Guru Arjan Dev Ji: The Scripture and the First Martyrdom

Guru Arjan Dev Ji was born in 1563 and served as the fifth Sikh Guru from 1581 until 1606. He was the youngest son of Guru Ram Das Ji, the fourth Guru, and he carried forward the work begun by the earlier Gurus. Kavi Santokh Singh, in his Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth, gives a long and devoted account of his life within the wider story of the Gurus.

The guruship of Guru Arjan Dev Ji came during a time of growth for the Sikh community. The town of Amritsar was taking shape around its sacred pool, and the number of Sikhs was rising across the Punjab. Macauliffe describes how the fifth Guru organized the community and welcomed people from many backgrounds (Macauliffe 1909).

His leadership joined together building, writing, and care for the community. The chapters that follow look at each of these in turn. The historian J. S. Grewal places this guruship at a key point in the early history of the Sikhs (Grewal 1998).

Guru Arjan Dev Ji completed the ਹਰਿਮੰਦਰ ਸਾਹਿਬ (Harmandir Sahib) at ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਸਰ (Amritsar). This shrine, later known as the Golden Temple, stands in the middle of a sacred pool. Macauliffe records the care taken in its building and the joy of the community when it was finished (Macauliffe 1909).

One feature of the shrine carries deep meaning. It was given doors on all four sides. This open design was a sign that people of every direction and every background were welcome. The teaching of the Gurus was for all, not for one group alone.

The shrine sits low, reached by steps that go down rather than up. This too holds meaning: a worshipper bows and enters with humility. The pool of ਅਮ੍ਰਿਤ (amrit) around it gives the city of Amritsar its name. Kavi Santokh Singh praises this work as a lasting gift to the Sikh people (Santokh Singh, Suraj Granth).

With the building complete, the Guru turned to filling it with the holy word. The next chapters look at his own writing and then at the great scripture he gathered.

Among the writings of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the ਸੁਖਮਨੀ ਸਾਹਿਬ (Sukhmani Sahib) holds a loved place. The name means the hymn that brings peace to the mind. It is a long composition, read daily by many Sikhs, and it speaks of trust in the Divine and calm within the heart.

The ਬਾਣੀ (bani) of the fifth Guru is gentle and clear. It teaches that remembering the Divine name brings comfort in times of trouble. Out of reverence, this course does not reproduce long passages of the sacred text; readers are encouraged to study it from a complete and respectful edition.

Macauliffe gives a careful account of the fifth Guru's writings and their themes (Macauliffe 1909). The scholar Pashaura Singh has studied the place of these compositions within the wider scripture and the history of their gathering (Pashaura Singh 2000).

The greatest work of Guru Arjan Dev Ji was the compiling of the ਆਦਿ ਗ੍ਰੰਥ (Adi Granth) in 1604 at Amritsar. He gathered the bani of the four Gurus before him, added his own large body of writing, and included verses of chosen saints whose words agreed with the Gurus' teaching. The work of writing the volume by hand was done by Bhai Gurdas under the Guru's direction.

When the scripture was complete, it was installed in the Harmandir Sahib. Baba Buddha was made the first ਗ੍ਰੰਥੀ (Granthi), the custodian and reader of the holy book. In this way the shrine and the scripture came together at the heart of the community.

Pashaura Singh has studied the making of this scripture in close detail, looking at its sources and its order (Pashaura Singh 2000). The compilation gave the Sikhs a single, agreed body of sacred text. Grewal notes how important this step was for the unity and identity of the community (Grewal 1998).

In 1606, under the Mughal emperor Jahangir, Guru Arjan Dev Ji gave his life for his faith. He became the first Sikh ਸ਼ਹੀਦ (shaheed), or martyr. This event marks a turning point in Sikh history and is remembered each year with deep respect.

Grewal places this martyrdom within the changing relations between the growing Sikh community and the Mughal state (Grewal 1998). Macauliffe gives a moving account of the Guru's last days and his calm in the face of suffering (Macauliffe 1909).

The martyrdom showed the Sikhs that faith might call for the highest sacrifice. It also shaped the path of the community in the years that followed, as later Gurus carried the memory of this example forward. The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies discusses how this event came to be understood in Sikh tradition (Singh and Fenech 2014).

The legacy of Guru Arjan Dev Ji is wide. He completed the Harmandir Sahib, gave the Sikhs their scripture, composed loved bani including Sukhmani Sahib, and set the example of the first martyrdom. His own writing is the largest single contribution within Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji.

To study this period, scholars draw on several kinds of sources. The traditional account comes from Kavi Santokh Singh's Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth, a devoted retelling of the Gurus' lives. The early modern study in English is Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion (Macauliffe 1909). For the scripture itself, the close study by Pashaura Singh is widely used (Pashaura Singh 2000). For the broad history, Grewal's The Sikhs of the Punjab remains a standard work (Grewal 1998), and the Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies gathers recent scholarship (Singh and Fenech 2014).