Banda Singh Bahadur and the Misls: The Sikhs, 1708–1799

When Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded in 1708 (§5), the Khālsā was nine years old, the Guru’s sons were dead, and his town of Anandpur was lost. Ninety years later, when the young Ranjit Singh rode into Lahore in 1799 (§7), Sikh chiefs ruled most of Punjab and had struck their own coins in the Guru’s name for a generation. In between lies the century Sikhs remember as the time of martyrs: a rising that briefly made a Sikh state, the execution of its leader in Delhi, decades that Sikh memory keeps as persecution by Mughal governors and Afghan invaders, two great massacres, the destruction of the Harmandir Sāhib (the Golden Temple), and the slow conquest of the land by bands of horsemen who decided their affairs together at Amritsar.^[1]​^[2] Consensus

It is also the century in which the Khālsā took the shape the earlier chapters could only point to. The rahitnāmās were written, the doctrine of the Guru Granth and the Guru Panth was settled in practice, the warrior identity was made in war, and the shrines passed to holy men who were not Khālsā at all. Much of what Sikhs now remember of it was first written down in the nineteenth century, above all by Ratan Singh Bhaṅgū, in a history usually dated 1841 (G. S. Mann argues for c. 1810–1813).^[3]​^[4] Majority on the date. That is the argument of this chapter: the eighteenth century made the Khālsā as much as 1699 did, and its outside witnesses, most of them hostile, confirm the outline the Sikh tradition remembers.^[2]​^[5]​^[6] Majority

Timeline

The dates below follow Grewal and the Persian sources translated by Grewal and Habib; where Sikh and Persian dates differ, the cell says so.^[1]​^[5]

Banda Singh Bahādur

Who he was

The man the Sikhs call Banda Singh Bahādur (“the brave slave [of the Guru]”) was born, by the usual account, in about 1670 in the hills of Rājaurī and became a Vaiṣṇava ascetic, a Bairāgī, under the name Mādho Dās; he had a hermitage at Nanded on the Godāvarī when Guru Gobind Singh came there in 1708.^[7]​^[1] Consensus on the meeting; Majority on his origins. The Sikh tradition says that the Guru made him a Sikh, gave him the name Banda, five arrows, a drum and a banner, and sent him to Punjab with five senior Sikhs and a small escort, with letters to the congregations to rally to him.^[7]​^[3] Majority that this is the tradition’s account; it is first told in full in later texts.

The Persian chroniclers tell another story. To them he was an impostor who resembled the dead Guru, put forward by the Guru’s followers so that the zamīndārs would believe their leader had come back to life; most of them never use the name Banda, and call him simply “the Guru”.^[5]​^[8] Consensus that this is what they say. The two accounts agree on the essential point: he came from Guru Gobind Singh, and the Sikhs of Punjab accepted him because of it. Majority

Sirhind

He reached the country north of Delhi in 1709. Sikh sources date the sack of Samāṇā to late that year; the Persian sources describe the rising gathering force around Sadhaura, at the foot of the Śivāliks.^[7]​^[8] Majority Khāfī Khān puts his following at first at 4,000–5,000 horse and 7,000–8,000 foot, growing to 40,000 armed men.^[20]​^[8] Contested on the numbers. Irvine, reading the Persian chroniclers, says the recruits came mostly from castes then called low, and the chroniclers single out sweepers, tanners and the nomad traders called Banjārās.^[8]​^[21] Majority

His target was Wazīr Khān, the governor (faujdār) of Sirhind, who had executed Guru Gobind Singh’s two younger sons in 1704 (§5). The armies met a few miles from Sirhind on 22 May 1710 by Irvine’s reckoning (12 May Old Style, the date in Sikh histories; a report from the emperor’s camp gives the 24th). Irvine’s text places the battle on the plain between Alwan Sarai and Banur; a Persian fragment he cites in a footnote puts it near Chappaṛ Chiṛī, the name the Sikh tradition uses. Wazīr Khān was killed, and Sirhind was taken and sacked.^[8]​^[5] Consensus The Mughal writers describe the sack in terms of horror: the city plundered, mosques pulled down, the tomb of a Sufi saint at Sadhaura dug up, and Wazīr Khān’s Hindu minister, remembered by the Sikhs for his part in the killing of the Guru’s sons, singled out for vengeance.^[8]​^[21] Majority on the events; the chroniclers were partisans of the other side, and say so.^[5]

