Guru Gobind Singh Ji was born at Patna in 1666 and became Guru at nine, on the execution of his father. He was brought up at Anandpur, learned Persian and Sanskrit alongside Punjabi and Braj, and kept a court of fifty-two poets.
He fought his first battle at Bhangani in 1688 against a coalition of hill rajas, and Nadaun in 1691. Anandpur was besieged repeatedly through the 1690s and 1700s by the hill states and then by imperial forces.
On Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur he called for a head from the assembly, took five men one by one into a tent, and brought them out as the Panj Piare. He administered amrit prepared with a double-edged sword, gave the men the name Singh and the women Kaur, and then asked the five to administer it to him. That reversal, the Guru taking initiation from those he had just initiated, is the constitutional fact of the Khalsa.
The five were Daya Ram of Lahore, Dharam Das of Hastinapur, Himmat Rai of Jagannath Puri, Mohkam Chand of Dwarka and Sahib Chand of Bidar. One was a Khatri, one was a Jat, three were from what were then treated as low castes, and they came from four corners of the subcontinent.
Anandpur was abandoned in December 1704 under a safe conduct that was broken at the Sarsa. Two sons died at Chamkaur, the younger two were bricked up at Sirhind, and his mother Mata Gujri Ji died the same week.
He wrote the Zafarnama to Aurangzeb from Dina in the Malwa, in Persian verse, accusing him of perjury. He went south, met Bahadur Shah, and was stabbed at Nanded by an assassin in 1708. Before dying he ended the line of personal Gurus and vested the guruship in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji.
He kept fifty two poets at Anandpur and had Persian and Sanskrit works translated. The court at Paonta and then at Anandpur was a literary establishment as much as a military one, and most of what it produced went into the Sarsa in flood in December 1704 and has never been recovered.
The Zafarnama is in Persian verse and it addresses an emperor as an equal. It accuses him of swearing on the Quran and breaking the oath, and it says that when every other means has failed it is lawful to take up the sword. It was carried to the Deccan and it was read.
He died at Nanded, fifteen hundred kilometres from Anandpur, and Takht Sachkhand Hazur Sahib stands there. He was born at Patna and Takht Patna Sahib stands there. Two of the five takhts are outside Punjab, which is a reminder that the map of this tradition has always been larger than the province it is named after.