsar Sahib

  Anandpur was abandoned under siege in December 1704 and the family scattered; the last stand of the forty who had deserted and returned was at Muktsar in 1705. Gobind Singh tore up their disclaimer over their bodies, which is where the town's name comes from. Gobind Singh wrote the Zafarnāmā, his verse letter to Aurangzeb, in the months after these defeats, and it is not a capitulation but an indictment in Persian couplets.

• Shrine within cityHola Mohalla

  Anandpur is where the Khalsa was instituted in 1699 and Hola Mohalla is what Guru Gobind Singh did with the festival that followed it. In 1701 he divided the new order in two and set them to fight a mock battle for a standard, turning Holi into a muster — holā rather than holī, the masculine form, which is the whole argument in one grammatical change. The gatka, the horsemanship and the closing march to Kiratpur are still that review.

• Companion in the same setGurdwara Amb Sāhib, Mohali

  Anandpur was founded by the ninth Guru on land bought from the Raja of Bilaspur, a few years after Har Rai died at Kiratpur just downriver; the tenth Guru then made it the Khalsa’s birthplace. Amb Sāhib sits at the other end of the same Shivalik foothill corridor, and the two mark what changed: a shrine to a meeting, and a town built to hold a standing community.

• CampaignFateh Burj, Chappar Chiri

  Banda Singh Bahādur was commissioned by Guru Gobind Singh at Nanded in 1708 and sent north into Punjab, where the grievance was Sirhind: Wazīr Khān had ordered the walling-up of the tenth Guru’s younger sons after Anandpur was abandoned. The field at Chappar Chiri in 1710 is where that account was settled, and the tower is a modern monument to it rather than a contemporary one.

On these journeys

• Five Takhts
• Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Sources

Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib, Anandpur

• Wikipedia