The first Sikh state

For a few years Banda ruled the old Mughal district (sarkār) of Sirhind, the country between the Sutlej and the Yamunā, from a fort in the hills near Sadhaura called Mukhlisgaṛh, which he renamed Lohgaṛh, “iron fort”.^[5]​^[8] Consensus He appointed a governor of Sirhind, Bāj Singh, and officers over the districts.^[21]​^[5] Consensus A report from Bahādur Shāh’s court says the Khālsā forbade the killing of animals in Sirhind, in keeping with Banda’s Vaiṣṇava past.^[5] Majority The chronicler Wārid says he ordered Hindus and Muslims who joined the Sikhs to eat together, “to obviate the distinction of the lowly and the well-born”, as Grewal summarises him.^[5] Majority The court newsletters (akhbārāt) tell a similar story from the other side. A news-sheet presented to Bahādur Shāh in the spring of 1711 (21 Rabīʿ I of his fifth regnal year), after the fall of Lohgaṛh, reported from Banda’s camp at Kalanaur that he had “promised and proclaimed, ‘I do not oppress the Muslims’”, that he fixed a daily allowance and wages for any Muslim who came to him, and that “He has permitted them to read khutba and namaz. As such, five thousand Muslims have gathered round him,” in Ganda Singh’s translation; a report a few weeks later says that “whosoever from amongst the Hindus and Muslims comes to him for service is looked after and fed.”^[10]​^[11] Majority that the news-writers reported this; the figure is theirs, and they were reporting on an enemy.

The coins and the seal. The clearest sign of what Banda claimed is the money. He struck coins at Lohgaṛh in 1710–1712, whose Persian couplet, as William Irvine read it from the Persian chroniclers, gives sovereignty to the Gurus:

Sikkah zad bar har do alam tegh-i-Nanak wahib ast, / Fath Govind Shah-i-shahan fazl-i-Sacha Sahib ast.

Irvine’s translation is: “Fath Govind, king of kings, struck coin in the two worlds, the sword of Nanak is the granter of desires, by grace he is the veritable Lord.”^[9]​^[8] Majority On his letters he used a seal with a second couplet, beginning with the cooking-pot (deg) and the sword (tegh), which said that Gobind Singh had received them, with victory and ready help, from Nānak.^[22]​^[5] Majority “Both these inscriptions reveal that Banda did claim sovereignty for the state he established, or tried to establish,” Grewal writes, “but not in his own name.”^[5] Majority

Did he give the land to the tiller? Many Sikh and Indian historians, following Ganda Singh, have credited Banda with abolishing the zamīndārī system and giving the land to those who worked it; Ganda Singh wrote in 1935 that by this reform “the actual cultivators of the soil became the proprietors of their holdings”.^[23]​^[7] Contested The Persian sources show something narrower but still striking: men of castes the chroniclers called low appointed to rule places where they had been servants, and the well-born obliged to greet them. Irvine’s summary of the chroniclers is that “a low scavenger or leather-dresser, the lowest of the low in Indian estimation, had only to leave home and join the Guru, when in a short space of time he would return to his birth-place as its ruler, with his order of appointment in his hand.”^[8] Majority that the chroniclers report this. No revenue document of Banda’s survives to show a redistribution of land, and Grewal and Dhavan describe a rising that drew in zamīndārs as well as peasants rather than a programme of land reform.^[1]​^[2] Contested The court newsletters, as their translator Bhagat Singh summarises them, have zamīndārs of the Bārī Doāb supplying Banda with arms and horses.^[7] Majority; Political in modern Punjab, where the claim is part of Banda’s memory as a social revolutionary.

