Malerkotla 1872: The Kukas, the Cannons and the Officer Who Would Not Wait

Malerkotla, Wednesday 17 January 1872. Seven field guns stand in a row on the parade ground of the town’s Nawab. Behind them wait soldiers lent by the princely states of Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Malerkotla itself.

That afternoon, carts have brought in 68 prisoners from a village in Patiala territory: 66 men and two women. Many are wounded. They are Kukas, followers of a Sikh teacher named Ram Singh. Two days earlier, they raided this town.

The man in charge is John Lambert Cowan, a British district officer. He is the acting Deputy Commissioner of Ludhiana. He has no power to sentence these men to death, and he knows it. In his report that morning, he admitted he was using “an authority which is not vested in me”.

The prisoners go to the guns in batches. A bugle sounds. The guns fire. By Cowan’s own count, 42 or 43 men have died this way when a letter is put into his hand. It is from his superior. It tells him to hold the prisoners for trial. Six or seven more men are already at the muzzles. Cowan reads it, hands it to the police officer beside him, and lets the firing go on.

Forty-nine men were blown from guns that evening. A fiftieth broke free and seized Cowan by the beard. He was cut down with swords. The next day, Cowan’s superior had sixteen more put to death after a hurried trial. Sixty-six men in all.

The Kukas had killed people too. The summer before, they killed butchers in their beds at Amritsar and Raikot. That week, they killed policemen and townsmen at Malerkotla. The British called them rebels. Their own community, and later India’s nationalists, called them martyrs and freedom fighters. This is their story, told from the records of both sides. It starts in a Ludhiana village, with a carpenter’s son.

Ram Singh was born on 3 February 1816 in Bhaini Araian, a village in Ludhiana district. He was the eldest of four children of Jassa Singh and Sada Kaur. The family were Tarkhans: carpenters and small farmers. He was married at seven, as many children then were. He had two daughters.

At twenty, he joined the army of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He served in the regiment of the prince Nau Nihal Singh. In 1841 his regiment was sent to the north-west. There he met Balak Singh, a holy man of Hazro, near Attock. Balak Singh preached a plain life of prayer and the Name of God. The young soldier became his disciple. Before Balak Singh died in 1862, he named Ram Singh to lead after him.

After the first Anglo-Sikh war, Ram Singh left the army and went home to Bhaini. He worked as a sharecropper, farming another man’s land for a share of the crop. He kept a grocery shop. In 1855–56 he took building contracts at Ferozepur. By then the British had taken over Punjab, in 1849. The Sikh kingdom he had served was gone.

In April 1857, at Vaisakhi, he gave his followers a code of conduct at Bhaini: rules for how to live. Namdhari tradition says he raised a white triangular flag there on 12 April. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates the code to Vaisakhi day, 14 April. A month later, the sepoys, the Indian soldiers of the British army, rose at Meerut. Punjab’s new rulers never forgot that summer. It shaped how they read everything the Kukas did.

His followers were called Namdharis, holders of the Name. Their neighbours had another word for them. In worship they sang the Gurus’ hymns until some broke into loud, ecstatic cries. A cry is a kuk in Punjabi, so people called them Kukas, the shouters. The British wrote it Kooka.

Originally a carpenter and in himself a thoroughly religious character, but his followers gave a political turn to his tenetsT.D. Forsyth, the Commissioner who deported Ram Singh, describing him in his memoirs

A Kuka was easy to spot. He wore white homespun, cloth spun and woven by hand. His plain white turban was tied in the sect’s own straight style. A woollen rosary hung at his neck, and he carried a stick. He touched no meat, liquor, hemp or opium. He did not pray at tombs or graves. Protecting the cow was a basic rule.

Ram Singh gave women amrit, the Khalsa initiation, alongside men. He spoke against the killing of baby girls, against dowry and against the sale of girls. On 3 June 1863, at the village of Khote in Ferozepur district, he held simple weddings that cost almost nothing. Some of the marriages crossed caste lines.

The sect ran like a shadow state, a government of its own. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism counts 22 subas, each a governor for a district. Below them were jathedars, local leaders, and in each village a granthi, a reader of the scripture. The Kukas sent letters by their own messengers, not the government post.

And they turned their backs on the Raj, the British government. Ram Singh told followers to boycott British goods, government schools, government jobs, the law courts and the post. They were to wear only homespun cloth. Disputes went to Kuka panchayats, village councils, not to British judges. In the 1860s, says the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, this already pointed to a major thrust of the national movement. Half a century later, Gandhi would call India to non-cooperation.

