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Modern Sikh teaching on Guru Arjan Dev's death holds that Guru Arjan Dev was tortured and executed by officials of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in May 1606. In this version, the emperor, a fundamentalist Muslim, aided by evil councillors and alarmed at the growth of Sikhism, decided to act against the Guru. Using Guru Arjan's support for his rebel son Prince Khusrau as a pretext, he ordered the Guru to remove objectionable passages in the Adi Granth and pay a large fine: the Guru was tortured for refusing both orders and was eventually killed. The actual historical evidence on how and why the Guru died is less clear.
Jahangir's memoirs state that Arjan was handed over to Murtaza Khan in Lahore, so that the official could execute him. Jahangir did so because of Arjan's support for Khusrau, and does not describe ordering any torture to the Guru. This suggests none was ordered, since Jahangir earlier describes the torture and execution of two other rebels in detail. Nor does it fit with Jahangir's general policy of religious tolerance, with one contemporary English observer remarking that "here every man has liberty to profess his own religion freely", and which saw state funding of other religions and numerous non-Muslims favoured by Jahangir.
Set against this was Jahangir's stated desire to convert Guru Arjan Dev Ji to Islam, though given that he later wmed other Muslims about trying to force Islam on people, probable thought in terms of the Guru converting voluntarily. Jahangir was angered by teh number of Muslims who converted to Sikhism. Professor J. F. Richard's view that Jahangir was "persistently hostile to popuarly venerated religious figures" is instructive, though it appears that Jahangir only took action against religious figures he saw as threats to the state. This included the Naqshbandi Muslim Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi, whi Jahangir viewed as an extremist (and who was noted enemy of Guru Arjan Dev Ji), and so had his imprisoned in Gwallior fort. Nor was Jahangir likely to be personally familliar with the Adi Granth, since he labelled the Guru as a Hindu.
If Jahangir's memoir was the only contemporary source, the picture would still be relatively clear. We would known why Guru Arjan Dev died and who ordered his death, if not the exact manner of it. However, other contemporary and near-contemporary sources, especially the Sikh accounts, do not support Jahangir's version of events.
Professor J.S.Grewal notes that Sikh sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth century contain contradictory repots of Guru Arjan Dev's death. Guru Gobind Singh's memoir, the Bichitra Natak, mentions Guru Arjan Dev only once, to record that "when Guru Arjan Dev departed his life for the divine abode, [the Guru] assumed the form of Hargobind. In contrast he and other Sikh sources extensively discussed Guru Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom. Bhai Gurdas, a contemporary of Arjan and noted Sikh chronicler, recorded his death, but whether or not his account shows the Guru was tortured rests on the translation of "bhir" (and whether it is translated as 'distress/hardship' or 'torture'). In the 1740s, Chaupa Singh, who was close to Guru Gobind Singh Ji, placed the blame on Chandu Shah, a Hindu official in Lahore, who had the Guru arrested and executed after he turned down Chandu Shah's offer of marriage between Chandu's daughter and Hargobind.
A contemporary Jesuit account, written in 1606 by Father Jerome Xavier, who was in Lahore at the time, adds weight to aspects to all these accounts. Xavier records that the Sikhs managed to get Jahangir to commute the death sentence to a heavy fine, for which a rich individual, possibly a Sikh, stood as guarantor. When the Guru failed to produre the money for the guarantor, the latter tortured Arjan in the hopes of extracting the money, but the Guru refused to give in and so died. The other near-contemporary non-Sikh source, a 1640s chronicle probably written by a Parsi, supports this view.
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