Lohgaṛh, Gurdās Nangal and Delhi

The emperor Bahādur Shāh came north in person. His army took Lohgaṛh late in 1710, but Banda escaped into the hills.^[5]​^[8] Consensus The contemporary chronicler Kāmwar Khān dates the assault to 19 Shawwal 1122, 11 December 1710.^[24]​^[5] Consensus From his camp near Lohgaṛh on 29 Shawwal, about 20 December 1710 by the modern calendar (10 December Old Style, the date usually quoted), the emperor told his paymaster-general, Mahābat Khān, to send orders to the faujdārs around Delhi “to kill the worshippers of Nanak (the Sikhs) wherever they were found”, as Ganda Singh translated the court newsletter in which it is recorded.^[10]​^[11] Majority Farrukh-Siyar repeated the order, the newsletters’ later translator Bhagat Singh writes, “in almost the same words”.^[7] Majority The rising went on for five more years, in the hills, in the Bārī Doāb and around Batala, until the governor of Lahore, ʿAbd al-Ṣamad Khān, with troops sent from Delhi, shut Banda into a small fortified enclosure at Gurdās Nangal near Gurdaspur in April 1715. After eight months of siege and starvation he surrendered on 17 December 1715 (7 December Old Style, the date in most Sikh histories).^[8]​^[12] Consensus Muḥammad Qāsim, who watched the siege, says that many Sikhs deserted, cutting off their hair to escape notice.^[21]​^[5] Majority

The prisoners were brought into Delhi on 10 March 1716, in a procession copied from the one that had humiliated the Maratha king Sambhājī: the heads of the dead on poles, Banda in an iron cage on an elephant dressed in a gold-brocade robe and a red turban, and behind him the prisoners on camels in sheepskin caps.^[13]​^[12] Consensus Mīrzā Muḥammad, an imperial officer who went to watch, put them at “over seven hundred and forty”; the English envoys John Surman and Edward Stephenson, who were at the court on the East India Company’s business, wrote “about Seven hundred and eighty”, with “about two thousand heads stuck upon poles”.^[13]​^[14] Contested on the numbers. The followers were beheaded in batches, about a hundred a day, over a week or more, beginning on 15 March 1716 by Irvine’s reckoning (5 March Old Style); the other sources’ dates run to 21 March.^[8]​^[13]​^[5] Majority

What struck every witness was that they would not recant. Mīrzā Muḥammad, who wrote of them with open hostility, records their answer to those who taunted them in the streets (Primary source 2); Khāfī Khān tells of a young prisoner whose mother won his release by swearing he was not a Sikh, and who denied her and asked to die with his companions; the English envoys wrote that “to the last it has not been found that one apostatized from this new formed Religion” (Primary source 3).^[20]​^[5]​^[14] Consensus Banda himself was kept alive for three months while his captors tried to learn where his treasure was, and was executed in June 1716 (the 19th or 20th by the modern calendar), with his small son, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār Kākī at Mehraulī; the chroniclers describe a death by torture.^[5]​^[12] Consensus His followers’ deaths became one of the founding memories of Sikh martyrdom.^[25] Consensus

Bandaī and Tat Khālsā

Who was Guru now?

