Banda Singh Bahadur: The Hermit Who Took Sirhind, Struck the Khalsa’s First Coins and Died in Delhi

Delhi, the last days of February 1716. Crowds line the road to see what the emperor’s army has brought back from Punjab.

First come the heads, about two thousand of them by the Persian accounts, carried high on poles. Then the prisoners, some 740 men in heavy chains, many of them on camels, their faces blackened, the historian Khafi Khan wrote, so that the crowd could jeer.

In the middle, on an elephant, rides a man in an iron cage, dressed in a gaudy robe as a joke. A Mughal officer named Mirza Muhammad Harisi watched it pass and called it a tamasha, a show. Someone had tied a dead cat to a pole, to tell Delhi that nothing had been left alive in the fort where these men were caught.

Harisi let slip one more detail. The army had not taken 740 men at that fort. It made up the number with people seized from villages along the road.

The man in the cage was Banda Singh Bahadur. Six years earlier he had killed the most feared Mughal governor in Punjab, taken his city, struck coins in the name of the Sikh Gurus and ruled the land between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. To Sikhs he is a martyr-king. Persian chroniclers called him ‘the accursed one’. This story gives both sides.

It begins 1,500 km to the south, on the bank of the Godavari, with a hermit who wanted no kingdom at all.

Lachhman Dev was born on 27 October 1670 at Rajouri, in the hills of Poonch, the son of a farmer named Ram Dev. Which caste the family belonged to is still argued: later writers call them Rajputs, Sodhi Khatris or Jats, but no record from his own lifetime says.

Every Sikh child knows how his first life ended. Out hunting as a teenager, the story goes, he shot a doe and watched her die with her unborn young. He put down his bow, and at fifteen he left home.

He became a bairagi, a wandering Vaishnav ascetic, and took the name Madho Das. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he learnt yoga near Nasik from a teacher called Aughar Nath, and then set up his own math, a hermitage, at Nanded on the Godavari, deep in the Deccan. Tradition gives him disciples and occult powers.

He was nearly 38. He had no army, no land and no quarrel with the Mughals. Then, one day in 1708, a stranger walked into his hermitage and sat down on his cot.

The stranger was Guru Gobind Singh. Less than four years earlier he had lost his mother and all four of his sons, at Chamkaur and Sirhind; that December is told in our long read on the four Sahibzadas. Aurangzeb had died in March 1707, and the Guru had travelled south in the camp of the new emperor, Bahadur Shah.

The Sikh tradition tells the meeting like a duel. Madho Das was away. The Guru sat on his cot, and his Sikhs, some accounts say, killed the hermit’s goats for a meal, an outrage in a Vaishnav’s home. Madho Das came back furious and tried, the story says, to overturn the cot with his powers. It did not move.

The tradition ends with the hermit at the Guru’s feet, calling himself the Guru’s banda: his slave. What exactly passed between them is known only from accounts written after both men were dead.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates the meeting to 3 September 1708 and says the Guru initiated him into the Khalsa and named him Banda Singh, from the word he had used for himself. Some sources give his Khalsa name as Gurbakhsh Singh. The world remembers the title Bahadur, the brave.

Was he ever initiated? Ganda Singh, whose Life of Banda Singh Bahadur (1935) is still the classic, listed 35 historians who say he became a Sikh. Hari Ram Gupta wrote that the Guru made him a disciple but did not give him amrit. In 2025 it was fought over in newspaper advertisements (Part 16).

The Guru gave him a war drum, a banner and five arrows, and five Sikhs to stand beside him: Binod Singh, Kahn Singh, Baj Singh, Daya Singh and Ram Singh. He was to go to Punjab, gather the Khalsa and punish the men who had persecuted it.

On 7 October 1708, Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded, after affirming the Guru Granth Sahib as the Guru for all time to come. Banda was already on the road north.

He set out with a small band and a bundle of the Guru’s letters, hukamnamas, telling the Sikhs of Punjab that he came with the Guru’s blessing. The journey took the best part of a year.

The empire was in no shape to stop him: Aurangzeb’s death had set off a war between his sons, and the winner, Bahadur Shah, was far to the south.

Men came to Banda in thousands. Some were devout Sikhs burning to avenge the Sahibzadas. Many were peasants with old scores against landlords and officials. And many came for loot. Ganda Singh, his most devoted biographer, called some of them professional robbers; Hari Ram Gupta saw Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs who came for plunder alone. That mixture explains much of what followed.

