Guru Har Krishan Ji

Guru Har Krishan Ji was five when he became Guru and seven when he died. He is called Bala Pritam, the child beloved.

Ram Rai contested the succession at the Mughal court and Aurangzeb summoned the boy to Delhi. He stayed at the house of Raja Jai Singh, which is now Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. He refused an audience with the emperor.

Delhi was in a smallpox epidemic. The tradition holds that he attended the sick and contracted the disease and died of it in 1664. The water of the tank at Bangla Sahib is taken by pilgrims for that reason.

Asked for a successor he said only Baba Bakala, meaning the next Guru was at the village of Bakala. Twenty-two claimants set themselves up there. The account of how the real one was found, by a trader named Makhan Shah Labana who had vowed five hundred gold coins in a storm at sea and offered two to each claimant until one asked for the rest, is the origin of the phrase Guru ladho re, the Guru is found.

That Guru was Tegh Bahadur Ji, a son of Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji who had been living quietly at Bakala for twenty years.

He became Guru at five and died at eight, which makes him the youngest and the shortest tenured of the ten.

He was summoned to Delhi by Aurangzeb, stayed at Raja Jai Singh's bungalow, and served the sick during an outbreak in the city before contracting it himself.

His last words are recorded as Baba Bakala, directing the sangat to look for his successor there. Gurdwara Bangla Sahib stands where the bungalow was.

What we don't know

  • Whether the smallpox account is contemporary or later.
  • The historicity of Makhan Shah Labana's test as told.

Where to check this

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

  • Gurdwara histories at Bangla Sahib and Baba Bakala.

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.