Banda’s success raised the question that Guru Gobind Singh’s death had left open (§5). Kesar Singh Chhibbar, writing in 1769, says that many regarded Banda as the eleventh Guru, though Chhibbar himself did not; Ratan Singh Bhaṅgū, in a history usually dated 1841, says that he started a new panth of his own, with his own greeting (fateh daras, often written fateh darshan, “behold victory”, in place of the Khālsā’s), and that his claim to rule alienated the Sikhs who held that Guru Gobind Singh had given sovereignty to the Khālsā as a whole.^[26]​^[3]​^[5] Majority The Persian writers confirm the greeting: Banda’s men went into battle shouting fateh daras and Sacha Padshah, “true king”, in Irvine’s spellings; Khāfī Khān reports the same cries.^[8]​^[20]​^[5] Consensus

The tradition remembers the opponents as the Tat Khālsā (“the true Khālsā”), loyal to Guru Gobind Singh’s widow Mātā Sundarī in Delhi, and Banda’s followers as the Bandaī Khālsā. The later chronicles tell that after Banda’s death the two parties met at Amritsar and that Bhāī Manī Singh, keeper of the Harmandir, settled the dispute; the Tat Khālsā prevailed.^[7]​^[2] Majority that the tradition says so; the details are first told in the nineteenth century. The Bandaī Sikhs survived as a small following, and Banda’s line kept a shrine at Ḍerā Bābā Bandā near Riāsī in Jammu.^[7] Majority

The Guru’s widows

Mātā Sundarī, who lived in Delhi until her death in 1747, and Mātā Sāhib Devī (Mātā Sāhib Kaur) were the focus of loyalty for many Sikhs after 1708. The Persian writer Chaturman, in 1759–60, thought each had held a “spiritual seat”, and that a youth adopted by Mātā Sundarī, Ajīt Singh, had been set up as Guru by some until his execution in Delhi, which Chaturman dates 1721–22 and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, with Irvine, to 1725.^[5]​^[7]​^[8] Majority that he says so. Their own letters tell a different story. Mātā Sundarī’s surviving hukamnāmās, dated between 1717 and 1730, and Mātā Sāhib Devī’s, from 1726 to 1734, address the Sikhs as “the Khālsā of Akāl Purakh”, ask for offerings in the Guru’s name and claim no Guruship for their writers; Grewal reads them as speaking for “the house of the Guru”.^[15]​^[5] Majority By 1759 a hukamnāmā to the Sikhs of Patna, dated 12 April and printed in Ganda Singh’s edition of the hukamnāmās, was issued by “the Khalsa of Sat Sri Akal Purakh Ji”, in Grewal’s rendering: the community writing as the Guru.^[27]​^[5] Majority This is the doctrine of the Guru Panth becoming practice, a generation after 1708.

Persecution

The Mughal governors

The thirty years after Banda’s death were the hardest the Khālsā remembers. The governors of Lahore, ʿAbd al-Ṣamad Khān (to 1726) and his son Zakarīyā Khān (1726–1745), hunted the Sikh bands, and the Sikh chronicles tell of rewards for Sikh heads and of Sikhs living in the forests and the desert of the Lakkhī Jungle in the Mālvā.^[1]​^[3] Majority The non-Sikh sources are almost silent on these years: Grewal notes that they have “nothing about their activity” between Banda and the governorship of Muʿīn al-Mulk in 1748.^[5] Majority Most of what is known comes from Bhaṅgū and later writers.

Persecution alternated with deals. In 1733 Zakarīyā Khān, unable to crush the bands, offered them a jāgīr and the title of Nawāb for their leader; they gave it to Kapūr Singh, who organised the fighters into an older and a younger army, the Buḍḍhā Dal and the Taruṇā Dal. The arrangement broke down within two years.^[7]​^[2] Majority Dhavan’s point is that this was the ordinary politics of the late Mughal Punjab: armed peasant bands bargained with governors as other zamīndārs did, and their leaders became sardārs by the same means.^[2] Majority

Bhāī Manī Singh

Bhāī Manī Singh, the companion of Guru Gobind Singh who had kept the Harmandir for Mātā Sundarī and is credited by tradition with compiling the Dasam Granth (§5), was executed at Lahore. The tradition says he had been permitted to hold a festival gathering at Amritsar on payment of a levy, warned the Sikhs away when he learned that troops were to be sent against them, could not pay, and refusing to accept Islam was cut apart joint by joint.^[7] Majority that this is the tradition’s account. The year is disputed: 1734 in much Sikh writing; 1737, at Dīvālī, in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism; 1738 in some others.^[7] Contested “Cut joint by joint” (band band kaṭāe) entered the Ardās, the daily prayer, as one of its marks of martyrdom (Primary source 6).^[28]​^[25] Consensus