On 26 November 1709 they fell on Samana, a rich town south-west of Sirhind. To Sikhs it was no random target. Sikh histories name it as the home of Sayyid Jalal-ud-din, the executioner of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, and of Shashal Beg and Bashal Beg, said to have executed the two youngest Sahibzadas.

Samana was sacked and razed. Hari Ram Gupta, whose History of the Sikhs is a standard work, put the dead at nearly 10,000 Muslims. That is a historian sympathetic to the Sikhs, not an enemy chronicler. Banda left Fateh Singh as governor and moved on, taking Shahabad, Mustafabad and other towns. At Kapuri he killed its faujdar, Qadam-ud-din, a man notorious for persecution, and razed the town.

Sadhaura, under the Shivalik hills, held a debt of its own. Its saint, Sayyid Badruddin Shah, known as Pir Budhu Shah, was a Muslim who, Sikh histories say, sent four of his sons and 700 followers to fight for Guru Gobind Singh at the battle of Bhangani in 1688.

For that, the town’s chief, Osman Khan, had the old pir tortured and killed. Sikh and Persian writers alike remember Osman Khan as a cruel man; one Persian history says he barred Hindus from cremating their dead.

Banda came for him. Osman Khan was captured and hanged. Then a mob of aggrieved peasants who had joined the march plundered the town, and Sayyids and Shaikhs were killed. People who had taken shelter in Budhu Shah’s own house were killed there too, a detail recorded not by Mughal chroniclers but by the Sikh writers Patwant Singh and Surjit Singh Gandhi.

The saint Banda came to avenge was a Muslim who had stood by the Guru. People hiding under his roof died at the hands of the army that came in his name.

12 May 1710. On the plain at Chappar Chiri, about 20 km from Sirhind, Wazir Khan drew up perhaps 18,000 to 25,000 men, by modern estimates: cavalry, musketeers, elephants, about two dozen guns and thousands of ghazis, volunteers for holy war.

Banda’s men had spears, swords and bows. They had no artillery and no elephants.

Wazir Khan had also planted a trap. Sikh accounts say Sucha Nand, his Hindu diwan, the man remembered for urging death for the two small boys in 1704, sent his own nephew to Banda with 1,000 men who claimed to have deserted the Mughals. When the Mughal guns opened up, the nephew’s men ran, and so did the looters and irregulars.

Banda had kept a third of his army back. He sent it in. In the hand-to-hand fighting, Wazir Khan was killed. Most Sikh accounts give the blow to Bhai Fateh Singh; the Suraj Prakash and Max Arthur Macauliffe credit Banda’s own arrow. His army broke and fled.

Among the Mughal dead, Harbans Kaur Sagoo writes, were Sher Muhammad Khan and Khwaja Ali of Malerkotla. Was this the same Sher Muhammad Khan who, as Nawab of Malerkotla, had protested in Wazir Khan’s court against the killing of the two boys in 1704? Malerkotla’s own records date the nawab’s death to 1710 or 1712, and do not settle it.

What is clear is that Banda never attacked Malerkotla. Many credit the nawab’s old protest; the historian J.S. Grewal says the town simply lay off Banda’s route.

Two days later, on 14 May 1710, Sirhind fell. Sikh accounts say the fort’s guns killed about 500 of the attackers before the walls were taken.

Sucha Nand was caught and put to death. Hari Ram Gupta puts the treasure carried away at two crore rupees. Baj Singh, one of the five Sikhs from Nanded, became governor, with Ali Singh of Salaudi as his deputy, and the Muslim officers of the province’s 28 parganas were turned out.

Then the city paid, and how badly is the hardest question in this story.

Nobody counted the dead. What the record does show: Sirhind was plundered, many who died had nothing to do with 1704, and the great Muslim shrines of the city were still standing when the Sikhs left.

Banda did not move into Wazir Khan’s palace. He made his base at Mukhlisgarh, an old Mughal fort in the Shivalik foothills near Sadhaura, in today’s Yamunanagar district of Haryana, and renamed it Lohgarh: the fortress of iron.

From there he ruled the land between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, worth about 36 lakh rupees a year, and began a new calendar from the capture of Sirhind.

