The image everyone knows is the one at the end: an old man with a great two-handed sword, his severed head balanced on his left palm, still walking toward Amritsar.
It is worth knowing that almost everything before that image is a man sitting still, with a pen, for fifty years.
Pahuwind
Baba Deep Singh was born on 26 January 1682 at Pahuwind, a village in the Amritsar district, to a farming couple named Bhagta and Jioni. Nothing about the household was remarkable. Punjab in 1682 was in the last decades of Aurangzeb's reign, and rural Sikh families of that sort were about to be tested very hard.
In 1700, aged eighteen, he went to Anandpur for Vaisakhi and received amrit from Guru Gobind Singh — one year after the Khalsa had been constituted. He stayed. The traditional accounts have him learning Gurmukhi letters and scripture from Bhai Mani Singh, and weapons alongside, in the way the Anandpur establishment ran both together.
Talwandi Sabo
The years that followed broke Anandpur apart: the siege, the flight, the Sarsa, Chamkaur, Sirhind. In 1705-06 Guru Gobind Singh reached Talwandi Sabo in the Malwa and stopped there for the better part of a year. The place became Damdama Sahib — damdama, the resting place, the breathing space.
What happened there is the most consequential thing in Baba Deep Singh's life. Working from memory, because the manuscripts had been lost in the Sarsa, the Guru dictated the final recension of the Guru Granth Sahib to Bhai Mani Singh — adding the compositions of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur. This is the Damdami bir, the text that would be installed as the eternal Guru at Nanded in 1708 and which every Sikh congregation reads today.
Baba Deep Singh was there for it. When the Guru left for the Deccan in 1706, he was left in charge.
The Pen
He then spent decades doing the thing he is least famous for.
He copied the Granth by hand. Not once — repeatedly, over years, producing saroops that were sent out to the takhts so that congregations far from the Malwa would have an authoritative text. The traditional accounts credit him with four copies sent to the other takhts and further copies besides; the numbers vary between tellings, as numbers in this period generally do.
It is worth pausing on what that work is. The Guru Granth Sahib runs to 1,430 pages. Copying it demands a trained hand, exact orthography, a knowledge of the several languages in it, and — because an error in scripture is not like an error elsewhere — an unbroken attention over months. He did it into old age.
The school of learning that grew around Damdama Sahib under him is the origin of the Damdami Taksal, the seminary tradition of scriptural exegesis and recitation. Taksal means a mint: a place that turns out something to a fixed standard.
The Sword
The pen and the sword were not, for him, a contrast. They were the same vow in two forms, which is precisely what sant-sipahi — saint-soldier — is meant to describe.
He fought with Banda Singh Bahadur in the campaigns of 1709-10 that took Sirhind. He lived through the decades in which the Mughal governors of Lahore put prices on Sikh heads and drove the community into the forests, through the killing of Bhai Mani Singh, and through the Chhota Ghallughara of 1746. When the scattered bands were organised into misls around 1748, he led the Shahid Misl — the confederacy of martyrs, which took its name from exactly what it expected.
1757
Ahmad Shah Durrani crossed into Punjab for the fourth time in 1757. On the way back to Kabul, his commander Jahan Khan was sent to Amritsar with orders that went beyond plunder. The Harmandir Sahib was blown up. The sarovar — the sacred pool the whole city takes its name from — was filled with debris and, by the accounts, with the carcasses of animals.
This was not a raid for money. It was an attempt to make the centre of Sikh devotion unusable.
The news reached Damdama Sahib, where Baba Deep Singh was seventy-five years old and had not held a command in the field for some time.
The Line
What he did is remembered as a gesture rather than a speech.
He rose before the congregation, and — in the traditional account — drew a line across the ground with his khanda, and said that those willing to die should cross it. The number who crossed grows in the telling; what is agreed is that he set out for Amritsar with a body of men that gathered strength as it went, in the hundreds at the start and the thousands by the end.
He was reportedly carrying an eighteen-seer double-edged khanda — a very heavy weapon for a man of any age, let alone seventy-five. It is preserved and displayed at the Akal Takht.
Gohalwar
Jahan Khan's forces met them near Gohalwar, some miles short of Amritsar, in November 1757.
The fighting was heavy and the Sikhs pushed through it. Baba Deep Singh took a mortal wound to the neck.
And here the account divides into two, and both versions matter.
The historical version is that he was mortally wounded short of the city, that his men carried the fight forward, and that he reached — or was brought to — the precincts of the Harmandir Sahib, where he died. His vow was kept.
The devotional version is the one on every poster, calendar and gurdwara wall in the Sikh world: that his head was struck from his shoulders, that a Sikh beside him cried out that he had vowed to reach the Harmandir Sahib, and that the old man raised his left hand to steady his own head, took up the khanda in his right, and fought the remaining distance before laying his head down at the edge of the pool.
Sikhs who tell the second version are not, on the whole, confused about which one is documented. It is a statement about the weight of a vow, not a claim about anatomy.
What He Left
He is commemorated along the whole road rather than at a single place — at Damdama Sahib where he took the vow, at Tarn Taran, at Gohalwar where he was struck, and at Gurdwara Shahid Ganj Baba Deep Singh inside the Golden Temple complex, which is where pilgrims stop.
The shrine he died for was rebuilt. It was destroyed again in 1762, in the same year as the Vadda Ghallughara, and rebuilt again; the gold that gives it its English name was added by Ranjit Singh seventy years later.
What is genuinely unusual about Baba Deep Singh is the shape of the life rather than the manner of the death. Sikh history has a great many soldiers. It has rather fewer men who spent fifty years as a copyist of scripture and then, at seventy-five, went out and did the other thing — and who are honoured for the two as a single act.