Nādir Shāh, 1739

The Persian conqueror Nādir Shāh invaded India in 1738–39, defeated the Mughal army at Karnāl and sacked Delhi (see Islam §9 for the empire’s decline). The Sikh chronicles say that Sikh bands fell on his baggage as he returned through Punjab, and Bhaṅgū tells of his warning to Zakarīyā Khān that these people would one day rule the country.^[1]​^[3] Consensus on the invasion; Majority that Sikh bands raided his columns; Contested on the warning, which is the kind of prophecy written after the event.

The Chhoṭā Ghallūghārā, 1746

In 1746 Jaspat Rāi, a Mughal commander at Eminābād, was killed by a Sikh band, and his brother Lakhpat Rāi, a minister (dīwān) at Lahore, swore revenge. By the Sikh account he had the Sikhs of Lahore executed, then hunted the main body of the Khālsā through the marshes of Kāhnūvān and into the hills; Sikh chronicles put the losses at about 7,000 killed and 3,000 captured, the captives being beheaded at Lahore.^[7]​^[3] Majority on the campaign; Contested on the numbers, which come only from the Sikh side. The Sikhs called it the ghallūghārā, the ‘great massacre’ (often rendered ‘holocaust’); after 1762 it became the Chhoṭā, the lesser one.^[7] Consensus

The Afghan wars

Ahmad Shāh Abdālī

Ahmad Shāh Abdālī (Durrānī), who had served Nādir Shāh and founded the Afghan kingdom after his death in 1747, invaded India nine times between 1747 and 1769; Punjab was ceded to him by the Mughals in 1752.^[1]​^[5] Consensus His wars, with the Marathas as well as the Mughals, broke what was left of Mughal government in Punjab, and the Sikhs fought both sides of them and gained from both.^[5]​^[2] Consensus Ṭahmās Khān, a servant of the Mughal governor who lived through these years, records how after 1757 “from every side tumult and rebellion began to be raised by the Sikhs”, until their bands, a thousand strong, sacked the suburbs of Lahore by night.^[16]​^[5] Consensus

The Vaḍḍā Ghallūghārā, 1762

After his victory over the Marathas at Pānīpat in January 1761, Abdālī returned in the winter of 1761–62 specifically to break the Sikhs. On 5 February 1762, after a forced march, he caught the Dal Khālsā near Kup, north of Malerkotla, with its baggage train of families, and fought it all day as it retreated towards Barnālā.^[7]​^[5] Consensus The estimates of the Sikh dead:

Contested on every figure; the agreement of the non-Sikh contemporary and the Sikh chronicler on a number in the tens of thousands is the strongest evidence of the scale. The news reports from Delhi to the Maratha courts, which follow these years closely, do not mention the battle at all.^[18]​^[5] Majority Ṭahmās, who had watched the Sikhs for a decade, expected them to rise again within months, and they did.^[5] Consensus

The Harmandir destroyed and rebuilt

Abdālī’s commanders had desecrated the Harmandir in 1757; the Sikh tradition remembers Bābā Dīp Singh, leader of the Shahīd misl, dying in the attempt to retake it.^[1]​^[7] Majority In April 1762, after the Ghallūghārā, Abdālī blew the building up with gunpowder and had the tank filled in. Forster, two decades later, wrote that Amritsar “was rased to the ground, and the sacred waters choaked up with its ruins”, and that pyramids of Sikh heads were built.^[17]​^[7] Consensus

