Baba Deep Singh Ji was born at Pahuwind, in what is now Tarn Taran district, in 1682, took amrit at Anandpur in 1700, and worked with Bhai Mani Singh Ji on the Damdami recension. He was the first head of the Damdami Taksal at Talwandi Sabo, said to have been founded by Guru Gobind Singh Ji, which trained readers and interpreters of the scripture and still exists.
In 1757 Ahmad Shah Abdali's forces, under his son Timur Shah at Lahore, filled in the sarovar at Amritsar and desecrated the Harmandir. Baba Deep Singh Ji, then seventy-five, took a jatha from Damdama toward Amritsar, drawing a line on the ground and asking who would cross it.
He was killed in the fighting at Ramsar or Gohalwar, some kilometres short of the Harmandir. The tradition holds that he was decapitated and continued fighting with his head in his hand until he reached the parikrama, and that is what is depicted in the paintings sold across Punjab.
Historians treat that as devotional. What is not disputed is that a man of seventy-five raised a force, marched on an occupied shrine and died doing it, and that the Khalsa retook Amritsar shortly afterward.
Gurdwara Shaheed Ganj Baba Deep Singh stands inside the Golden Temple complex.
He was a scribe under Guru Gobind Singh Ji at Damdama Sahib and headed the taksal there, which makes him a scholar before he was anything else.
In 1757 he led a force to Amritsar after the complex was desecrated, and the account is that he was mortally wounded at Gohalwar and carried on to the sarovar.
He was in his seventies. The tradition holds the head and the sword together in every image of him, and the shrine at the complex marks where he reached.