Bhai Taru Singh was a young farmer near Lahore who fed and sheltered Sikh fighters during the Mughal persecution of the 1740s, was informed on, and was brought before the governor Zakariya Khan. Offered his life if he cut his hair, he replied that they could have the scalp along with it. His hair was removed with the scalp attached and he survived some days afterwards. Sikhs tell this story specifically to answer the question of why the kesh cannot be traded for convenience — not because hair is holy in itself, but because it was the mark the state demanded and men died refusing to surrender. That framing is why the argument recurs in every generation that faces a dress-code case, from Delhi in the 1980s to French schools after 2004 to Canadian workplaces. The historical record for the episode is eighteenth-century Sikh chronicle rather than Mughal documentation.