The Sikhs began rebuilding almost at once. A news report from Delhi in October 1763 says that a large number of Sikhs had gathered at Amritsar and started building, employing some Durrānīs as labourers; the Sikh tradition dates the foundation of the new sanctum to April 1764, paid for out of the plunder of Sirhind and supervised by Bhāī Des Rāj, and its completion, with the causeway and gateway, to the 1770s.^[18]​^[5]​^[7] Majority When Abdālī came back in December 1764, the Jangnāma says, he found only thirty Sikhs in the enclosure, who “did not at all show any fear of being killed nor the dread of death” and died fighting; Sikh sources name their leader as Gurbakhsh Singh.^[29]​^[5] Consensus “The Harmandar Sahib at Amritsar was destroyed and desecrated by Ahmad Shah Abdali on two or three occasions,” Grewal writes; “Everytime it was rebuilt through the collective effort of the Khalsa.”^[5] The gold came later, under Ranjit Singh (§7). Consensus

The misls

From bands to confederacies

The fighting Khālsā of the 1730s and 1740s was a shifting set of armed bands (jathās, ḍerās), each following a leader. By Sikh tradition, at Vaisākhī on 29 March 1748, a few months after Abdālī’s first invasion, the bands gathered at Amritsar were united in the Dal Khālsā (“the army of the Khālsā”) under Jassā Singh Āhlūvālīā, in eleven groupings that came to be called misls.^[7]​^[2] Majority The word is Arabic-Persian, usually explained as “alike, equal” or “a file”; Sainapati already uses it of a troop of the Guru’s horsemen.^[7] Majority

The list is conventional, and so is the number. The usual twelve are the Bhaṅgī, Āhlūvālīā, Rāmgaṛhīā, Kanhaiyā, Sukerchakia, Nakaī, Ḍallevālīā, Nishānāṅvālī, Karoṛsiṅghīā, Siṅghpurīā (or Faizullāpurīā) and Shahīd misls of the Dal Khālsā, and the Phūlkīāṅ chiefs of Patiala, Nābhā and Jīnd outside it.^[7] Majority The neat dozen is a later convention; in the eighteenth century the groupings were more fluid, and followers could change allegiance.^[2]​^[7] Majority The Persian witnesses name the chiefs, not the misls: the Jangnāma of 1765 lists Jhaṇḍā Singh, Harī Singh and Lahiṇā Singh Bhaṅgī, Chaṛhat Singh Sukerchakia, Jai Singh Kanhaiyā, and “Jassa Kalal” and “Jassa Najjar”, Jassā Singh Āhlūvālīā and Jassā Singh Rāmgaṛhīā, named by the castes of distiller and carpenter.^[29]​^[5] Consensus Most of the chiefs were Jaṭs; those two were not.^[1] Majority

The Sarbat Khālsā and the gurmatā

The misls met as the Sarbat Khālsā, “the whole Khālsā”, at Amritsar, by Bhaṅgū’s account at Vaisākhī and Dīvālī, and took decisions called gurmatās (“the Guru’s counsel”), passed before the Akāl Takht in the presence of the scripture: the Guru Granth and the Guru Panth acting together, as the doctrine Sikhs date to 1708 required (§5).^[3]​^[5]​^[7] Majority The news reports from Delhi confirm the practice: in 1763 they describe the Sikh chiefs preparing to meet at Amritsar “for gurmata”, and Jassā Singh telling the emperor’s envoy that he would put the emperor’s orders before the chiefs there.^[18]​^[5] Consensus The non-Sikh sources, Grewal notes, mention the gurmatā but never the doctrine of the Guru Panth behind it.^[5] Majority

How far this was government is another matter. Forster, travelling in 1783, described the “grand convention” in the past tense, and wrote that it was “now rarely summoned” (Primary source 5); the British historian J. D. Cunningham called the whole system “a theocratic confederate feudalism”.^[17]​^[30] Majority The picture of a Sikh commonwealth governed by its assemblies owes much to Forster, John Malcolm (1812) and Bhaṅgū; the reports of the 1760s show chiefs who met to coordinate, quarrelled over spoils and fought each other for Lahore.^[5]​^[2] Majority

