ਜਿਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਸਿੰਘਾਂ ਸਿੰਘਣੀਆਂ ਨੇ ਧਰਮ ਹੇਤ ਸੀਸ ਦਿੱਤੇ, ਬੰਦ ਬੰਦ ਕਟਾਏ, ਖੋਪਰੀਆਂ ਲੁਹਾਈਆਂ, ਚਰਖੜੀਆਂ ਤੇ ਚੜ੍ਹੇ, ਆਰਿਆਂ ਨਾਲ ਚਿਰਾਏ ਗਏ… ਧਰਮ ਨਹੀਂ ਹਾਰਿਆ।

Those Singhs and Singhniyan who gave their heads for Dharam; who were cut limb from limb, scalped, broken on spiked wheels, sawn asunder — but did not forsake their faith.

Every Sikh, twice a day, stands with folded hands and says these words in Ardas. Before we ask Vahiguru for anything — health, success, protection — we first remember them. That ordering is not an accident. It is the Panth’s way of saying: everything we have, we have because they stood the watch. This post is about who they were, what shaheedi actually means in Sikhi, and what the phrase shaheedi pehra — the martyr’s watch — asks of us today.

If you’re new to this history, keep the family tree open beside this as you read: Das Patshahian — the journey of the jot.

What shaheedi means — and what it doesn’t

The word shaheed comes from the Arabic shahid — a witness. A shaheed is not primarily someone who dies; a shaheed is someone who testifies. Their life, and if demanded their death, becomes evidence of a truth: that there is something in a human being no empire can touch.

This matters because Sikh shaheedi is often misread through other lenses. It is not victimhood — the shaheeds of our history were not passive casualties but people who were offered every exit and declined. It is not fanaticism — nearly every Sikh shaheedi you will read about below was suffered in defence of someone’s freedom, often someone of another faith entirely. And it is not despair — the accounts consistently describe shaheeds going to their deaths in chardi kala, rising spirits, reciting bani.

The foundation was laid before any sword was raised. Guru Nanak Dev Ji set the price of the path in Salok Varan Te Vadhik:

ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਉ॥ ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ॥

If you desire to play this game of love with Me, then step onto My path with your head on your palm.

The old bardic (dhadhi) tradition of the Panth describes the Sikh warrior’s ethos as a wedding party — a true wedding party is one that weds death and looks at fear with disdain. The shaheed does not lose their life; they give it, the way a gift is given at a wedding — joyfully, to a Beloved. That is why the tradition around martyrdom in Sikhi is soaked in the language of love (prem), not rage.

The first shaheed: Guru Arjan Dev Ji, 1606

The shaheedi tradition begins at the very top of the house — with the Guru himself. Guru Arjan Dev Ji, fifth Nanak, compiler of the Adi Granth and builder of Harmandir Sahib, was arrested under emperor Jahangir, who wrote openly in his memoir (the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri) that the Guru’s growing influence over Hindus and Muslims alike should be brought to an end. In the summer heat of Lahore, the Guru was seated on a burning iron plate while scalding sand was poured over his body. Tradition records that Mian Mir, the Sufi saint who loved the Guru, begged to intervene. The Guru declined, and gave the Panth its permanent grammar for suffering:

ਤੇਰਾ ਕੀਆ ਮੀਠਾ ਲਾਗੈ॥ ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਪਦਾਰਥੁ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਮਾਂਗੈ॥

Sweet is Your will; Nanak asks only for the treasure of Your Naam.

He is remembered as ਸ਼ਹੀਦਾਂ ਦੇ ਸਿਰਤਾਜ — the Crown of Martyrs. And his shaheedi changed the Panth structurally, not just emotionally: his son, Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji, took the gaddi wearing two swords — miri and piri, temporal and spiritual sovereignty — and raised the Akal Takht facing Harmandir Sahib. The lesson institutionalised in 1606 was that a people who will not defend the truth will keep being asked to die for it on someone else’s terms. The sant would now also be a sipahi.

Hind di Chadar: Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, 1675

Sixty-nine years later the ninth Nanak repeated the offering — and this time the shaheedi was for someone else’s religion. When Kashmiri Pandits, facing forced conversion under Aurangzeb, came to Anandpur for protection, Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji told them to inform the emperor that if the Guru of the Sikhs could be converted, they would all convert. In Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, in November 1675, he was beheaded after refusing Islam and refusing to perform miracles to save himself.

Before the Guru’s own shaheedi, three of his Sikhs were tortured to death in front of him, each given the chance to convert and each refusing: Bhai Mati Das was sawn in two while reciting Japji Sahib; Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton and burnt alive; Bhai Dayala was boiled in a cauldron. Their steadiness is called sidak — faith that does not bend under any pressure. Guru Gobind Singh Ji later wrote of his father in Bachittar Natak:

ਧਰਮ ਹੇਤ ਸਾਕਾ ਜਿਨਿ ਕੀਆ॥ ਸੀਸੁ ਦੀਆ ਪਰੁ ਸਿਰਰੁ ਨ ਦੀਆ॥

For the sake of Dharam he performed this great act — he gave his head, but not his resolve.

