Shaheedi of Banda Singh Bahadur and his companions in Delhi

Who: Banda Singh Bahadur, his four-year-old son Ajai Singh, some two dozen leading Sikhs held with him in the Fort, and 694 other captives handed to the kotwal, out of the 740 prisoners in the procession; on the other side Emperor Farrukh-siyar and the Delhi kotwal, Sarbrah Khan.

What: The prisoners from Gurdas Nangal reached Delhi on 27 February 1716. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes a grisly procession: 740 prisoners in heavy chains, seven hundred cartloads of the heads of Sikhs, and 2,000 more heads on pikes. By Farrukh-siyar's order Banda and about two dozen leaders were imprisoned in the Fort, while the remaining 694 were handed to the kotwal to be executed at the Kotwali Chabutra at the rate of a hundred a day. Banda was held for about three months.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates his death to 9 June 1716. Ganda Singh's Life of Banda Singh Bahadur (1935) prints it differently: Sunday, 29 Jamadi-ul-Akhir 1128, which he gives as 19 June 1716, new style. That date was a Friday, not a Sunday (see the note below). On the day of his death Banda, his son Ajai Singh and his companions (Ganda Singh names Baj Singh, Ram Singh, Fateh Singh, Ali Singh and Gulab Singh Bakhshi) were led out of the Fort and taken to the tomb of Khwaja Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki near the Qutb Minar. There he was offered Islam or death. He refused. His four-year-old son, Ajai Singh, was hacked to pieces before his eyes, and later retellings add that the child's heart was thrust into his mouth. Banda's eyes were pulled out, his hands and feet were chopped off, his flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, and his body was cut up limb by limb.

Where: Delhi, at the Kotwali Chabutra and at the tomb of Khwaja Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki near the Qutb Minar. Delhi was also where Guru Tegh Bahadur had been martyred in 1675.

Why it mattered: Banda's Shaheedi is remembered as the supreme sacrifice of the first Sikh to seize territory for the Khalsa. The state did not stop there. George Forster, in his travel narrative published in 1798, reported an edict of Farrukh-siyar that every Sikh who fell into his officers' hands should be put to the sword on refusing Islam, with a reward for every head. The Panth was hunted for decades, yet within fifty years the Dal Khalsa had taken Sirhind (1764) and Lahore (1765), and the Gobindshahi coin struck at Lahore carried the couplet Banda had used on his seal.