Bhai Ghanaiya Ji

Bhai Ghanaiya Ji carried water on the battlefield at Anandpur and gave it to the wounded of both sides. He was reported to the Guru for reviving enemy soldiers.

Asked to explain himself he said he saw no Mughals and no Sikhs, only the Guru's face in every man. Guru Gobind Singh Ji gave him ointment as well as water and told him to dress the wounds too.

He founded the Sevapanthi order, which took up seva as its whole practice, ran dispensaries and rest houses, and produced a body of Punjabi devotional writing. Sevapanthi deras existed across the Punjab and a number survive.

He was from Sodhara near Wazirabad, in what is now Pakistan.

The episode is quoted whenever the ethics of the Sikh martial tradition are argued about, and it is quoted correctly, because the instruction was not to stop but to do more.

The complaint against him was that he was reviving enemy soldiers who would fight again. The answer he was given was ointment, to use as well as the water.

The Sevapanthi writers, Bhai Addan Shah and the line after him, produced commentaries and vaars in Punjabi that sit outside the mainstream Sikh canon and are almost entirely unpublished.

The comparison with the Red Cross is made constantly and is anachronistic. What the episode establishes is a rule about who counts as a person in a fight, stated in the middle of one.

What we don't know

  • His dates.
  • How many Sevapanthi deras remain active.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Published material on the Sevapanthi order and its literature.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.