There is no parallel I know of anywhere in world history: the head of one faith accepting execution to defend the right of another faith to exist. That is why he is called Hind di Chadar — the shield of Hind.

1699: shaheedi becomes the Khalsa’s inheritance

On Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh Ji stood before the sangat with a drawn sword and asked for a head. The five who rose one by one — Bhai Daya Singh, Bhai Dharam Singh, Bhai Himmat Singh, Bhai Mohkam Singh, Bhai Sahib Singh — became the Panj Piare, the first Khalsa. Note what the initiation rite was: a rehearsal of shaheedi. To take khande di pahul is to have already given your head; everything after is living on the Guru’s time.

Kavi Kankan, a court poet of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, captures in Das Gur Katha how deeply sacrifice was woven into the Khalsa’s founding: “ਸਵਾ ਲਾਖ ਮਰ ਚੂਕੈ ਜਬ ਤਬ ਉਤਰੈ ਸਭ ਦੂਖ — until 125,000 are martyred, all pains will not be relieved” (v. 212). The Khalsa was born already knowing what would be asked of it. Elsewhere Kankan has the Guru’s Sikhs told: “ਲੜਿ ਲੜਿ ਭੇੜ ਵਿਖਾਇ ਖਸਮ ਰੀਝਾਂਵਣੇ — fighting and fighting, you will prove yourself to your Master… on that day the bards sing the odes to the martyrs” (vv. 69–70).

Sarbans daani: the Guru who gave his whole family

Within six years of 1699, Guru Gobind Singh Ji had given everything a man can give. In December 1704, after the evacuation of Anandpur and the chaos at the Sarsa river, the Guru’s family was torn apart. At Chamkaur, forty Singhs held a mud fort against an army; Sahibzada Ajit Singh, seventeen, and Sahibzada Jujhar Singh, thirteen, each asked their father’s permission to go into the field, and the Guru — as father — sent them, and watched them fall. Three of the original Panj Piare — Bhai Himmat Singh, Bhai Mohkam Singh, Bhai Sahib Singh — attained shaheedi in the same battle. Bhai Sangat Singh, who resembled the Guru, wore his kalgi so the Guru could leave on the Panth’s order and continue the struggle.

The younger Sahibzade, Zorawar Singh (eight) and Fateh Singh (five), were betrayed, taken to Sirhind with their grandmother Mata Gujri Ji, and bricked alive in a wall when they refused, repeatedly and cheerfully, to abandon Sikhi. Mata Gujri Ji — wife of one shaheed Guru, mother of the tenth Guru, grandmother of four shaheed Sahibzade — passed in the cold tower (Thanda Burj) upon hearing the news. She is honoured as the first great shaheed singhni of the Khalsa era, and in a real sense the trainer of the youngest martyrs in our history: it was her katha in the cold tower those last nights that kept two small boys firmer than empires.

The Guru’s response to losing all four sons and his mother is the measure of the man. He wrote to Aurangzeb in the Zafarnama — the Epistle of Victory, written as the defeated party by every worldly measure — and told him plainly that treachery had won nothing, and famously consoled the Panth: what does it matter if four have gone, when the Khalsa lives? He is remembered as sarbans daani — the giver of his entire lineage.

The Singhniyan of the Guru’s darbar

Sikh shaheedi has never been a men’s tradition with women in the audience. The same December, when forty Majha Sikhs deserted Anandpur and returned home, it was a woman — Mai Bhago (Mata Bhag Kaur) — who shamed them, re-armed them, and led them back. At Khidrana (now Muktsar) in 1705 she fought at their head; all forty fell and were pardoned and blessed by the Guru as the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated, as Bhai Maha Singh breathed his last in the Guru’s lap. Mai Bhago survived her wounds and served as the Guru’s bodyguard — the first woman in Punjab’s recorded history to lead troops in battle.

After Chamkaur, when the Mughal forces left the bodies of the Sahibzade and the Singhs to rot as a warning, a sixteen-year-old from a nearby village — remembered as Bibi Harsharan Kaur (Sharan Kaur) — slipped past the pickets at night, gathered the bodies of the shaheeds one by one, wiped their faces, and lit their funeral pyre. Discovered by soldiers, she was killed at that same pyre — the last shaheed of Chamkaur, and the reason the shaheeds of Chamkaur received their final rites at all.

The 18th century: the darkest watch

After Guru Gobind Singh Ji passed the Guruship to Guru Granth Sahib Ji and the Guru Khalsa Panth at Nanded in 1708, the Khalsa entered its longest night. Baba Banda Singh Bahadur shook the Mughal empire, took Sirhind, and struck the first Khalsa coin; captured in 1715 after the long siege of Gurdas Nangal, he was paraded to Delhi in an iron cage and executed in 1716 with unspeakable cruelty — his young son killed before his eyes — alongside roughly 740 Singhs, executed a hundred a day. Contemporary observers, including English East India Company witnesses, recorded their astonishment: the prisoners competed to be killed first, and not one accepted the offered pardon in exchange for conversion.

