Haqiqat Rai was a Hindu Khatri boy of Sialkot, about eighteen, accused of blasphemy after a quarrel with schoolfellows. He was tried at Lahore and offered his life if he converted. He refused and was executed.
He is not a Sikh figure. He is commemorated as a Punjabi Hindu martyr and his samadh at Lahore was a pilgrimage site, with a fair held at Basant.
His story was widely told across Punjab in all three communities and a substantial Punjabi devotional literature grew around it.
After 1947 the site was lost to the Hindu community that maintained it and the observance moved to Indian Punjab in a reduced form.
He is included here because a project about Punjab that records only Sikh martyrdoms is recording a third of the province.
The execution is dated to 1734 or 1742 depending on the account. The charge was that he had spoken against the Prophet during a quarrel with schoolfellows, and the accounts on the Hindu side hold that the words were put in his mouth.
His story circulated as a vaar and as a chapbook in Punjabi and Urdu through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the annual fair at his samadh in Lahore was among the larger Hindu observances in the city.
The Arya Samaj took the story up in the late nineteenth century and used it in its own polemics, which changed how it was told. Whatever the eighteenth century events were, they reach us through a nineteenth century argument.