Rākhī: protection

Before they ruled land directly, the misls took rākhī (“protection”): villages paid a share of the revenue, usually put at a fifth, twice a year at the harvests, in return for being left alone and defended against others.^[7]​^[1] Majority To the villagers it was another levy in a country where every armed power took one; to the Khālsā it was the step between raiding and government.^[2] Majority In the country between Delhi and the Yamunā it was still collected at the end of the century.^[7] Majority

The Phūlkīāṅ chiefs and their titles

The Phūlkīāṅ chiefs of the Mālvā, descendants of a Jaṭ chaudhrī named Phūl, took another road. Ālā Singh of Patiala dealt with Mughal and Afghan governors as a zamīndār: in 1763 his troops were collecting revenue for Zain Khān, the Afghan governor of Sirhind, and in 1765, when the other chiefs urged him not to accept Abdālī’s overlordship, he answered that he was “a zamīndār” and could not refuse.^[18]​^[5] Consensus Abdālī recognised him in 1761 and gave him the title of Raja in 1765; his grandson Amar Singh received from Abdālī in 1767 the title Rājā-i Rājgān, “raja of rajas”.^[7] Majority The tradition also tells that after the Ghallūghārā of 1762 Ālā Singh paid Abdālī to be spared the order to shave his head.^[7] Majority that the tradition says so. Patiala, Nābhā and Jīnd survived as princely states under the British until 1947.^[1] Consensus

Sikh rule: Lahore, 1765

In January 1764 the Dal Khālsā took Sirhind and killed Zain Khān; in the following months the chiefs divided the Sutlej–Yamunā country and the Doābs among themselves, and demanded from the Afghan governors of Multan and Kashmir the tribute they had paid Abdālī.^[5] Consensus Qāẓī Nūr Muḥammad, who rode with the Baluch chief Naṣīr Khān on Abdālī’s campaign of 1764–65, wrote that the Sikhs “have divided up Panjab among themselves, giving it to every man, old or young”.^[29] Consensus In 1765 the Bhaṅgī chiefs Lahiṇā Singh and Gujjar Singh and Sobhā Singh Kanhaiyā held Lahore, and the Khālsā struck coins there bearing the couplet of Banda’s seal, deg tegh fateh.^[19]​^[8]​^[5]​^[7] Consensus Grewal treats the coin as the Sikhs’ declaration of sovereignty, coming after they were already the rulers in fact.^[5] Majority

The coin had a rival. A rupee in Jassā Singh Āhlūvālīā’s own name, said to have been struck at Lahore in 1761, is reported by a contemporary Persian writer, but no specimen survives; a nineteenth-century chronicler, Ganesh Dās, says it was struck by Lahore’s qāzīs to provoke Abdālī. Grewal calls it “the controversial coin of Jassa Singh”.^[5]​^[7] Contested Either way, the coins struck in 1765 did what Banda’s had done: they named the Gurus, not the chiefs.^[5] Majority The words deg tegh fateh, the pot that feeds and the sword that protects, are still in the Ardās.^[28] Consensus

The last decades

After Abdālī’s last great campaign (1766–67) and his death (1772), the misls were the power in Punjab, and their horsemen raided far beyond it: in 1783 a Sikh army under Baghel Singh camped in Delhi, and by Sikh tradition he stayed to mark the sites of the Gurus’ presence there with gurdwaras.^[7]​^[1] Majority Unity did not survive success. The chiefs fought one another; Forster saw a land “divided into numerous states, which pursue an independent interest”, and predicted that “some ambitious chief” would absorb the rest and raise “the standard of monarchy”.^[17] Consensus on the text. Women held power among them too: Sadā Kaur led the Kanhaiyā misl in the 1790s and helped her son-in-law Ranjit Singh of the Sukerchakia misl to take Lahore in 1799, which is where §7 begins.^[1]​^[7] Majority

