Baba Gurditta Ji was the eldest son of Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji. He laid out Kiratpur in 1626 and was made head of the Udasi order by Baba Sri Chand, which linked the ascetic tradition founded by Guru Nanak Dev Ji's elder son back to the main line.
He was the father of Guru Har Rai Ji and of Dhirmal, whose descendants hold the Kartarpur birh of the Adi Granth.
He died at twenty-five, before his father, at Kiratpur.
The Udasi order's custody of Sikh shrines through the eighteenth century, and the Gurdwara Reform Movement's fight to remove them in the twentieth, both run back to the arrangement made in his lifetime.
Gurdwara Baba Gurditta at Kiratpur marks his cremation.
He was the father of two sons, Dhirmal and Guru Har Rai Ji. The succession passed over the elder, and Dhirmal's descendants at Kartarpur in the Doaba kept the manuscript of the Adi Granth that their line held, which is the origin of a dispute that has run for three centuries.
The Udasi order traces its own line of authority through him as the successor of Baba Sri Chand Ji, and that connection is what put Udasi mahants in charge of Sikh shrines through the eighteenth century, when it was unsafe for Khalsa Sikhs to hold them openly.
The arrangement lasted until the Gurdwara Reform Movement of the 1920s removed the mahants by agitation and legislation. The Udasi establishments surviving in Punjab now are separate institutions with their own akharas and their own property.