Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur Sahib, Nanded

01The Guru at Nanded

In 1708 Guru Gobind Singh travelled south with the new emperor Bahadur Shah and camped at Nanded on the Godavari. There he met Madho Das, a bairagi with a math by the river, who became his disciple and, as Banda Singh, was sent to the Punjab with five Sikhs and the Guru’s arrows; within two years he had taken Sirhind. At Nanded the Guru was stabbed by a Pathan assassin. The wound was stitched, but it opened again some days later when he drew a strong bow. Before he passed in October 1708 he declared that the Guru from then on would be the Granth, the Guru Granth Sahib. He was cremated on the spot now covered by the Angitha Sahib.

02Ranjit Singh’s takht

Sikhs who stayed on at Nanded kept the place, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh sent money and craftsmen to build the present takht between 1832 and 1837, with a gilded dome and gold-plated inner walls. The inner room holds the Guru’s weapons and belongings, which only the head granthi may enter. The Sikhs of Hazur Sahib, many of them Dakhni Sikhs settled in the Deccan for generations, keep their own customs of worship. In 2007 the management pulled down the Ramgarhia Bunga and the Baradari of Ranjit Singh’s time during kar seva, over the protests of conservators. In 2008 the tercentenary of the Gurgaddi of the Granth brought crores of rupees of new building and lakhs of pilgrims to Nanded.

The life of this place