The month of posh or December, especially the last week until Maghi/mid-January, sends a shudder down the spine of north Indians because of the freezing cold. This is despite global warming that has diluted the character of winter. Just half a century ago, when pure fog rather than smog defined the months of December and January, temperature plummeted to below zero in Punjab. Even today, minimum and maximum temperature varies between 0 and 15 degrees celsius in the state.
What peak winter time would have been like three centuries ago, when nature had not been vandalised, is not hard to imagine. Neither is it so to visualise a place called ‘Thanda Burj’ (cold tower), especially built close to a water body to keep it cool during summer. (Located in Sirhind/present-day Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab)
Now place an 81-year-old woman with her two grandchildren, aged seven and nine, on cold stone floor, on three consecutive nights until December 25, 1705, her shawl as the only cover for the three of them. This was Mata Gujri, the mother of Guru Gobind Singh with her two grandchildren, the sons of Guru Gobind Singh, Baba Zorawar Singh, the elder one, and Baba Fateh Singh. Sirhind was under the command of Mughal Nawab Wazir Khan.
Mata Gujri and the children were denied food and water on the first day of their transfer to Sirhind from Morinda, where they were kept in the wake of their arrest a day earlier. The arrest was a result of a betrayal by Gangu, a cook associated with the family of Guru Gobind Singh. The Guru had left Anandpur Sahib along with his family and army following a peace pact with the Mughal army for a safe passage. The Mughals, predictably, did not keep to their word, and attacked the Guru. The two elder sons of Guru Gobind Singh, Baba Ajit Singh and Baba Jhujhar Singh, both in their teens, were part of his army, and were killed fighting the Mughal army.
As they were crossing river Sirsa in present-day Himachal Pradesh, the rest of the Guru’s family got separated. Mata Gujri, along with the younger sons of Guru Gobind Singh, made it to village Saheri in Punjab’s Ropar, now known as Rupnagar. They spent the night at his place. The cook, enticed by the gold coins she was carrying, gave her away to the local Mughal ruler. Of course, the gold was not Mata Gujri’s personal property, but that of the Khalsa army. Huge money was required and spent on fighting the wars the Guru was forced to fight against Hindu kingdoms (aligned with the Mughals) and the Mughals.
While incarcerated in Thanda Burj for three days, the only food Mata Gujri and her grandsons had was hot milk smuggled by a devotee, Moti Ram Mehra. He is said to have fed them on two days before he was discovered, and shortly afterwards, done to death along with his entire family.
Guru Gobind Singh’s children, the youngest martyrs in recorded history, appeared in the court of Wazir Khan on two consecutive days prior to their execution on December 26, 1705. They were offered allurements to embrace Islam. When that did not work, they were tortured, starved and exposed to freezing cold. Nothing worked, and the children remained resolute in their faith and defiant towards the rulers.
According to oral history, the guards around Thanda Burj heard Mata Gujri tell the children stories of the valour and piety of Guru Arjan Dev, their great-great grandfather and those of Guru Tegh Bahadar, their grandfather. The children themselves are said to have recited Japji Sahib, the morning prayer authored by the poet-prophet Guru Nanak, even as they were being bricked alive.
It is no coincidence that it was Mata Gujri who raised these children following the death of their mother, and it was she who was around them before they were put to an impossible test for children that young, a test they passed, and thus attained immortality. Her whole life had been one long tapasya. Married at nine (as per tradition, girls, although married that early, stayed with their parents until after puberty), she gave birth to Guru Gobind Singh at the age of 42, 33 years after her marriage to Guru Teg Bahadar. This was no worldly marriage, just as the birth of Guru Gobind Singh was not a worldly affair.
He was born as per a divine command, and we have Guru Gobind Singh’s own version about the reason for his birth in Bachittar Natak. In fact, the scripts of all their lives seem to have been written by the divine as part of a plan to uproot the diabolical Mughal rulers, whose reign entered a dreadful phase of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam and cruel executions of those refusing to convert, beginning with Jahangir. It was during his reign that Guru Arjan Dev was executed—by being seated in boiling hot water, hot sand poured on his head. That was in June 1606.
Mata Gujri’s husband, Guru Teg Bahadar, the ninth guru in the lineage of Nanak, did tapasya for 27 years at Baba Bakala Sahib, close to Amritsar, before he was discovered and given gur-gaddi (guru’s seat). He was beheaded under Aurangzeb’s rule, in 1675, again for his refusal to embrace Islam. Guru Gobind Singh was just nine years old at that time.
After the execution of Guru Teg Bahadar, the task of parenting Guru Gobind, the tenth guru, fell entirely upon Mata Gujri’s shoulders. The mother of the founder of Sikh faith was an epitome of divine power. Beginning with her marriage to Guru Teg Bahadar, giving birth to Guru Gobind Singh, raising him, and finally being around the grandchildren as they were martyred, Mata Gujri seems to have been the chosen one. No earthly woman could have embraced and endured what Mata Gujri did—as wife, mother and grandmother.
She is said to have passed away moments after hearing the news of the grandsons’ execution. It cannot be “shock” that caused her death, as some writers and katha-vachaks at gurudwaras say. Death by shock is for lesser mortals. She, who had endured the execution of her husband, raised her son, later the grandsons, and whom she had motivated before their martyrdom, would have been prepared for it all.
Given the spiritual fabric of her being, it is reasonable to surmise that Mata Gujri left her body wilfully after the children’s execution, knowing the purpose of her life had been fulfilled.
Mata Gujri is the centrepiece of the divine play enacted around the dismantling of the Mughal rule that saw the martyrdom of two gurus and four children of one family across 99 years. Sikhs as a community get to hear, in gurudwaras, the awesome accounts of the lives of the gurus, their families and followers.
In the last few years, the rest of the Indians are also learning about Mata Gujri, thanks to the initiatives of the central government, including the commemoration of the day of the martyrdom of Baba Zorawar Singh and Baba Fateh Singh, December 26, 1705, as the ‘Baal Veer Divas’.
Discussion about this post