- Lived:
- 27 October 1670, Rajouri in the Poonch hills (Jammu) → an ascetic's monastery at Nanded on the Godāvarī → the Punjab in revolt, 1709–1715 → Delhi, where he was tortured to death in June 1716
- Field:
- war and state-building — the Khālsā's first commander after the line of Gurus ended; conqueror of Sirhind; and, for five astonishing years, a land reformer
- The Big Idea:
- Sent north with five arrows and a mandate, he broke the Mughal province that had murdered the Guru's children, struck coins in the Gurus' name instead of his own — and then did what no Indian ruler on record had done: abolished the landlords outright and made the peasants owners of the fields they ploughed.
- In their words:
- "The cauldron and the sword, victory and unfailing aid — obtained from Nānak and Guru Gobind Singh." (the Persian legend of his official seal; not one word of it about himself)
- If you remember one thing:
- He was an ascetic who called himself the Guru's bandā — slave — and governed like it: sovereignty vested in a Book and a community, the fields handed to the men who worked them, and at the end, offered his life for his faith, he chose the pincers over the recantation — as did the seven-hundred-odd prisoners marched to Delhi with him, of whom the record itself says not one apostatized.