The last human Sikh Guru handed his authority to a book
Guru Gobind Singh became leader of the Sikhs as a child after his father was executed on Aurangzeb's orders. He founded the Khalsa in 1699, asked its first five members to initiate him in turn, and before dying declared that the scripture itself, the Guru Granth Sahib, would be the eternal Guru.
He was born Gobind Das in Patna while his father, the ninth Guru Tegh Bahadur, was travelling in the east; his birthplace is now a shrine. The traditional year is 1666, but most early chroniclers give 1661, and scholars such as Louis Fenech think the earlier date fits the rest of his life better. After Kashmiri Pandits sought his father's protection from Mughal persecution in 1675, Tegh Bahadur went to confront the emperor and was put to death in Delhi. The boy was installed as tenth Guru the following spring.
His schooling mixed Persian, which he reportedly learned in a year at seven, with riding and archery. At Vaisakhi in 1699 he gathered followers at Anandpur and, in the tradition's telling, called five times for a volunteer willing to die, vanishing into a tent with each one before returning with all five alive. Those five, the Panj Pyare, received sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword and the new surname Singh, meaning lion. Men and women of every caste could join, a deliberate statement of equality.
The Khalsa brought the Five Ks, such as the steel bracelet called the kara, and a code banning tobacco and adultery. Telling Sikhs they need not shave their heads in mourning also freed them from a Mughal tax tied to that ritual. He abolished the masands, regional agents he judged corrupt, centralising the community. Not every Sikh took initiation, and the split between Khalsa and other Sikhs still shapes debates about pluralism.
He prized the pen as much as the sword, and his court at Anandpur once hosted more than a hundred poets. The Dasam Granth credited to him runs to 1,428 pages and remains disputed as scripture among Sikhs. His four sons all died before him, two in battle and two at the hands of the Mughal official Wazir Khan. He died in October 1708.
Source: Guru Gobind Singh