The government watched. In 1863, when Ram Singh and his followers came to Amritsar, officials questioned them. The Punjab government then confined him to his village. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the limits were lifted after a peaceful pilgrimage to Anandpur Sahib for Hola in 1867. He rode there with 21 subas and more than 2,000 followers. T.D. Forsyth, then Commissioner of the Jalandhar division, the officer over several districts, remembered an Anandpur fair less kindly. After the limits eased, he wrote, an enormous gathering of Kukas met there, and a disturbance very nearly broke out.

In 1869 Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Kashmir enlisted about 150 Kukas in a new regiment. Their leader was Suba Hira Singh of Sadhaura. To British eyes, it looked like men getting military training. The British pushed, and two years later the regiment was disbanded.

After the British took Punjab, beef shops opened in Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs. Kukas, and many Hindus and Sikhs, saw it as an insult to their faith.

It is the night of 15 June 1871, between midnight and one o’clock. A band of Kukas falls on the slaughterhouse outside Amritsar’s Lahori Gate. Four butchers sleeping in front of their homes are killed on the spot. Three more are badly wounded. One entry of the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates the attack to the night of the 14th.

The attackers left behind a blue turban and a steel disc. The historian Fauja Singh Bajwa, who worked from the government files, suggests they did it on purpose. The police went the wrong way. An informer named Hira and a man who claimed to be an accomplice told them a detailed false story. On 25 July, twelve men who had nothing to do with it were sent for trial.

A second killing saved them. Kukas convicted of a similar attack at Raikot were waiting to die. One of them, Gulab Singh, offered to name the real Amritsar killers in return for his life. The case against the innocent men fell apart. Four Kukas, Fateh Singh, Beela Singh, Hakim Singh and Lehna Singh, were hanged on 15 September 1871. Namdhari tradition says the guilty men gave themselves up on their Guru’s order, so that innocent men would not hang. Bajwa calls that version worth considering, but unproven.

What did Ram Singh know? In January 1872 he was questioned, and the Commissioner T.D. Forsyth wrote down his answers. Ram Singh said that a month or six weeks before Amritsar, two men had asked his leave to kill the butchers. He said he “strenuously forbade them”. But he admitted he had told the government nothing, even after the murders.

Exactly a month later, on the night of 15 July 1871, Kukas attacked the slaughterhouse at Raikot in Ludhiana district. It stood about 150 yards outside the town wall, near a gurdwara named after Guru Gobind Singh. Bajwa writes that birds carried bones from it and dropped them inside the gurdwara’s grounds.

Three people were killed and nine wounded. The two butchers who owned the place escaped. One jumped off a roof. The other was away in Ludhiana, appealing against a fine. The Deputy Commissioner offered a reward of 1,000 rupees. Trackers followed the trail, and an approver, an accomplice who turns witness, gave up the names.

By Bajwa’s account from the files, three of the convicted men were hanged in public outside the Raikot slaughterhouse on 15 August 1871. A Tribune report gives 5 August. On 26 November two more were hanged outside Ludhiana jail for planning the attack. One was Gyani Rattan Singh, a 35-year-old suba known for his learning. The other was his deputy, Rattan Singh of Naiwala, 28. One judge of the Chief Court, C. Boulnois, called the evidence against them unsatisfactory. He asked for transportation instead: shipping them to a prison colony overseas. He was outvoted.

Namdhari memory keeps the Gyani’s last words. They are written in the sect’s chronicle, Satguru Bilas, and quoted by Bajwa: “My end will not be the end of the movement against you.” For the British, the killings proved the sect was dangerous. For the Kukas, the gallows made martyrs.

By the end of 1871 the Punjab government had banned Kuka gatherings anywhere except Bhaini. In January Ram Singh was refused leave to go to Muktsar for the Maghi festival, so he called his followers home. Between 500 and 1,000 came to Bhaini on 11 and 12 January 1872, Bajwa says. Nonstop readings of the Granth were held for the men who had been hanged.

Among them was a band of about a hundred. Its leaders were Hira Singh and Lehna Singh of Sakraudi, a village in Patiala state. Cowan’s inquiry later found that both had once been well-off and were now poor. They stirred up their men with prayers and called on them to avenge the hanged suba. Arms and horses, they said, would be found at Malerkotla, a small Muslim-ruled state nearby. After that they would sack Sangrur, Nabha and Patiala.

Why Malerkotla? Bajwa gives three reasons, from the record and from tradition. The old Nawab had died and a regency council ruled, so the state looked weak. It was an old enemy of the Sikhs. And its butchers were said to have insulted a local Kuka, Gurmukh Singh, by killing an ox in front of him.

Here the accounts split. Deputy Inspector Sarfraz Khan was the police officer at Bhaini. He reported that Ram Singh told him the leaders would not listen. Ram Singh said he went to them “with a turban round his neck”, a sign of humble pleading, and begged them not to make trouble. He gave the police thirteen names. Cowan was not sure whether this was “made in good faith, or was a deep move on Ram Singh’s part”. The Lieutenant-Governor, the head of the Punjab government, later called the warning “of the most meagre description”.

The Namdhari chronicle tells it another way. In it, Ram Singh tells the band that this is not the time. Hira Singh answers that Guru Tegh Bahadur is asking for their heads. Bajwa, the movement’s sympathetic historian, concludes that Ram Singh disagreed with the timing, not with the cause.

At about 2 p.m. on 13 January the band marched out of Bhaini. Late that night, at 11 p.m., Cowan sent word to the agents of Malerkotla and Patiala in Ludhiana. They were to warn their states.

The band spent the night and most of the next day near Rubboo, a village about three and a half miles from Malodh. They had few weapons beyond swords and choppers. At dusk on 14 January they rushed the fort of the Sikh sardars, or chiefs, of Malodh. They hoped for guns and horses. Two defenders were killed and the sardar slightly wounded. The Kukas lost two dead, and four of their wounded were taken prisoner. By Cowan’s account, the raiders got away with three horses, a gun and a sword.

They marched through the night to Malerkotla, about nine miles away. The British called it Kotla. The town had been warned and posted patrols overnight. In the morning the guards were stood down. At about 7 a.m. on 15 January the Kukas got in over a broken wall. They made for the palace and the treasury.

A police diary of the day says they broke open the wrong door and found only papers. The town’s kotwal, or police chief, Ahmad Khan, met them with a few men. He was killed. Cowan wrote that he behaved “with great gallantry”. By Cowan’s count, seven other people were killed and fifteen wounded. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism counts eight policemen and seven Kukas dead. The raiders fled with two horses and a few swords, fighting the townsmen as they ran.

They stopped at Rurr, a village in Patiala territory about twelve miles off. Its villagers had run away. An officer of Patiala state rode up with three horsemen. He found the Kukas sitting in the scrub: hungry, worn out, carrying their wounded. After a show of defiance they gave up their swords. Sixty-eight were taken, two of them women.

The first reports to Calcutta, then the capital of British India, spoke of 500 raiders. Cowan later wrote that the band “never numbered more than 125”.

On the evening of 16 January, Cowan wrote from Kotla to his superior, Forsyth, the Commissioner at Ambala. All was calm again, he said. There was no need for Forsyth to come.

I purpose blowing away from guns, or hanging, the prisoners to-morrow morning at daybreak.J.L. Cowan to T.D. Forsyth, 16 January 1872, published in the Parliamentary Papers on the Kooka outbreak

Their crime was “not an ordinary one”, he went on. They were “open rebels, offering contumacious resistance to constituted authority”: stubborn rebels against the law. The punishment must be “prompt and stern”.

Forsyth said no. In an official letter on 17 January, he reminded Cowan of the rules. Crimes done in Malerkotla were for the state’s own rulers to try. Any death sentence had to go to the Commissioner for approval. The case was “not sufficiently urgent” to drop that simple procedure. A private note went with the letter.

A delay of twelve hours cannot produce harm, whereas illegal action may cause trouble.T.D. Forsyth’s note to Cowan, 17 January 1872, as printed in the official Blue Book

Cowan said the official letter reached him only as the last batch was being tied to the guns. He admitted that another note from Forsyth had been put into his hand at about noon. It said it would be better to keep the prisoners in Patiala’s fort at Sherpur. He later said he must have destroyed that note. He never expected to be asked for it.

The prisoners arrived that afternoon. Cowan reported that they were “most defiant and unruly”. They abused the government and the chiefs, he wrote, and “gloried in the act”. They told him they had attacked Malodh for arms, and Kotla “because their religion required them to slay the killer of cows”. He sent the two women to Patiala.

Then came the guns, the batches and the bugle. The police officer’s diary for seven o’clock that evening reads: “Just returned from the execution; arrangements excellent; seven guns.”

In the middle of it, Cowan wrote, one prisoner broke away and “made a furious attack on me, seizing me by the beard and endeavouring to strangle me”. Cowan called him “a very powerful man”. Officers of the princely states drew their swords and cut him down.

Blowing men from guns was an old Mughal punishment, the writer Mathew Lyons notes. The British had used it on mutineers in 1857. Forsyth later defended it in an official report. There were no arrangements for hanging so many men, he wrote, and it was “warranted by former precedents” from 1857.

The British first used blowing from guns on a large scale against the sepoys of 1857. Read our story <a href="/news/revolt-of-1857-full-story">The Revolt of 1857: Greased Cartridges, a Last Emperor, Massacres on Both Sides and the Side Punjab Chose</a>.

In Namdhari memory, the man who seized Cowan’s beard was not a powerful man at all. He was Bishan Singh, a boy of about twelve.

In The Tribune’s retelling, Cowan and his wife offered to spare the boy if he gave up the sect. He refused. He sprang at Cowan and tugged at his beard. Cowan’s soldiers cut off his hands before he was killed. The Namdhari writer Swaran Singh Sanehi says the boy leapt at Cowan after Cowan insulted him.

A second story is about Waryam Singh, said to be related to the Maharaja of Patiala. The gunners, the story goes, wanted to spare him. He was too short to reach the muzzle. So he fetched bricks and clods of earth from a nearby field, stood on them and asked them to fire.

Sanehi also cites two women prisoners, Ind Kaur and Khem Kaur. They were handed to Patiala and later set free. By their account, as Sanehi gives it, the men refused to be tied. They came to the guns one by one, to take the shot in the chest.

The British papers tell it differently. Cowan’s own letter says the last men were “tied to the guns”. It calls the man who seized his beard “a very powerful man”. None of the official letters gives the prisoners’ names or ages, apart from the leaders’. In 1965 Fauja Singh Bajwa wrote a detailed history from the government files. It does not mention the boy.

Forsyth had other work that night: Ram Singh. Cowan had called Ram Singh to Malodh, met him there and sent him home. Forsyth sent cavalry and summons after him. At two o’clock in the morning of 18 January, Ram Singh came into Ludhiana with four followers.

Forsyth questioned him for two hours. At four o’clock, under a guard of Gurkhas, Ram Singh was put on a special train out of Punjab. His subas Lakha Singh, Sahib Singh and Jawahir Singh went with him. He was never tried. He was held under Regulation III of 1818, an old Bengal law that let the government lock a man up without charge.

Then Forsyth wrote to Cowan. Cowan later copied the note into his own defence:

“My dear Cowan, I fully approve and confirm all you have done. You have acted admirably. I am coming out.”

Forsyth rode to Kotla that day. Sixteen prisoners were left. Forsyth wrote that he tried them before assessors, the agents of the princely states, who sat with him as advisers. He found them guilty and sentenced them to death. They died on the 18th; a telegram reported them “executed yesterday at Kotla”. The official papers do not say how. Namdhari accounts and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism say they too were blown from guns. Forsyth’s telegram added: “Cowan’s prompt action deserves praise.”

The crackdown went on. Troops cleared every man out of Bhaini. A police post of a sub-inspector and twenty constables was set up in the village. Bajwa writes that it stayed until 1922. Groups of more than five Kukas were banned from meeting anywhere in Punjab. Village headmen had to report every Kuka’s movements. Kukas were thrown out of the Punjab police.

On 19 January the news reached the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, the head of the British government in India. He telegraphed the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab: “Stop any summary execution of Kookas without your express orders.” His government told Punjab that the papers showed “nothing to justify” what Cowan had done. Cowan was suspended. Less than three weeks later, Mayo was dead. A convict stabbed him in the Andaman Islands on 8 February.

In London, The Times reported the executions on 5 February. On 29 February an MP, Haviland-Burke, asked in the House of Commons whether there had been any trial. The Under-Secretary for India, Mountstuart Grant Duff, gave the numbers: 49 blown from guns, a fiftieth cut down, sixteen more by Forsyth. Pressed twice, he answered plainly.

So far as we are aware, there was no trial of any sort by Mr. Cowan; he executed without trial.Mountstuart Grant Duff, Under-Secretary of State for India, House of Commons, 29 February 1872 (Hansard)

Cowan defended himself in writing. A rising that might have spread had been “nipped in the bud”, he said. “I acted from no vain motive, or from cruelty, or a desire to display authority,” he wrote. The punishment, “terrible as it was, was imperatively necessary to prevent the spread of an insurrection.”

