MARTYRDOM AND THE EXECUTION OF GURU ARJAN IN EARLY SIKH SOURCES.

• Author: FENECH, LOUIS E.

Popular Sikh histories of today are united in their claim that the execution in 1606 of the fifth Sikh Master, Guru Arjan has always been understood as an heroic martyrdom. Yet the fact that this event is not mentioned either in the Bachitar Natak, the first Sikh text to allocate privileged space to martyrdom, nor in subsequent eighteenth-century Khalsa Sikh literature of the gur-bilas genre, makes such a claim very difficult to sustain. This paper turns a critical eye towards these sources and speculates as to how Sikhs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in fact understood Guru Arjan's demise.

Seva hari gur thim kurban [1]

To become a sacrifice for the sake of the Guru is the [true] service of God.

FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF contemporary Sikh scholars, the tradition of martyrdom (sahidi) in Sikhism begins with the execution of the fifth Sikh master, Guru Arjan, in 1606 A.D. According to Sikh tradition, the Guru incurred the displeasure of the Mughal emperor Jahangir by supporting the emperor's recalcitrant son Khusrau's claim to the throne, an act which saw Guru Arjan jailed, beaten, and subsequently fined. On his refusal to pay the fine the Guru was quickly executed in Lahore on Jahangir's orders. In popular Sikh historiography, the implications of Guru Arjan's claim to martyrdom are made obvious. Firstly, that Guru Arjan himself conceived of his imminent demise as that of an heroic martyr and, secondly, that the Sikhs of the fifth Guru's day likewise shared this understanding of his death. [2]

These are indeed important traditions, traditions that have helped shape the direction and destiny of the Sikh Panth during this last century. And although they lack the support of any explicit evidence in contemporary sources, there may nevertheless be available for them implicit reinforcement, derived from an investigation of the earliest manuscripts of the Adi Granth.

In just such an examination, Pashaura Singh has come to a conclusion significant for these traditions. He states that the inclusion of heroic ballads in the scripture begins not with the sixth Sikh Guru, Hargobind, as general Sikh tradition maintains, [3] but with Guru Arjan. This is, of course, a logical conclusion since, according to Sikh tradition, Guru Arjan was clearly the moving force behind the creation of a Sikh scripture. [4] Pashaura Singh notes in his analysis of these earliest manuscripts that, while compiling the Adi Granth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Guru Arjan recognized the high regard exhibited by the rural population of the Punjab for the heroic ballad (var) and himself selected the epic tunes (dhuni) of these ballads at the beginning of the vars in different rag sections of the Adi Granth. This process of appropriation, we are told, was undertaken in order to attract this rural audience, particularly those of Jat caste, to the Sikh faith. As our author makes clea r, however, the fifth Guru selected such dhunis "only for their musical directions, not for propagating the heroic stories behind them." [5] These are all debatable points, the last one in particular, since the values which were inscribed in the heroic stories the tunes carried would have probably become associated with the Sikh faith, a possibility that Guru Arjan, an exceptionally gifted compiler and poet, would not have overlooked. [6]

With Singh's illuminating evidence at hand one can well speculate that Guru Arjan appreciated these heroic values. He may have himself thus felt that both his self-conscious defiance of Mughal authority (if such actually occurred) and his imminent death were heroic acts, perhaps those of a martyr. It is entirely possible, finally, that his Sikhs also understood the fifth Master's actions in this way. Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, Sikh tradition has affirmed all of this as beyond doubt. Guru Arjan died the glorious death of the heroic martyr, and his son, in response to his father's ordeal, enjoined his Sikhs to bear arms to protect themselves and all those considered righteous.

Such an understanding of the fifth Guru's demise, however, clearly veers into the realm of conjecture for a number of reasons. Two of these reasons, in particular, were presented in one of my previous essays. I shall briefly summarize them here. [7] Firstly a meticulous analysis of contemporary and near-contemporary sources does not substantiate the claims of Sikh tradition. Such analysis, in other words, makes it clear that many scholars extrapolate far too much from these texts, filling in the numerous gaps in the narrative these sources supply with popular understandings forged in later centuries. And, secondly, I seriously doubt that martyrdom as a concept was present in the Sikh tradition during the early to mid-seventeenth century, inasmuch as an investigation of the many hymns in the Adi Granth used by traditional Sikh scholars to support the presence of this conceptual system are always taken out of context and misconstrued. It appears to me that the relatively stable political and social atmosphere o f sixteenth-century northern India, due in large part to the benign policies of the emperor Akbar and to the relatively small size of the Sikh Panth, did not necessitate such a generalized doctrine of redemptive death.

