The Sikhs now faced the most savage persecution in their history. With the death of Bahadur Shah in 1712 and the accession of Far-rukh Siyar to the throne in 1713, the Mughal Empire came to be headed by a man who outstripped all his predecessors in gratuitous cruelty. His governors and commanders curried favour with him by sending him severed Sikh heads ‘for his pleasure’.26 When once Zakariya Khan, for example, who was later to become governor of Lahore under him, called on the emperor in Delhi and presented him with a particularly large number of Sikh heads, the overjoyed emperor raised Zakariya’s rank and loaded him with presents. Zakariya ordered his men to arrest Sikhs wherever they saw them and bring them to Lahore for daily public executions. He announced a reward of 50 rupees for every Sikh head brought to him.
But the head-hunters’ policies made the Sikhs even more determined to make the administration pay for its misdeeds. Zakariya Khan, disconcerted by the unending plunder of his treasuries and arsenals and the loss of a number of his men, now tried appeasement. In 1733 he offered the Sikhs a large jagir or gift of land, which they willingly accepted. This proved a major error from the Mughal point of view. The Sikhs saw an opportunity for rigorous institutionalization of their activities that concerned the larger purpose of safeguarding the faith and its followers from genocidal Mughal attacks. Kapur Singh was the man chosen to head this programme. A tough, self-assured and experienced warrior, he was also deeply devout and dedicated to building solid institutions that would protect the Sikhs.
He organized the Sikhs into different groupings or dals, which would later be merged into the Dal Khalsa. The dals had responsibilities ranging from armed resistance against the Mughals and guarding Sikh places of worship to attending to conversions and baptisms. The Taruna Dal, composed of younger men, relished the opportunity of dealing with the Mughal military; the years of Mughal oppression had hardened Sikh farmers into a motivated potential soldiery, able-bodied men keeping lance and sword by them as they worked on their land. As its membership increased to 12,000, it was further divided into five sections, each having its own commander with his banner, drum and administrative control of the territories annexed by him.
These five sections, along with several more that would be formed as time went on, were to lead to the formation of the Sikh misls. The word misl in Arabic means ‘equal’; the term was first used by Guru Gobind Singh in 1688 when he organized the Sikhs into a battle formation of groups each under its own leader, with equal power and authority. These groups eventually took the form of twelve misls, which derived their names from their villages or leaders: Ahluwalia, Bhangi, Ramgarhia, Faizullapuria, Kanaihya, Sukerchakia, Dallewalia, Shahid or Nihang, Nakkai, Nishanwalia, Karorsinghia and Phulkian. The misl chiefs, the Sardars, who have been compared to the barons of medieval times, had complete control over their territories, and their military units were able to discourage any defiance of their authority. They had absolute autonomy, but in times of war they pooled their resources to take on the enemy. In times of peace they often fought each other.
The misl warrior was a soldier of fortune, a horseman who owned his own mount and equipment, armed with matchlock, spear and sword. Infantry and artillery were virtually unknown to the Sikhs for serious purposes before the days of Ranjit Singh. Sikh soldiers despised ‘footmen’ who were assigned the meaner duties – garrison tasks, provisioning, taking care of the women. ‘The Sikh horseman’, according to Bikrama Jit Hasrat, ‘was theoretically a soldier of the Khalsa, fired by the mystic ideals of Gobind which he little understood, and he had no politics. He was also a soldier of the Panth [Sikh community], out to destroy the enemies of the Faith in all religious fervour and patriotism. Above all, he was a free-lance, a republican with a revolutionary impulse … The armies of the Dal Khalsa, unencumbered by heavy ordnance, possessed an amazing manoeuvrability. [They] were sturdy and agile men who could swiftly load their matchlocks on horseback and charge the enemy at top speed, repeating the operation several times. They looked down upon the comforts of the tents, carrying their and their animals’ rations of grains in a knapsack, and with two blankets under the saddle as their bedding, they marched off with lightning rapidity in and out of battle.’27 At the height of their power in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the misls could muster around 70,000 such horsemen.
The Sikhs at this time accounted for only 7 per cent of the population of the Punjab, as against 50 per cent Muslims and 42 per cent Hindus.28 Before their golden period they had to face huge and continuing adversity. To start with, Zakariya Khan, having given them a jagir as a peace offering, sent a force two years later to reoccupy it. He took Amritsar by siege, plundered the Harmandir Sahib, filled the pool with slaughtered animals and desecrated its relics.
When Zakariya Khan died in 1745 and his son Shah Nawaz Khan succeeded him as governor of Lahore, the progeny proved even worse than the parent. Nawaz Khan’s favourite pastime appears to have been to watch the bellies of captive Sikhs being ripped open and iron pegs stuck into their heads. In June 1746 the first of the two so-called ghalugharas (disasters) took place: a large body of Mughal troops under Yahiya Khan massacred 7,000 Sikhs while an additional 3,000 were captured and taken to Lahore for public execution. The wada ghalughara or great disaster – to be described – took place in February 1762, perpetrated by the Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Abdali.
The sixteen years between the two ghalugharas saw copious bloodshed in the Punjab, with the forces of the Khalsa continually set upon by one or another of their three principal enemies – the invaders Nadir Shah of Persia, the Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Abdali and the Mughal emperor. Abdali invaded India eight times between the years 1748 and 1768. Punjab now became the setting for a triangular struggle between the Afghans, Sikhs and Mughals. Abdali and the Mughals wanted to see the end of the Sikhs, but the Khalsa was willing to take on both. Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, head of the Ahluwalia misl, liberated the Golden Temple from Mughal control and restored the shrine to its former glory. In 1752 the new governor of Lahore, Mir Mannu, a particularly duplicitous and sadistic man who had defected from the Mughals to the Afghans and who was keen to curry favour with Abdali, now officially declared Punjab an Afghan province, in defiance of the declared Sikh sovereignty over several regions and towns of Punjab dating from Banda Singh’s time.
When in 1757 the Sikhs waylaid Abdali’s baggage train full of the wealth he had plundered from Delhi, Mathura and Vrindavan, rescued hundreds of captive Hindu girls and returned them to their homes, it was the last straw for him. He ordered his son Timur Shah, now governor of Lahore, to eliminate the ‘accursed infidels’ and their Golden Temple once and for all.
Attacks and counter-attacks between the Sikhs and their persecutors formed a continuing dance of death on the landscape of Punjab, culminating in the wada ghalughara on 5 February 1762. In a surprise attack on a large assembly of Sikhs at Kup near Sirhind, Abdali’s army, having covered 110 miles in two days, killed from 10,000 to 30,000 Sikhs (estimates vary), a very large number of whom were women and children who were being escorted to a safer region. In the ferocious fighting the odds were heavily loaded against the Sikhs.
Abdali now headed for the Golden Temple and struck on 10 April 1762, at a time when thousands had gathered there for the Baisakhi celebrations. The bloodbath was horrific. The Harmandir was blown apart with gunpowder. The pool was filled with the debris of destroyed buildings, human bodies, carcasses of cows and much else, and topping it all a pyramid of Sikh heads was erected. Within a few months, however, early in 1763, Charat Singh, head of the Sukerchakia misl – whose grandson Ranjit Singh was to be born one and a half decades later – managed to wrest back control of the Golden Temple.
The very next year, however, Abdali was back in India and once more bore down on the Sikh shrine. Each of the thirty Sikhs present died defending the sacred edifice, which was yet again demolished and defiled. But this was the last time the Afghans or the Mughals would ever set foot in it. In a swift military action the Sikh
s not only annexed Lahore on 16 April 1765 but declared their sovereignty over the whole of Punjab. To make absolutely clear that political power in the region now rested with them, they struck coins and declared Lahore the mint city, Dar-ul-Sultanate (Seat of [Sikh] Power).
With their control of Punjab, in addition to large parts of what is now Pakistan, plus the present-day states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, the Khalsa now emerged as a territorial power of significance and substance. The process was helped by the economic activities of the twelve misls which were beginning to prosper as major cultivators of crops such as wheat, rice, pulses, barley, sugar cane, cotton, indigo and jaggery, in addition to a wide variety of fruit. Nor were manufacturing, crafts, construction of townships or internal and external trade neglected. Exports were sent to Persia, Arabia, Yarkand, Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan, Turfan and Bokhara. Lahore and Amritsar between them also produced increasingly fine silks, shawls, woollen materials, carpets and metalware. The Sikhs, with their entrepreneurial drive and inclination to spend well and indulge themselves fully, were changing the character of the Punjab.
