Bhai Taru Singh

Bhai Taru Singh was a Sandhu Jatt of Puhla village, now in Amritsar district. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes a pious Sikh who farmed his land with care and lived frugally, and who sent whatever he saved to Sikhs forced into exile by the government's persecution. He was barely 25 when he died.

The Lahore governor, Zakariya Khan, had cut the Sikhs off from every way of earning a living and wondered how they survived. In the account of the Prachin Panth Prakash, a government informer, Harbhagat Niranjania of Jandiala, told him that a farmer called Taru Singh paid his revenue, ate little and passed his savings to the Sikhs in the jungle. Taru Singh was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, then brought before the governor.

Key moments

• Before the governor he greeted him with the Sikh salutation. Charged with sedition, he answered that the Sikhs paid revenue and taxes, and that what they saved from their own mouths they gave to their brothers.
• Offered Islam or death, he asked why he should become a Muslim, since Muslims die too. The court's qazi ordered that his scalp be scraped off. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the sentence was carried out on 1 July 1745.
• Its entry on martyrdom records him refusing with the words that his faith should last "until my last hair", and says he was glad that his hair, sacred to a Sikh, stayed whole while the barbers worked with their lancets.
• His body was cremated outside Delhi Gate at Lahore. A shahidganj, a martyrs' memorial, was built there later and became a place of pilgrimage for Sikhs.

Devotional retellings add more. A SikhNet article by Bhupinder Singh says villagers paid to free his sister, that Zakariya Khan fell ill and sent Bhai Subeg Singh to ask Taru Singh's forgiveness, and that the governor died on 1 July 1745 with Taru Singh dying a few hours later. The same article also gives 9 June 1745 for the scalping, so these retellings do not agree on dates. Treat them as tradition, and the Encyclopaedia's date as the firmer one.

What he is remembered for: Bhai Taru Singh is remembered as a Shaheed of the years when Lahore's governors hunted the Khalsa. Sikhs remember him for two things: feeding the Panth when it had been starved of everything else, and refusing, under torture, to separate himself from his faith and its outward form.