Since the publication of that article in early 1997, what has continued to intrigue me about the fifth Guru's demise is not so much the concrete events that led to his execution or accompanied his death. Although we do not know how the Guru actually died--a point about which Sikh tradition itself is also confused--we do know that Guru Arjan earned the disapproval of the Mughal authorities for his apparent support of Prince Khusrau's claim to the throne and was therefore killed by them. This fact is beyond doubt, because of the testimony found in the memoirs of the emperor Jahangir, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri primarily, and, to a lesser extent, in both the Dabistan-i Mazahib or "School of Religions," a contentious Persian text dealing with Indian religions attributed to either Mohsin-i Fani or Zulfiqar Ardastani, and the account that appears in a letter written by the Jesuit missionary Jerome Xavier in late September 1606, just months after the Guru's death. [8] All these reports are relatively contemporaneous with the fifth Master's execution and their evidence, its brief and ambivalent nature notwithstanding, provides the earliest available account of it.

What interests me particularly is how Guru Arjan's death was construed by the Sikhs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did Sikhs of these two periods perceive this death as heroic, perhaps that of an heroic martyr? Although I have shown that Sikhs of the early- to mid-seventeenth century would not likely have perceived this death as a martyrdom, since this concept had not yet been elaborated, I have not analyzed just how the Sikhs of this period did interpret the execution of Guru Arjan. The following section will attempt this. The concept of martyrdom, "heroic death with the hope of posthumous recognition and anticipated reward," [9] however, does appear in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. How, therefore, do Sikhs of this later time understand Guru Arjan's demise and what then does this say about eighteenth-century Sikh understandings of the concept which Sikh authors will only later term sahidi or sahadat? [10] It is very tempting to see the gur-bilas and rahit-nama authors of the eighteenth century sharing an understanding of Guru Arjan's death and execution that corresponds with today's general interpretation. This is indeed a powerful temptation since many of today's Sikh histories refer to these very gur-bilas authors when making their claims in regard to Guru Arjan's execution. An examination of the eighteenth-century Sikh sources, however, demonstrates otherwise. Let us begin our discussion with a better understanding of what constituted an heroic death in the earliest Sikh literature since, in later Sikh tradition, the martyrdom of Guru Arjan, as well as every other Sikh martyrdom, is perceived as such.

THE HERO AND THE HEROIC DEATH IN THE ADI GRANTH

Although a careful reading of the Adi Granth will fail to define what a specifically "heroic" death entailed during the period of the first nine Sikh Gurus, we may partially reconstruct this understanding by implication. There are, after all, a number of references to the lifestyles of "true heroes" (sura, sur, vir, surbir) in the text and these certainly tell us how one lived heroically, according to the Sikh Gurus. We may only assume, however, that the death of anyone who died emulating these "heroic" values may have been understood as a heroic one. The two Gurus who have the most to say about the hero's lifestyle are Nanak and Arjan. A hero, according to Guru Nanak, embodies the following qualities:

sabadi sur jug chare audhu bani bhagati vichari [11]

O bhagat, it is only through the contemplation of the mystical word inscribed within and without the cosmos that you can become a [true] hero (sur) throughout the four ages. [You must therefore] contemplate the sacred utterances of the Guru [with deep devotion).

Guru Arjan would no doubt concur with the first Guru, as the statement below makes clear:

Jo isu mare soi sura [12]

The one who destroys [duality] is the [true] hero (sura).

And so too would the third Sikh Guru, Amar Das, agree with this general understanding:

nanak so sura variamu jini vichahu dusatu ahankaranu maria [13]

The [true] hero, says Nanak, [14] is the one who overcomes within [himself] the enemy of self-centredness.

These are merely three of many such descriptions of the true hero, all of which bear the same imprint. Commensurate with the understandings of other religious and secular personages mentioned in the Adi Granth, the true hero is defined by the Sikh Gurus principally in spiritual terms, alluding once more to the...