Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur: An Overview of His Life and Bani Hardev Singh Virk 1 and Gurmukh Singh 2 1 Professor of Eminence, SGGS World University, Fatehgarh Sahib (Punjab) 2 Retired Principal Civil Servant and OBE, London, UK 1 hardevsingh.virk@gmail.com; 2 sewauk2005@yahoo.co.uk) Introduction Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib (1 April 1621 – 11 November 1675) was the youngest of the five sons of Guru Hargobind Sahib, the sixth Sikh Guru, and his wife Nanaki. He became the 9th Guru of Sikhs on 20 March 1665. His hymns (Gurbani) were included in Aad Guru Granth Sahib, compiled by Guru Arjan Dev in 1604, by Guru Gobind Singh Jee at Talwandi Sabo (Damdama Sahib) in the Damdami Bir. The total number of his hymns is one hundred and fifteen in fifteen raagas. Aurangzeb wanted to make India an Islamic country. A delegation of Kashmiri Pundits led by Kirpa Ram Datt reached Anandpur and pleaded with Guru Tegh Bahadur to save them from the extreme cruelty of Aurangzeb to convert them to Islam.They, on the advice of the Guru, told the Mughal authorities that they would willingly embrace Islam, if Guru Tegh Bahadur did the same. It was for the first time in the history of religions that the Guru was going to fight a battle on behalf of those of a belief system which he himself did not subscribe to, a belief system the basics of which Guru Nanak had rejected. Recently, the first author (HSV) reviewed the book authored by Gurmukh Singh (GS) [1-3]. The author reveals the purpose of writing this book: "The main reason for this publication is that earlier publications about the life and martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur either do scant justice to the Guru’s active life or have been written more like fiction in the traditional saakhi (story-telling) style. One example is an otherwise informative biography of Guru Tegh Bahadur by Dr Tarlochan Singh which is written more like a historical novel" [4]. Life of Guru Tegh Bahadur Most of the accounts of his life portray Tegh Bahadur as a person who was a renunciate in life, who remained absorbed in meditation most of his time and did not bother about the affairs of the world. GS rejects all this false information in his well researched book. He has tried to remove the cobwebs created by other authors by his research oriented approach of sifting the facts from fiction. According to GS, "Guru Tegh Bahadur was trained as a warrior by his father and he participated in most of the battles fought by Guru Hargobind. As a matter of fact, he fought so bravely in the battle of Kartarpur in April 1635, when he was just 14 years old, that his father, Guru Hargobind, changed his family name from Tyag Mal to Tegh Bahadur (the fearless master of the sword)". GS quotes Harbans Singh [5] who sums up the mission and life of Tegh Bahadur in Baba Bakala as follows: “Tegh Bahadur was now remote from the main seat of Sikhism, yet he