The History of Sikhism

Nanak was born on April 15, 1469, in the village of Talvandi (Nankana Sahib since 1947) in Punjab, then part of the Delhi Sultanate, into a Hindu Khatri family. Around 1500, following a mystical experience at the Bein river in which he is said to have disappeared for three days, he emerged proclaiming the message "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim" — teaching devotion to one formless God (Ik Onkar), equality of all people, honest work, and remembrance of the divine name.

Location: Nankana Sahib, Punjab, Pakistan

Nanak traveled widely across Asia — accounts place him in India, Pakistan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Mecca, and Baghdad — teaching his message in hymns that form the core of Sikh scripture. In his later years he founded the town of Kartarpur on the Ravi river, where his followers lived as a community of householders, worked the land, and shared the langar, a free community meal open to people of all castes and creeds — an institutional rejection of caste dining restrictions.

Location: Kartarpur, Punjab

Nanak died on September 22, 1539, having chosen his disciple Bhai Lehna as successor rather than either of his own sons. Renamed Guru Angad, the second guru began collecting Nanak's hymns and standardized the Gurmukhi script in which Sikh scripture is written. Angad's succession established the principle of a living line of gurus, which continued through eight more successors over 170 years.

Location: Kartarpur, Punjab

The fifth guru, Arjan, completed the Harmandir Sahib (later known as the Golden Temple) in Amritsar, built around a sacred pool, and in 1604 compiled the Adi Granth, the first authoritative collection of hymns by the gurus and saints of various traditions. Arjan's growing influence and his support for the rival claimant to the Mughal throne led to his arrest; he died in 1606 in the custody of Emperor Jahangir, becoming the faith's first martyr, a turning point that began the militarization of the community under the sixth guru, Hargobind, who built the Akal Takht as a seat of temporal authority.

Location: Amritsar, Punjab

The ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi in November 1675 on the orders of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb after he refused to convert to Islam, having taken up the cause of Kashmiri Hindu pandits facing forced conversion. Sikh tradition holds that he chose death to defend freedom of conscience for all religions. His son and successor, Gobind Rai, would carry the community toward open conflict with the Mughal state.

Location: Delhi, Mughal Empire

On the Baisakhi of 1699, the tenth guru, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa — an initiated order of "saint-soldiers" bound to the five Ks (including uncut hair and a sword), taking the surname Singh (lion) for men and Kaur (princess) for women. He administered the amrit (initiation) ceremony to the first five volunteers and then, in a radical act, requested initiation from those same five, placing the initiated community on equal footing with the guru. The Khalsa gave Sikhism its distinct visible identity and a martial tradition forged amid persecution, including the Wadda Ghalughara (great massacre) of 1762, in which thousands of Sikhs were killed.

Location: Anandpur Sahib, Punjab

Before his death in October 1708, following a stabbing by an assassin and his final testament, Guru Gobind Singh declared the Guru Granth Sahib — the compiled scripture — to be the eternal, living guru of the Sikhs, ending the line of human gurus. The scripture includes hymns by the ten gurus alongside works by Hindu and Muslim saints, reflecting the faith's stated rejection of any single tradition's monopoly on truth.

Location: Nanded, Maharashtra, India

In the decades after the gurus, the Sikhs consolidated twelve confederated misls into a sovereign state. In 1801 Ranjit Singh was crowned Maharaja of the Sikh Empire at Lahore, ruling a religiously diverse realm stretching from the Khyber Pass to Kashmir with a modernized army that included European officers. His death in 1839 began the empire's rapid decline.

Location: Lahore, Punjab

After two Anglo-Sikh wars (1845-46 and 1848-49), the British East India Company annexed Punjab on March 29, 1849, ending the Sikh Empire and sending the young Maharaja Duleep Singh to England. Punjab was administered by the British with Sikh chiefs and landlords, and Sikhs became a heavily recruited community in the British Indian Army, serving in both World Wars with distinction — a legacy shaping Sikh identity in the diaspora and their eventual migration to Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

Location: Punjab, British India

The 1947 partition of India cut the Sikh homeland in two: the most sacred sites, including Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur, fell in Pakistan, while most Sikhs migrated to Indian Punjab amid partition violence. In 1966, after a Punjabi Suba agitation, Indian Punjab was reorganized as a Sikh-majority state with Chandigarh as its capital. Punjab became a centerpiece of the Green Revolution in the 1960s-70s, and the period saw rising religious and political assertion culminating in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973, which demanded greater autonomy.

Location: Punjab, India and Pakistan

In June 1984, the Indian Army launched Operation Blue Star, storming the Harmandir Sahib complex to remove armed militants led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had fortified the site amid a campaign for Sikh autonomy and an insurgency brewing in Punjab. The Indian government stated the action was necessary to restore law and order; the operation damaged the Akal Takht, killed civilians and pilgrims alongside militants, and was received by much of the Sikh world as a desecration. Official casualty figures were around 500 dead, with higher estimates existing; the event remains deeply contested.

Location: Amritsar, Punjab, India

On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, an act widely understood as revenge for Blue Star. In the days that followed, anti-Sikh riots killed thousands in Delhi and other cities — official Indian figures acknowledged around 2,700 deaths in Delhi, while independent estimates run considerably higher. The violence was followed by a decade-long insurgency in Punjab centered on the demand for a separate Sikh state (Khalistan), met by counterinsurgency operations; militancy was largely suppressed by the mid-1990s.

Location: Delhi, India

Sikhism counts roughly 25 to 30 million adherents, with a diaspora spanning Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Southeast Asia, where Sikhs hold prominent public offices. In November 2019, India and Pakistan opened the Kartarpur Corridor, allowing visa-free pilgrimage from India to the site of Nanak's final years — a rare point of cooperation between the two states. Debates over Punjab's history, the 1984 violence, and Khalistan advocacy continue to shape Sikh politics in both India and the diaspora.