Bhai Taru Singh Ji farmed at Poola in Amritsar district and fed the Sikh jathas who were living in the wastes and the Lakhi jungle during the years when a price was on every Sikh head. He was informed on by a village official named Harbhagat Niranjania.
Brought before Zakariya Khan at Lahore, he was offered his life if he cut his hair. He refused. His scalp was removed with the hair on it. The account says he lived twenty-two days after it.
Zakariya Khan died in the same period, and the tradition links the two, holding that the governor could not pass water and was relieved only when a shoe of Bhai Taru Singh Ji's was struck on his head, and that he died shortly after the Bhai did. The causal link is devotional rather than historical.
He was twenty-five. Gurdwara Shaheed Ganj Bhai Taru Singh at Lahore is on the site.
The period of the two ghallugharas, and of the standing bounty on Sikhs, ran roughly from the 1730s to the 1760s. Most of the men killed in it are not named anywhere. Bhai Taru Singh Ji is named because he was a farmer and not a soldier, which made the point the Khalsa wanted made.
Harbhagat Niranjania, the man who informed on him, held a position under the administration and the accounts name him. Informers are named in the Sikh record of this period as consistently as the martyrs are.
The year is given as 1745 in some accounts and 1746 in others, and the number of days he survived the injury differs between them. The Persian chronicles of the period do not mention the case at all.
He is named in the Ardas among the categories of the martyred, as those who allowed themselves to be scalped. A farmer who fed people is the reason that phrase is in the daily prayer.