And he struck coins. On their face, in Persian verse, they say the coin is struck in both worlds by the grace of the sword of Nanak, and that victory belongs to Guru Gobind Singh, king of kings, by the favour of the True Lord. The back gives the mint as Khalsa and the year of the new reign. Coins of the second year (1711) and third (1712) survive; collectors know only a handful.

Look at whose name is missing. Mughal coins carried the emperor’s name. Banda’s carried the Gurus’. His own appears nowhere.

His seal carried a couplet Sikhs still know by heart: deg, tegh, fateh. The deg is the cooking pot that feeds the hungry, the tegh is the sword that protects them, and fateh is the victory that both bring, received from Guru Nanak through Guru Gobind Singh. Sikh rulers put the same words on their coins half a century later.

The most famous claim about Banda’s rule is that he abolished the zamindari system and made the men who ploughed the land its owners. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says so, and so does almost every Sikh history. The record is thinner, and more interesting.

We found no surviving order abolishing anything. What the sources do record is an upheaval. Khafi Khan complained that Banda appointed his own thanedars and revenue collectors. William Irvine, summing up the Persian accounts in The Later Mughals, wrote that in the parganas held by the Sikhs ‘the reversal of the previous customs was striking and complete’, and that a man from the lowest castes could join Banda and come home as the ruler of his own village.

Not every zamindar was swept away: some sent him horses and arms, others fought him. Whether it was a land reform or a revolt is a fair argument.

The emperor’s own news-writers, who had no reason to flatter him, recorded something else. In June 1710, the court newsletters reported Muslims joining Banda: a Dindar Khan became Dindar Singh, and Banda forgave Jan Muhammad, zamindar of Gulab Nagar, and made him zamindar of the whole pargana.

In April 1711 a report reached Bahadur Shah that about 5,000 Muslims had gathered round Banda near Kalanaur and Batala, and that he allowed them to read the khutba and say their prayers. The man whose army sacked Samana and Sadhaura also led Muslims who prayed in his camp. Both are in the record.

By late 1710 Bahadur Shah had had enough. He marched north himself, and on 10 December 1710, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, he ordered his faujdars to kill Sikhs wherever they were found. The court’s own reports from that winter tell of Sikh heads sent to the emperor by the hundred.

An imperial army, put at about 60,000 horse and foot, closed round Lohgarh. Food ran out. On a December night Banda broke through the cordon and vanished into the hills of Sirmaur.

Behind him, a Sikh named Gulab Singh, who looked like him, had put on his clothes and stayed. The Mughals caught him, put him in a cage and celebrated, until they saw who he was.

The hawk had flown and an owl had been caught.Khafi Khan, on the Mughal army at Lohgarh, December 1710

Bahadur Shah died at Lahore on 28 February 1712, and his sons fought for the throne, as his father’s had. Banda came down from the hills, retook Sadhaura and Lohgarh, and held on.

In 1713 a new emperor, Farrukhsiyar, took the throne in Delhi. He wanted Banda finished.

The worst blow, when it came, did not come from the Mughals.

Many of the Khalsa’s veterans had grown uneasy with Banda. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism lists their complaints: he brought in a new greeting, Fateh Darshan, in place of the Khalsa’s own; he put his men in red instead of the Khalsa’s blue; and he let followers treat him as a Guru, after Guru Gobind Singh had passed the Guruship to the Granth. Other accounts add his vegetarian kitchen and caste rules of purity.

They called themselves the Tat Khalsa, the true Khalsa, and looked for guidance to Mata Sundari, the Guru’s widow, who lived in Delhi. Banda’s loyal followers became known as the Bandai Khalsa.

By one count half his followers left him. The quarrel outlived him: in 1721 the two camps faced each other at Amritsar until Bhai Mani Singh, sent by Mata Sundari, had two slips dropped into the sacred pool, one bearing the Khalsa’s greeting and one bearing Fateh Darshan. The Khalsa’s slip surfaced first, the tradition says, and a wrestling bout before the Akal Takht settled the rest. The Bandais never recovered.

In the spring of 1715, Abdus Samad Khan, the governor of Lahore, with his son Zakariya Khan and Qamar-ud-din Khan, drove Banda’s column into the north. At Gurdas Nangal, a few kilometres west of Gurdaspur, the Sikhs shut themselves inside the high-walled compound of a Sikh named Duni Chand.