Then came the era when the state put a price on Sikh heads — when, as the chroniclers put it, the Khalsa’s address was the horse’s saddle and the jungle. From this period the Ardas draws its catalogue of tortures, because each one happened to someone with a name. Bhai Mani Singh (1734), the great scholar-scribe who served three Gurus and compiled Dasam Bani, was cut joint by joint (band band kataye) at Lahore. Bhai Bota Singh and Bhai Garja Singh (1739), on hearing it announced that the Sikhs were extinct, set up a toll post on the royal highway near Sarai Nur-ud-din — a two-man declaration of Khalsa sovereignty — and fell fighting a detachment sent against them. Bhai Taru Singh (1745), a young farmer who fed the Khalsa from his own fields, was offered his life if he cut his kesh; he offered his scalp instead, and it was cut from his head. Bhai Subeg Singh and his young son Bhai Shahbaz Singh (1745) were broken on the spiked wheel, the charkhari, the father made to watch the son. Baba Deep Singh (1757), seventy-five-year-old scholar of the Damdami Taksal and head of the Shaheedan Misl, vowed to answer the desecration of Harmandir Sahib and, by the tradition of the Panth, fought on after his fatal wound until he fell in the parikarma of Sri Amritsar.

Twice the attempt was made to solve the “Sikh problem” by extermination. The Chhota Ghallughara (1746) killed perhaps seven to ten thousand in the swamps of Kahnuwan. The Vadda Ghallughara (February 1762) killed twenty-five to thirty thousand — by many estimates a third to half of the entire Panth — in a single day near Kup Rahira, most of them the vaheer: elderly, women, children. The Khalsa’s answer defines us: within months they had defeated their attackers at Sirhind, and within four years they held Lahore.

And in the middle of this century stand the women whom every Ardas names. Under Mir Mannu, governor of Lahore from 1748 to 1753, Sikh women and children were seized and imprisoned when their men could not be caught. The Singhniyan were each made to grind sava mann — over thirty kilos — of grain a day; when they still refused conversion, their infants were cut to pieces before them, and the pieces hung in garlands around their mothers’ necks. Not one woman abandoned Sikhi. The Panth’s grim, proud proverb from those years survives: Mannu sadi datri, asi Mannu de soye; jyon jyon Mannu vaddhda, asi doon savaye hoye — “Mannu is our sickle and we his crop; the more he cuts us, the more we grow.”

What “shaheedi pehra” means

Pehra means a watch — the sentry’s shift, standing guard while others sleep. The phrase shaheedi pehra carries at least three layers, and all three are live in the Panth’s self-understanding.

First, it names the watch the shaheeds themselves stood. Every generation from 1606 to 1762 — and beyond, into the Akali morchas, the two World Wars, 1947, and the traumas of the twentieth century — some Sikhs drew the night shift of history, and stood it, so that the Panth would still exist at dawn. The eighteenth-century Singhs and Singhniyan did not know the Sikh empire was coming. They kept the faith with no evidence it would ever be rewarded. That is what makes it faith.

Second, in the traditional and Nihang understanding, the shaheeds still keep the pehra. In the older worldview of the dals, shaheed Singhs are not gone; they remain present as a guarding host over the Panth, invoked in Ardas and remembered at shaheedi asthans. Whatever one’s theology, the practice encodes something true: a community that daily names its martyrs is a community they still protect, because their example patrols its conscience.

Third — and this is the part that concerns us — the pehra rotates. A watch is something you are assigned. The Ardas is not a memorial service; it is a shift-change briefing. When we recite jinna singhan singhniyan ne dharam het sees ditte, the unstated second clause is: and now it’s your watch. For most of us the watch will never demand blood. It demands smaller, constant things: keeping kesh in a world that finds it inconvenient; standing up for someone else’s freedom of conscience the way the ninth Guru did, even when — especially when — they are not our own; refusing the daily conversions of comfort, careerism, and cowardice; teaching our children the names. The shaheeds paid the entry price of the Panth in full. The pehra is how we pay the maintenance.

Why their memory is structural, not sentimental

Notice what the institution of shaheedi does inside Sikhi. It makes the tradition unkillable by decapitation — the Guruship itself passed to Granth and Panth, so there is no single head to cut off. It sets the community’s moral floor extraordinarily high: a Panth whose daily prayer remembers women who would not convert while wearing garlands of their children’s bodies cannot easily be intimidated by lesser pressures. And it keeps Sikh identity anchored in giving rather than grievance: the Ardas names the tortures but ends in chardi kala and sarbat da bhala — rising spirits and the good of all. We remember the wound without becoming it.

That is the inheritance. The lineage artwork above is one small attempt to see it whole: one jot passing through ten forms, and around it, in every generation, the flames of those who kept the watch.

ਸ਼ਹੀਦਾਂ ਦੀ ਕਮਾਈ ਦਾ ਧਿਆਨ ਧਰ ਕੇ, ਬੋਲੋ ਜੀ ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ।

Sources and further reading

This post draws on Kavi Kankan’s Das Gur Katha (tr. Kamalroop Singh, 2024), the papers at kamalroop.com/papers, and the following: