The Ghallugharas and the Misls: How the Sikhs Survived Two Massacres and Rode Into the Red Fort

Kup, a village about 12 km north of Malerkotla, 5 February 1762. In the fields a whole people on the move has stopped for the night. The fighters of the Dal Khalsa, the army of the Sikh misls, are camped in a ring. Inside it is the vahir, the baggage train of women, children and old people, being taken south to safety in the Malwa.

They think the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Durrani is far away at Lahore. He is not. In under 48 hours, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, he has ridden about 200 km and crossed two rivers. At dawn his army falls on the camp.

By nightfall somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 Sikhs were dead, depending on whose count you trust. Sikhs call it the Vadda Ghallughara, the great carnage.

Yet three years later the Sikhs held Lahore and struck their own coins, and 21 years later they were inside Delhi’s Red Fort. This is how a people with a price on every head fought its way to power, and what it did to others on the way. It begins where our long read on Banda Singh Bahadur ends: Delhi, 1716.

The executions of 1716 did not end the hunt. In Lahore the governor Abdus Samad Khan, who had starved Banda out of Gurdas Nangal, kept it up, and in 1726 his son Zakariya Khan took over and pressed harder.

Officials and village headmen were told to kill Sikhs or bring them in alive. Sikh histories record rewards for information, for heads, even for cutting a Sikh’s long hair; the amounts change from book to book. Captives were beheaded before crowds at the Nakhas, Lahore’s horse market outside the Delhi Gate, later called Shahid Ganj, the place of martyrs.

So the Khalsa went where cavalry could not easily follow: the Lakhi Jungle around Bathinda, the marshes along the Beas, the Shivalik foothills. Many who stayed in the villages cut their hair to survive. The fighters learnt to live in the saddle.

In 1733 Zakariya Khan tried the opposite. He offered the Sikhs a jagir of three parganas, Dipalpur, Kanganwal and Jhabal, a robe of honour and the title of Nawab, if they would keep the peace.

At Amritsar the elder Darbara Singh refused it. Sikh tradition says the congregation then chose the man quietly fanning it: Kapur Singh, a Virk Jat from Kaloke, near today’s Sheikhupura.

Nawab Kapur Singh used the breathing space to organise the scattered bands into the Budha Dal of veterans, who guarded the holy places, and the Taruna Dal of young fighters, in five jathas, each with its own flag and drum. By 1735 the compact had collapsed and the bands were back in the jungles.

Amritsar, Diwali, 1737 or 1738; the accounts differ. Bhai Mani Singh, the old scholar who had written down the scripture for Guru Gobind Singh at Damdama Sahib, was head granthi of the Harmandir Sahib. He got Zakariya Khan’s leave for a Diwali gathering, for a fee of 5,000 rupees to be paid from the offerings.

Then, Sikh accounts say, he learnt that troops were to fall on the crowd, and sent word for the Sikhs to stay away. Few came, and the fee went unpaid.

In Lahore he was told to accept Islam. He refused, and was sentenced to be cut apart, joint by joint. The tradition says that when the executioner began at his wrist, the old man reminded him that the sentence said every joint. Sikhs remember him in the Ardas, the daily prayer, every day.

In 1739 the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and rode home with the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. As his heavy columns crossed Punjab, Sikh bands came down from the hills and stripped his rearguard.

Sikh tradition says Nadir asked Zakariya Khan where these people lived. On their saddles, the governor answered, and Nadir warned him they would one day rule his country. The dialogue is tradition; the fiercer hunt that followed is history.

In 1740 the Ranghar chief Massa, commander at Amritsar, was holding dancing parties in the Harmandir’s precincts. On 11 August two Sikhs, Mehtab Singh and Sukha Singh, rode in dressed as village headmen bringing revenue, cut off his head and rode away.

Poohla, near Lahore, 1745. Taru Singh, a young farmer, grew maize on a small plot and with his sister fed the Sikhs hiding in the jungles. An informer reported him; Sikh accounts say he was of the Niranjania sect of Jandiala, a town that returns in this story.

In Lahore he was offered his life if he cut his hair. He refused, and Zakariya Khan had his scalp cut from his head. A gurdwara in Lahore’s Naulakha Bazaar marks the place.

The tradition, told by the Khalsa’s chronicler Ratan Singh Bhangu, says Taru Singh lived on for days while the governor fell ill and found relief only when beaten with Taru Singh’s shoe. The record says Zakariya Khan died on 1 July 1745.

Eminabad, early 1746. The Mughal faujdar Jaspat Rai was killed in a fight with a Sikh band. His brother Lakhpat Rai, a Khatri and diwan at Lahore, took off his turban in the governor’s court, Sikh accounts say, and swore revenge on the whole community.

He began in Lahore. Hindu notables led by Diwan Kaura Mal pleaded for the city’s Sikhs; Lakhpat Rai refused, and on 10 March 1746 they were put to death.

Then he marched with cavalry and cannon on the Sikhs gathered in the marshy forest of Kahnuwan, south of today’s Gurdaspur, and set it on fire. The Sikhs broke out towards the hills and found the troops of the Hindu hill states waiting. Behind them the Ravi was in flood.

About 7,000 Sikhs were killed and 3,000 captured and later beheaded at the Nakhas, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism estimates; other estimates run from 400 (the historian Purnima Dhavan) to 40,000 (Bhangu). Lakhpat Rai ordered Sikh books burnt and, the Sikh accounts say, made it a crime even to say gur, jaggery, because it sounded like Guru. Within two years the Sikhs had killed him.

Amritsar, Baisakhi, 29 March 1748. About 65 bands met as the Sarbat Khalsa, the community in council, and passed a gurmata, a binding resolution: they would merge into one army, the Dal Khalsa, under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, grouped into eleven misls, each with its own leader and banner.

They had already built a mud fort at Amritsar, Ram Rauni. A carpenter’s son named Jassa Singh later rebuilt it as Ramgarh, and became Jassa Singh Ramgarhia. Punjab now had two famous Jassa Singhs, who did not always agree.

The Dal lived on rakhi. A village that paid it, usually a fifth of its revenue, got the Dal’s protection; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism compares it to the Marathas’ chauth. To those who paid willingly it was safety in a lawless land. To those who did not, it could look a lot like extortion.

Lahore, 1748. The new governor was Muin ul-Mulk, Mir Mannu to Punjab, who had just beaten Durrani at Manupur. His policy on the Sikhs swung with his needs. When he wanted fighters, his Hindu diwan Kaura Mal, a friend of the Sikhs, won them a jagir, and Sikh horsemen fought for Kaura Mal at Multan in 1750. The English traveller George Forster later credited Kaura Mal with saving the Sikhs from Mannu.

When the danger passed, the hunt came back: prices on heads, musketeers searching villages, women and children marched in chains to Lahore.

What happened to the women is told by the Sikh tradition. Held in Mannu’s prison, it says, they were made to grind heavy loads of grain on starvation rations, and when they would not give up their faith their children were killed in front of them. Contemporary records are thin; Gurdwara Shahid Ganj Singhnian in Lahore keeps their memory.

The Sikhs answered with a Punjabi rhyme: Mannu is our sickle and we are his crop; the more he cuts, the more we grow. In November 1753 Mannu died after a fall from his horse.

Kandahar, July 1747. After Nadir Shah’s murder one of his young commanders, Ahmad Khan of the Abdali tribe, became king; the story that a tribal jirga chose him has no contemporary proof. He took the title Durr-i-Durran, pearl of pearls.

In Afghanistan he is Ahmad Shah Baba, father of the nation, buried in a domed tomb in Kandahar. He wrote Pashto poems; in one, he forgets the throne of Delhi when he remembers his homeland’s mountains. Pakistan named a missile after him.

To Punjab and the Gangetic plain he was something else. Nine of his campaigns came into India between 1747 and 1769. In 1757 his armies sacked Delhi and then Mathura, crowded with Holi pilgrims, where his commander Jahan Khan offered five rupees for every Hindu head. That year, at Lahore, a great gun was cast for his vizier from pots and pans collected from Hindu and Sikh homes: the Zamzama.

Damdama Sahib, autumn 1757. Durrani had left Punjab to his son Timur Shah and his commander Jahan Khan; the Harmandir had been defiled and Durrani had ordered it pulled down.

Baba Deep Singh was 75. As a young man he had helped Bhai Mani Singh copy the Guru Granth Sahib, and he had fought beside Banda Singh. He vowed: may my head fall at the Darbar Sahib. About 500 rode out with him; by Tarn Taran, more than 5,000. On 13 November 1757 they met the Afghan army outside Amritsar.

The best-loved telling says that when his head was struck off he held it in one hand and fought on until he reached the shrine. Another account says he was mortally wounded and died on reaching its edge. Either way, the vow was kept. The spot is marked in the Golden Temple complex, and his khanda is kept at the Akal Takht.

In 1758 the Marathas, invited by Adina Beg Khan, the shrewd faujdar of Jalandhar, swept the Afghans out of Lahore with Sikh help. On 14 January 1761, at Panipat, Durrani destroyed the Maratha army.

As he went home through Punjab, the Sikhs struck at his columns. Sikh tradition says Jassa Singh Ahluwalia’s men freed about 2,200 Hindu women being carried off as captives and took them back to their families; the number and place vary between tellings.

By November 1761, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records, the Sikhs had plundered Sirhind and Malerkotla, beaten two Afghan armies and taken Lahore. At Diwali the Sarbat Khalsa resolved to punish the Afghans’ local allies, starting with Aqil Das of Jandiala.

The Vadda Ghallughara did not happen only because Durrani was strong. It happened because people in Punjab asked him to come.

There is an irony here. In 1704 Malerkotla’s nawab had protested against the killing of Guru Gobind Singh’s two youngest sons (our long read on the four Sahibzadas tells it). In 1762 his successor helped bring the Afghans down on the Sikh camp.

The Sikhs lifted the siege of Jandiala and crossed the Sutlej to take their families into the Malwa. Durrani ordered Zain Khan and Bhikhan Khan to block them and rode after them himself.

At Kup the first attacks were thrown back. Then the main Afghan army arrived. Charat Singh Sukerchakia, grandfather of Ranjit Singh, wanted a square. Jassa Singh Ahluwalia chose a moving ring around the vahir, marching on Barnala, 40 km away.

The ring broke again and again, and each time the attackers cut down women, children and the old before the fighters closed it. The killing ran for kilometres through Rahira, Kutba, Bahmania and Gehal. In the early afternoon, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, both armies stopped to drink at a large pond. The Sikhs went on to Barnala; Durrani did not follow. Jassa Singh Ahluwalia carried 22 wounds from that day.

• Tahmas Khan Miskin, on the Afghan side: 25,000.
• Ratan Singh Bhangu, whose father and uncle were there: 30,000 (50,000 in one passage).
• Jadunath Sarkar: 10,000. Hari Ram Gupta: 12,000.
• J.S. Grewal: about 5,000 Sikh men. The memorial at Kup Rahira: more than 35,000.

Durrani returned to Lahore on 3 March 1762 with carts of Sikh heads. In 2011 the Punjab government inaugurated a memorial at Kup Rahira with a 110-foot tower; in June 2025 The Tribune found it drew 50 or 60 visitors on an ordinary day.

Amritsar, Baisakhi, 10 April 1762. Durrani had the Harmandir Sahib blown up with gunpowder and its pool filled with the carcasses of cows. A flying fragment struck his nose, and the wound never healed. When he died near Kandahar in October 1772, nobody could say whether that wound or a cancer of the face had killed him.

Within three months Zain Khan was paying the Sikhs 50,000 rupees for peace. At Diwali, 17 October 1762, they faced Durrani at Amritsar, and that night he withdrew to Lahore; some historians doubt the battle happened at all.

He came again late in 1764. With his Baluch allies rode Qazi Nur Muhammad of Gujranwala, who wrote the campaign up in Persian verse as the Jangnama. On 1 December, he records, thirty Sikhs came out of a bunga by the shrine and charged the whole army. They ‘were not in the least afraid’. By the Sikh accounts, all of them died.

Nur Muhammad calls the Sikhs dogs, then tells his readers not to, for they are lions in battle. They never kill a coward, he writes, or chase a man who runs, and know nothing of theft or adultery.

…never attack or plunder a woman, be she a lady or a slave-girl.Qazi Nur Muhammad on the Sikhs, Jangnama (1764–65 campaign), as rendered in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism

The Sikhs rebuilt the Harmandir from the mid-1760s. Its gilding came later, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

On 14 January 1764 the Dal Khalsa caught Zain Khan outside Sirhind and killed him. Sirhind, the city where Guru Gobind Singh’s youngest sons had died, was burnt and most of it destroyed. The ruined district went to Ala Singh of Patiala.

In April 1765 (one account says May) the Bhangi chiefs Lehna Singh and Gujjar Singh, with Sobha Singh Kanhaiya, were let into Lahore by officers inside the walls. When their men began to loot, local zamindars asked the chiefs to stop it so the city could live; they shut the gates and punished the plunderers.

Then they struck a silver rupee with no chief’s name on it. In Persian it repeated the couplet of Banda Singh’s seal: the cauldron, the sword, victory and help without delay, received from Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh.

When an ageing Durrani later offered Lehna Singh the governorship of Lahore, he said no, citing Sikh principles. Ala Singh of Patiala, who stood apart from the Dal, chose differently: he paid Durrani tribute, by one account five lakh rupees plus 25,000 more to appear before him with his hair uncut, and in 1765 was made a Raja. To the misls it was collaboration; to Patiala, survival.

By the 1770s the Sikhs ruled most of Punjab, not as one kingdom but as a dozen confederate states, meeting as the Sarbat Khalsa at Amritsar at Baisakhi and Diwali.

• Bhangi: Amritsar, Lahore, Gujrat, for a time Multan
• Ahluwalia: Kapurthala
• Ramgarhia: Sri Hargobindpur, later Batala
• Kanhaiya: Sohian and the Batala country
• Sukerchakia: Gujranwala; Ranjit Singh’s misl
• Phulkian: Patiala, Nabha, Jind; apart from the Dal
• Nakai, Dallewalia, Nishanwalia, Singhpuria, Karorsinghia and Shaheedan

George Forster, an East India Company man who crossed Punjab in disguise in 1783, found no titles among them; at the great councils, he was told, every man could speak. When he asked a Sikh horseman who his chief was, the man said he served no earthly master.

He disdained an earthly superior.George Forster, on a Sikh horseman he met in 1783

In February 1764 a Sikh army under Baghel Singh crossed the Yamuna, took Saharanpur and made the Rohilla chief Najib-ud-Daula pay eleven lakh rupees. Many such rides followed. In 1775 the Sikhs looted the villages around the site of today’s New Delhi. Najib’s son Zabita Khan even took the name Dharam Singh and declared himself a Sikh; it did him little good, Forster noted.

Forster was in Rohilkhand in early 1783 when a Sikh army came down to the Ganga, and watched villagers flee the open country for forts. In 1785, he added, the Sikhs laid Rohilkhand waste for about a hundred miles.

Nobody counted the dead or the ruined, most of them peasants, Hindu and Muslim, who had done the Sikhs no harm. Forster also wrote that Muslims in Sikh Punjab were often insulted and could not give the call to prayer aloud, which he put partly down to ‘a remembrance of recent injuries’.

Delhi, March 1783. The emperor Shah Alam II still sat on Akbar’s throne, but his writ barely ran beyond the walls. Baghel Singh camped with 30,000 men at the place Delhi calls Tis Hazari, thirty thousand, after them, the tradition says, and his men raided the markets nearby.

Jassa Singh Ahluwalia broke in through the Ajmeri Gate to the Red Fort, where his men sat him on the throne in the Diwan-i-Am. Then Jassa Singh Ramgarhia arrived and demanded he get off. Swords came out, Ahluwalia stepped down, and Sikh did not fight Sikh in the emperor’s hall. Ramgarhia took home a stone slab from a Mughal throne.

Begum Samru, the ruler of Sardhana, negotiated for the emperor. Baghel Singh would stay with 4,000 men, take six annas in every rupee of the city’s octroi and build gurdwaras at places linked to the Gurus. By November he had raised seven, among them Sis Ganj, where Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded (see our long read on Guru Tegh Bahadur), Rakab Ganj and Bangla Sahib.

Sikhs mark it as Delhi Fateh Diwas: 11 March by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, 8 March in other accounts.

Jassa Singh Ahluwalia died in 1783, and the Dal Khalsa, in all but name, with him. The misls fought each other as hard as they had fought the Afghans. In the late 1770s the Ahluwalias and Kanhaiyas had driven Jassa Singh Ramgarhia across the Sutlej. In 1785, at Achal near Batala, he and Maha Singh’s Sukerchakias beat the Kanhaiyas, and Gurbakhsh Singh Kanhaiya was killed.

His widow, Sada Kaur, married her daughter to Maha Singh’s son, a boy called Ranjit Singh; many historians see her as the shrewd mind behind his rise. Forster had predicted that some ambitious chief would swallow the rest.

…display, from the ruins of their commonwealth, the standard of monarchy.George Forster, A Journey from Bengal to England, on the misls

On 7 July 1799, with Sada Kaur’s troops beside his own, the 18-year-old Ranjit Singh rode into Lahore. That story is in our long read on Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Koh-i-Noor.

The persecutors in this story included Muslim governors, Hindu diwans and hill rajas. One protector was a Hindu diwan, and the most honest witness to Sikh conduct was a Qazi who hated them.

For most of the eighteenth century the state in Punjab tried to end the Sikhs as a people. It priced their heads, killed their scholars and farmers in public and massacred their families twice. It failed, and the record of how it failed needs no decoration.

The record also shows what the survivors did with power. They burnt Sirhind, looted people who had done them no wrong and, once the Afghans were gone, turned on each other. Their own historians say so, and so should we. Both are true at once, which is what makes this Punjab’s most remarkable comeback, and not a fairy tale.