The Mughal army dug in around them, and nothing went in for eight months. When the grain was gone they ate their horses and donkeys, then leaves, bark and, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, ground bones.

Many died of dysentery and privation.Khafi Khan, on the siege

Inside, the old quarrel flared again. Binod Singh, one of the five from Nanded, wanted to break out; in the end he cut his own way out through the Mughal lines.

On 7 December 1715 the gates opened. Abdus Samad Khan, the Sikh accounts say, had promised to ask the emperor for a pardon. Instead two or three hundred of the starving men were tied up and killed on the spot, their bodies searched for gold. Banda, his small son Ajai Singh and the survivors were taken in chains to Lahore, and from there to Delhi, where this story began.

Farrukhsiyar ordered Banda and about two dozen leaders to be held in the fort. The rest, 694 men, went to the city’s kotwal, Sarbrah Khan. From 5 March 1716 they were taken out in batches to the Kotwali Chabutra, the police platform near Chandni Chowk, and beheaded, about a hundred a day. Each, the accounts say, was offered his life if he would accept Islam.

A story recorded by Khafi Khan and retold by the historian William Irvine has stayed with Sikhs ever since. The widowed mother of a young prisoner won an order for his release by swearing he was not a Sikh. The boy refused it, said he was one, and went back to die with the others.

On 9 June 1716 (some books give 19 June), Banda was taken to Mehrauli, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki and the Qutb Minar, and given the same choice: Islam or death. He chose death.

First they killed his son, Ajai Singh, about four years old, in front of him. Khafi Khan says Banda was ordered to kill the boy with his own hands, ‘in requital’ for the sons of others he had killed. Sikh tradition says he refused. Then Banda Singh Bahadur was tortured and put to death. The sources describe it in detail. We will not.

Two Englishmen were in Delhi that March. John Surman and Edward Stephenson led an East India Company embassy from Calcutta, sent to ask Farrukhsiyar for trading rights. On 10 March 1716, five days into the executions, they wrote to their governor at Fort William, Robert Hedges.

They were no admirers; to them Banda was a rebel. That makes what they wrote about his men worth more.

It is not a little remarkable with what patience they undergo their fate.John Surman and Edward Stephenson, East India Company envoys, Delhi, 10 March 1716

It has not been found that one apostatized from this new formed religion.The same letter

The embassy got what it came for. Its surgeon, William Hamilton, had treated the emperor’s illness, and in 1717 Farrukhsiyar gave the Company a farman letting it trade duty-free in Bengal.

Farrukhsiyar did not enjoy his victory long. In 1719 the Sayyid brothers who held real power at his court deposed him, had him blinded and killed in prison.

Banda’s Sikh state lasted barely five years. Its idea lasted longer. Within half a century the Sikh misls held Lahore and struck coins, as he had, in the names of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh rather than any chief.

Today he is remembered in stone. At Chappar Chiri, the Punjab government built the Fateh Burj, a 328-foot victory tower, and Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal opened the Rs 35-crore Baba Banda Singh Bahadur war memorial there on 30 November 2011. In January 2023, Haryana’s Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar laid the foundation of a memorial at Lohgarh. At Reasi in Jammu, on the Chenab, a dera kept by a Sodhi family who trace their line to Banda holds a samadhi in his memory.

He is also fought over. In June 2025 Haryana government advertisements for his martyrdom day called him ‘Veer Banda Bairagi’, and the SGPC and the Akal Takht were furious.

Analysts quoted by ThePrint saw a bid for both Sikh and backward-class votes. The man himself was a farmer’s son, a Vaishnav hermit and a Khalsa general in one life.

Banda Singh Bahadur was not a saint, and the Sikh tradition at its most honest has never needed him to be. His army razed Samana, sacked Sirhind and killed people sheltering in a Muslim saint’s house. His most loyal historians record it. Wazir Khan’s crimes did not make those people guilty.

He was also something new: a hermit who turned out an empire’s officials, put the Gurus’ names on his coins instead of his own, and let Muslims pray in his camp. The empire answered with an order to kill Sikhs on sight, a broken promise at Gurdas Nangal and a hundred executions a day.

The last word belongs to the outsiders who had no stake in his cause. Two English traders watched hundreds of his men walk to the executioner, and wrote home that not one of them gave in.