Baba Deep Singh
"Once you step onto this path, you may well give up your head rather than the cause."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the majority of my readers aren't exactly experts on Indian history, so it's probably a safe assumption that you're not familiar with the story of the Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh. Well, it's time to get educated -- because this dude is one of the most hardcore freedom fighters to ever live, and a guy so extreme balls-out in his insatiable quest for vengeance that something as inconsequentially-trivial as being fucking decapitated couldn't stop him from crushing his enemies to death with his nutsack.
Deep Singh (Baba is a term of reverence roughly equivalent to "Saint") was baptized a Sikh in 1700, and quickly got busy training in badass martial skills like swordfighting, hand-to-hand combat, horsemanship, resisting torture, circle-strafing, and punching people in the crotch with enough force to blow a hole in a brick wall. In case many of you out there aren't down with Sikhism, it's pretty much one of the most badass religions this side of Valhalla -- practioners are given a goddamned sword when they are baptized, and they are bound by their religion to carry this implement of pointed death with them everywhere they go. They also have to grow super-long awesome beards and badass Rollie Fingers-style handlebar moustaches. After going through a rigorous and intense initiation training so hardcore that it makes ancient Spartan initiations look like Home Economics Merit Badge Day for Girl Scout Troop 666, Baba Deep Singh retired to a nice quiet life studying the teachings of the great hallowed Gurus, hand-scribing copies of the Sikh holy scriptures, and fighting in large-scale revolutions against the oppressive and tyrannical Mughal Empire.
See, dudes like Babur and Akbar were pretty badass in their own right, but the Sikhs weren't really down with being ruled over by some godless heathen Muslims, and if there's one thing you should take from this article it's that you should generally try to avoid fucking with the Sikhs whenever you get the chance. One of Baba Deep Singh's homeboys kicked off a revolution in the Punjab region of India, and it was on like neckbone. BDS and his dudes jacked up the Mughals and chased them out of their homelands.
But whatever. This website is full of folks who threw off the yoke of oppression by lopping off their enemies' heads with hacksaws and then suplexing their decapitated corpses onto a bed of hot coals. What separates Baba Deep Singh is his mad desire for righteous vengeance, and the lengths he would go to accomplish said feat. It all got started in 1757, when the Mughal warlord Ahmad Shah Durrani started launching a bunch of raids into India. He busted in, pillaged, plundered, etc., sacked the city of Delhi, and began triumphantly processing back to Mughal-ville with a newly-acquired trove of plundered goods, stolen religious artifacts, and hot, screaming, kidnapped Indian babes. Fuck that. Baba Deep wasn't going to let that shit fly. He and his men launched a guerrilla raid on the Mughals while they were on the march, ambushing them, kicking their asses and pulling out their tracheas with their bare hands. The religious artifacts (and hot babes) were all returned to their rightful locations, and all seemed well with the world once again.
Not so fast.
The Mughals are descended from a dude named Genghis Khan. Maybe you've heard of him. Well motherfuckers with a pedigree of ultimate extreme asskickings don't take stuff like this lightly. Ahmad Shah Durrani, despoiled of all of the shit he worked so hard to steal from teeming throngs of unarmed defenseless peasants, took out his revenge the best way he knew how -- by seriously jacking up the Golden Temple of God in the city of Amritsar; the holiest and most hallowed site in the Sikh religion.
The Mughals first blew the shrine up with their cannons, then they slaughtered a bunch of cattle and filled the sacred pools of the temple with cow blood and guts. Now, most Sikhs don't hold cows sacred like the Hindus do, but you don't need to worship at the altar of a bovine god to agree that this is still pretty disgusting and obnoxious. A large force of soldiers hung around to defend the shrine and prevent the Sikhs from reclaiming the desecrated temple, and the douchebag Mughal ruler picture-messaged pictures of the carnage to Baba Deep Singh's cell phone.
Our man Baba Deep Singh was seventy-five years old at this time, but he hadn't lost a step -- the only thing his excessively old age did for him was give him a totally awesome beard. As soon as he heard that the Golden Temple had been profaned and destroyed, he pulled his old, beat-up, thirty-pound Khanda sword off the wall and started walking towards Amritsar. Along the way, he stopped in at every village he came across, recruiting a huge mob of pitchfork and torch-bearing warriors ready to go Dr. Frankenstein on those Mughal bastards who fucked up their holy monument. These dudes set out to avenge their temple Bruce Lee-style, and nothing was going to stop them.
The improvised peasant army hurled themselves at the hardened Mughal warriors, and insane bloodshed ensued with the unholy realness. The Mughals were a well-trained force of asskickers, but the Sikhs were super omega ripshit pissed off, and they were flipping out like assassins on those poor bastards, tearing them new assholes with daggers, tridents, and cordless power drills. During the fighting, however, Baba Deep Singh launched himself at the commander of the Mughal garrison and both men delivered terrible blows at one another, kind of like the intro to Ninja Gaiden on the old-school Nintendo. The Mughal's head slid off of his neck onto the floor with a disgusting squish. Baba Deep Singh didn't fare much better -- his head had been almost completely severed from his body. The only thing holding his cranium upright was his left hand.
Baba Deep Singh, however, was a Mughal-killing madman, and he didn't even give a shit. He kept fighting, holding his barely-attached head onto his torso with one hand and hacking people in half with his other. The sight of this dude, sword in one hand, bloody head in the other, must have been pretty goddamned unnerving to the dudes facing him, and the Sikhs cut a swath through the Mughals, driving them from the halls of the sacred temple. Some legends claim that Baba Deep's head actually came off at one point, and that he held the disembodied head in his left hand while he fought -- sort of like how a chicken with it's head cut off continues to run around for a while, vengeance was so ingrained into the very fabric of this guy's being that his wild post-mortem twitching involved lopping off appendages and stabbing people in the brain.
With the Mughals defeated, Baba Deep Singh died on the floor of the Golden Temple of God. The temple was re-consecrated by Sikh priests, and the spot where Singh fell is now a shrine where pilgrims come from across India to pay their respects to one of their religion's greatest martyrs.
"There is hardly a mode of torture which the Sikhs have not suffered, and not one has cried in pain or relented."