On the night of 6 December 1704 Guru Gobind Singh Ji reached Chamkaur after leaving Anandpur under a promised safe conduct that was broken at the Sarsa. The party was about forty. They took a mud-walled garhi belonging to Budhi Chand and held it through the following day against an imperial force under Wazir Khan of Sirhind.
Sahibzada Ajit Singh Ji, eighteen, went out with five men and did not come back. Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Ji, fourteen, asked to go next and was allowed. Both died in the fighting outside the wall.
Toward the end the surviving Singhs invoked the authority of the Panj Piare and ordered the Guru to leave, on the ground that the Panth needed him alive. He obeyed. Bhai Sangat Singh Ji, who resembled him, put on the kalgi and stayed. Bhai Jiwan Singh Ji, who had carried Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji's head from Delhi thirty years earlier, died at Chamkaur.
Gurdwara Katalgarh Sahib stands where the fighting was heaviest, Gurdwara Qatalgarh and Gurdwara Taari Sahib nearby. The town is in Rupnagar district, on the Sirhind side of the Sutlej.
Two of the four sons of Guru Gobind Singh Ji died here. The younger two were bricked up at Sirhind within the same fortnight.
Forty men held a mud walled house against a besieging force in December 1704, sending out small parties in turn to fight until they were killed.
The two elder Sahibzade were among them, at eighteen and fourteen. The Guru was ordered out by the surviving Sikhs acting as the Panj Piare, which is the one occasion on which that authority was used against him.
Gurdwara Katalgarh stands on the site. It is the single most cited episode in Sikh martial tradition and the garhi itself was an ordinary house belonging to an ordinary family.