Officials in Punjab partly agreed with him. The Maharaja of Patiala wrote that Ram Singh’s real aim was “to reign and acquire dominion”. Forsyth told his superiors he regretted Cowan’s “hasty action”. But, he said, the terrible measures had crushed the outbreak.

On 2 May 1872 the Government of India gave its verdict. It was now led by the acting Viceroy, Lord Napier of Magdala. Cowan was removed from the service. Forsyth was moved to Oudh, to a post where he would not oversee the courts of a princely state. Days later the same council asked London to grant Cowan a pension. He had committed “no offence against the rules of morality or rectitude”, it wrote. On 18 July the Secretary of State, the Duke of Argyll, approved the dismissal and a pension of 300 rupees a month.

Not everyone thought that was justice. A British journal, the Diplomatic Review, called the killings “lawless and atrocious proceedings”. A private man who killed one person would hang, it noted, while an official who had 65 put to death got a pension. Forsyth, for his part, called his own punishment a “most severe and unjust sentence” in his memoirs. He complained that letters in his favour had been left out of the papers sent to London.

Forty-seven years later, another British officer in Punjab, Reginald Dyer, would open fire on a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh. The historian Kim Wagner has argued that the 1872 massacre echoed 1857 and pointed ahead to Amritsar in 1919.

Ram Singh was first held in Allahabad fort. That was too close to Punjab. In March 1872 he was shipped to Rangoon in British Burma. There, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism notes, he was kept in the same place where the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, had been held. Ten of his subas were sent out of Punjab with him.

He was not cut off. Followers made the long journey to Burma, slipped past the guards and carried his letters home. The historian Ganda Singh later published a selection of them. In Punjab, his brother Budh Singh took the name Hari Singh and led the sect from 1875.

Kuka envoys looked abroad for help. In 1879 a suba, Gurcharan Singh, reached Russian officials in Central Asia. Kukas also backed Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last king of Punjab, whom the British had removed. He was trying to win back his throne. The Russians did not want a war with Britain. To cut Ram Singh off further, the British moved him in 1880 to Mergui, a remote port in southern Burma.

The anger did not die. In January 1883 a Kuka murdered a constable of the police post at Bhaini.

On 8 December 1885 a telegram went from Rangoon to Calcutta. Ram Singh had died at Mergui on 29 November, the British said, of old age and illness. His followers did not accept it. Many Namdharis believe to this day that he is alive and will return.

In 1873, a year after Malerkotla, other Sikh reformers met at Amritsar and founded the first Singh Sabha. They also wanted a purer faith. But they held that the line of human Gurus ended with Guru Gobind Singh. The Namdharis believe in a living Guru, so they went their own way.

So who were the 66? It depends on whose papers you read.

Today the Namdhari Shaheedi Smarak, the Kuka martyrs’ memorial, stands outside Malerkotla on the Jarag road. It covers about seven acres of former defence land. At its centre is a 66-foot khanda, the Sikh emblem, pierced with 66 holes, one for each man killed. Every 17 January Punjab holds a state-level function there. Namdharis have long asked for the day to be marked on the national calendar.

The wider nation has honoured Ram Singh too. In 2016 the Government of India marked his 200th birth anniversary, and his portrait hangs in Parliament. Bhaini Sahib, near Ludhiana, is still the sect’s headquarters.

The line of leaders has not been peaceful. After Hari Singh came Partap Singh (1906–59) and then Jagjit Singh (1959–2012). In December 2012 Jagjit Singh’s nephew Uday Singh was installed at Bhaini Sahib. Uday Singh’s elder brother, Thakur Dalip Singh, had been expelled from the sect. He leads a rival following.

On 4 April 2016 two men on a motorcycle shot dead Mata Chand Kaur at Bhaini Sahib. She was Jagjit Singh’s widow, and she had backed Uday Singh. Many in the sect blamed the rival camp. The case went to the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s federal police. In 2019 it arrested Dalip Singh’s former driver. Supporters of the two factions clashed again in Sirsa in August 2024.

A century and a half on, the argument over 1872 is not settled. Were the 66 rebels, murderers or martyrs? Each January, on the road out of Malerkotla, the white turbans come back to the khanda with 66 holes. And the question is asked again.