Who kept the shrines

While, by the Sikh chronicles’ account, Khālsā Sikhs were hunted, the shrines of the Gurus were often in other hands. The Udāsīs, ascetics who traced their line to Guru Nānak’s son Srī Chand (§3), and the Nirmalās, a learned order whose members studied Sanskrit and read the Gurus’ hymns in the terms of Vedānta, kept many gurdwaras through the century and after it. They did not keep the Khālsā form, they could live where a turbaned Khālsā Sikh could not, and the misl chiefs, and later Ranjit Singh, endowed them with land.^[31]​^[1] Majority Forster in 1783 noted that “the administration of ecclesiastical affairs was entrusted to a certain society of religeuse [sic], composed chiefly of the descendants of their original priests”, the Bedīs and Sodhīs of the Gurus’ families.^[17] Majority on whom he meant.

What that meant for practice is the subject of Oberoi’s argument (§7, §8). In the shrines kept by Udāsī and Nirmalā mahants, worship took forms shared with the Hindu traditions around them, images among them, which the Singh Sabhā reformers of the late nineteenth century would condemn and the gurdwara reform movement of the 1920s would expel (§9).^[31]​^[6] Majority on the custodianship; Contested on how far it represented a different Sikhism rather than a compromise of hard times.

The rahitnāmās take shape

The codes of conduct that define the Khālsā were written in these decades, and §5 sets out their dates: the Tankhāhnāmā from 1718–19, the Chaupā Singh rahitnāmā in the 1740s–1760s, the codes attributed to Prahlād Singh, and Desā Singh’s of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.^[6]​^[32]​^[33] Majority on the dates. Their rules carry the century’s marks: uncut hair; no tobacco; no meat killed in the Muslim manner; no relations with Muslim women; distance from the “Turks”, the rulers; and the promise that “the Khālsā shall rule”.^[6] Majority McLeod read them as the Khālsā’s answer to persecution and war; Dhavan as the record of an argument among Sikhs (Khālsā and non-Khālsā, Jaṭ and Khatrī, warriors and scholars) about who belonged and on what terms.^[6]​^[2] Contested on how much of each code reaches back to 1699.

The outsiders saw a separate people. Qāẓī Nūr Muḥammad, who wrote to celebrate a holy war against them and called them “miscreants”, nonetheless told his readers that the Sikhs “are not from amongst the Hindus” and had “a distinct religion of their own” (Primary source 4).^[29] Consensus on the text; Political in modern use, where the line is quoted in the argument over whether Sikhs are Hindus (§8).

The evidence ledger

Primary sources

What is absent

• A record from Banda’s own government. No order, revenue paper or letter of his administration survives in the original beyond the seal’s wording and a few later-copied hukamnāmās; his state is known mostly from its enemies.^[5] Majority
• A Persian witness to the persecution of the 1720s–1740s. Between Banda and 1748 the non-Sikh sources say almost nothing about the Sikhs; the stories of these years are Bhaṅgū’s and later.^[5] Majority
• Outside numbers for the Chhoṭā Ghallūghārā. The figures for 1746 are the Sikh chroniclers’. Majority
• The Vaḍḍā Ghallūghārā in the Delhi reports. The news-writers who followed the Sikhs month by month do not mention it.^[5] Majority
• A written constitution of the misls. There are no minutes of the Sarbat Khālsā; the twelve-misl scheme is a later convention, and the groupings were more fluid.^[2]​^[7] Majority
• A surviving specimen of Jassā Singh’s coin of 1761. Contested

Debates

Who was Banda?

Contested; Political on the social-revolution reading.

How many died in the Ghallūghārās?

The numbers come from a Sikh chronicler writing decades later, a non-Sikh contemporary, and a British traveller’s hearsay; they agree on tens of thousands for 1762 and differ on everything else.^[16]​^[3]​^[7] Contested

What were the misls?

Contested The views differ more in emphasis than in fact, and most historians combine the last two. Majority

Further reading