In March 1783 an event took place that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. A combined misl force under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, outstanding among Sikh chiefs for his qualities of leadership, entered Delhi, the imperial seat of the once mighty Mughals. Some of the misl leaders arrived at the Red Fort which represented Mughal power and walked into the emperor’s audience hall, and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia had himself installed on the imperial throne. It was a symbolic move, but its meaning was clear to all. The Khalsa withdrew only after the emperor agreed to an annual tribute, but when he broke his promise in 1785 the Sikhs returned to Delhi and subjugated it once again. They had no wish to take permanent possession of it, but they made the emperor agree to the construction of eight gurdwaras, each built on a site with a special significance for the Sikhs, one of them being Gurdwara Sisganj, on the spot where Emperor Aurangzeb had had Guru Tegh Bahadur, father of Guru Gobind Singh, tortured and beheaded in November 1675.
The Sikh contingents entering Delhi scrupulously maintained the secular and civilized principles of their religious teachings. No orgy of bloodshed was indulged in despite the number of revered Sikhs who had been brought to Delhi over the years to be barbarically put to death by successive Mughal rulers.
The misls contributed significantly to the Sikh vision, with its moral underpinnings. Each of them consolidated Sikh power in the Punjab by imaginatively developing their territories and providing just administration. ‘In all contemporary records, mostly in Persian,’ one modern historian points out, ‘written generally by Muslims as well as by Maratha agents posted at a number of places in Northern India, there is not a single instance either in Delhi or elsewhere in which Sikhs raised a finger against women.’29 And as we have seen, with Sikh rule now established over large parts of the Punjab, its people now experienced a sense of security and a rapid increase in prosperity to a much greater degree than over the past half-century.
Two Afghan rulers, however, were still forces to be reckoned with for the Sikhs: Abdali’s son Timur Shah who succeeded him in 1772 and Timur’s son Zaman Shah who succeeded him in 1793. While Timur Shah avoided the Sikhs as far as possible, Zaman Shah during one of his invasions briefly occupied Lahore before being thrown out. But events of this period belong to the young Ranjit Singh’s first years of leadership and will be described later.
The eighteenth century was a costly one for the Sikhs. It has been estimated that Guru Gobind Singh, in his battles with the Mughals, lost about 5,000 men and Banda Singh at least 25,000; that after Banda Singh’s execution Abdus Samad Khan, governor of Punjab (1713-26), killed not less than 20,000 Sikhs and his son and successor Zakariya Khan (1726-45) an equal number; that Yahiya Khan (1746-7) accounted for some 10,000 Sikhs in a single campaign after the chhota ghalughara, the first disaster; and that his brother-in-law Muin-ul-Mulk, indulging his sadistic instincts between 1748 and 1753 as governor of Punjab by putting a price on Sikh heads, dispatched more than 30,000. Adeena Beg Khan, a Punjabi Arain, put to death at least 5,000 Sikhs in 1758; Ahmad Shah Abdali and his Afghan governors killed around 60,000 between 1753 and 1767; Abdali’s deputy Najib-ud-Daulah, also an Afghan, slew nearly 20,000. ‘Petty officials and the public’ may have killed 4,000.30
To this total of around 200,000 Sikhs killed over the first seventy years of the eighteenth century must be added the casualties of the clashes with Timur Shah and Zaman Shah.
2
Drumbeat of a School Drop-out
‘The Maharaja [Ranjit Singh] has no throne.
“My sword”, he observed, “procures me
all the distinction I desire.”‘
BARON CHARLES HUGEI.
