Anandpur Sāhib — Khālsā founding

Anandpur Sāhib

The seat of the Khalsa on the Sutlej

Anandpur Sāhib, in Rupnagar district of Punjab, stands on the right bank of the Sutlej at the foot of the Shivaliks, and it is the town associated with the founding of the Khalsa and with a long series of engagements between the Mughal state and the tenth Sikh Guru. Guru Tegh Bahadur made it his seat in the later 1660s — the conventional date for the settlement of Anandpur is 1665 — and the town grew around his darbār and the two maṭh precincts that developed there, Baolī Sāhib and Piārā (Piyara) Sāhib, the latter associated with Guru Tegh Bahadur's marriage.

Bhai Nawab Bachan Singh Ji and Guru Gobind Singh, with a congregation that is remembered as numbering in the thousands, proclaimed the Khālsā Vachan Ambodh at Anandpur in 1701 at the instance of the Guru. That is the event the town is remembered for. Around it stand the other establishments of the town: the Gurdwārā Pañch Sāhib cluster — Baolī, Piārā, Qāsur, Kalāntarpur and Rāmgāṛhiā Sāhib — and the Takht Sri Anandpur Sāhib, one of the five Takhts of the Khālsā. The jathedarbashi and the lines of succession at this takht are matters of Punjabi institutional history with their own complications, including the long relationship of the takht with the royal house of Kapurthala; that history needs a Punjabi source and is not summarised here.

The military history of the region between 1688 and 1704 — the engagements conventionally remembered as the nine battles of Guru Gobind Singh in and around Anandpur, against Mughal forces and their local allies — is part of the wider Kalsa narrative and remains politically and emotionally live in Punjab. Any published summary must keep the Sikh and Mughal state perspectives distinguishable; the sources named below are mostly Sikh-tradition histories and should be read as such.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Guru Granth Sahib (Ādi Granth) and the Dasam Granth — the primary Sikh textual basis, at work level.
• Pritam Singh, The Sikh Religion — for the khālsā, the takhts and Guru Gobind Singh's institutions.
• J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab — for Anandpur's history; he is the standard modern authority in English and has not been consulted page by page here.
• Inherited and unverified: the frontmatter's 1984 reference for this site, and the enumeration of the nine battles, which differ between tellings and should be taken from a named Punjabi or Sikh-history source.