Into this bloodied landscape of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, only son of Mahan Singh Sukerchakia and Raj Kaur, daughter of Raja Gajpat Singh of Jind, was born on 13 November 1780. He seemed an unlikely prospect as the founder of a kingdom. The people of the Punjab belonged to the tall, large-boned type settled in northern India since the Aryan migrations of around 1500 BC, physically distinctive in the region to this day. Ranjit Singh conformed to this type not at all. He was small of stature and slight of build, and in childhood his face was scarred by smallpox, which left him blind in one eye. In his early years he was nicknamed Kana, ‘the one-eyed one’. As C.H. Payne, a chronicler of the Sikhs, put it: ‘The gifts which nature lavished on Ranjit Singh were of the abstract rather than the concrete order. His strength of character and personal magnetism [were to be] the real sources of his greatness.’1 A Western observer of the time wrote of ‘the splendid mental powers with which nature had endowed him’.2
As a child the boy does not seem to have occupied himself with any of the pursuits in which children of privileged circumstances are apt to indulge or be indulged. Instead of giving his child playthings, his father is said to have handed him a sword. While he could never find the time to learn to read and write beyond the Gurmukhi alphabet, he eagerly learnt musketry and swordsmanship. The stories of the daring feats of his father, grandfather and others before them greatly influenced him and helped shape the course of his life.
The most colourful of his ancestors was a figure from the seventeenth century, Desu, a cultivator, his father’s great-greatgrandfather. Desu’s earthly possessions consisted of twenty-five acres of land, a well, three ploughs and two houses for his family and cattle. The Sukerchakia misl took its name from that of his village, Suker Chak, which was located near the town of Gujranwala, about forty miles north of Lahore.
An accomplished cattle-lifter, Desu was also known for his courage and derring-do; he was a giant of a man and a fearless fighter. The great love in his life was his piebald mare Desan, on which he would swim all the five rivers of Punjab when in flood. According to one account, he and Desan did this fifty times. At the age of fifty, Desu decided to go and see Guru Gobind Singh at Anandpur with the request that he baptize him. After the baptism his name was changed to Budha Singh, and, greatly inspired by the Guru, he stayed with him to participate in the many battles fought by the Khalsa. When he died in 1715 at Gurdas Nangal fighting alongside Banda Singh, there were twenty-nine scars of sword cuts on his body, seven bullet wounds and seven wounds from spears and arrows.
The two sons of this colourful man, Nodh Singh and Chanda Singh, were much less spectacular in their military exploits. But Nodh Singh’s eldest son Charat Singh, Ranjit Singh’s grandfather, stood out as a man of great stature both on the battlefield and because of the extent to which he expanded the territories of the Sukerchakias. His daring exploits attracted Abdali’s attention, and in clashes in 1761, 1764 and 1766 he tried to eliminate Charat Singh, but the indomitable misl chief emerged stronger than ever, making sure after each engagement to annex still more territories.
In his brief lifespan of forty-five years, he acquired the entire districts of Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, Jhelum, Shahpur, Fatehgunj, the salt mines of Khewra an
d Pind Dadan Khan and the much fought-over northerly fort of Rohtas. He also captured Chakwal, Jalalpur, Rasulpur, the towns of Kot Sahib Khan, Raja Ka Kot, parts of Chaj and Sind Sagar Doab and took many other territories under his control, such as parts of Rawalpindi, but in some cases he was content merely to receive revenue. By means of many other such arrangements he established his suzerainty, the Sukerchakia misl, over a considerable area. His power was won and consolidated not only by force of arms but through alliances entered into by marrying his sons, sister and daughters into families of consequence. The broad base he created was without doubt the springboard that was to enable his grandson to establish an empire of the Sikhs. Had it not been for his untimely death at forty-five, caused by the accidental firing of his own gun, this energetic man would have achieved much more.
Of his three children, his two sons Mahan Singh and Sahaj Singh and their sister Raj Kaur, it was Mahan Singh, born in 1760, who headed the misl and proved a worthy successor to his father who died when the boy was just ten. Until he took charge of the misl just five years later, his purposeful and able mother, Mai Dessan, handled its affairs and its extensive territories with exemplary skill, self-confidence and courage. She provided Mahan Singh with invaluable lessons in the management of his complex inheritance, lessons he put to good use. The problems she dealt with ranged from a revolt by senior officials appointed by the misl to winning the army’s support of her stewardship and rebuilding Gujranwala Fort, the seat of the Sukerchakia misl, which had been destroyed by Ahmed Shah Abdali. Mai Dessan finely exemplified the tradition by which Sikh women took on crucial responsibilities in critical times.
Empire of the Sikhs Page 5
