Battle of Chappar Chiri

The march north

Guru Gobind Singh commissioned Banda Singh Bahadur at Nanded in 1708, weeks before his death, and sent him north with arrows from his own quiver, a drum, a standard and letters instructing the Sikhs of Punjab to join him.^2,5 Banda arrived with no army. He assembled one on the way, out of peasants, artisans and cultivators from a countryside with reasons of its own to move against the local administration — the rising drew on agrarian grievance as much as on religious loyalty, and the two are not cleanly separable in the sources.³

His object was Sirhind and its governor Wazir Khan — the man who in 1704 had ordered the two younger sons of Guru Gobind Singh, aged roughly nine and seven, bricked into a wall and executed.⁴

The battle

On 12 May 1710, on the plain of Chappar Chiri outside Sirhind, Banda’s irregular force met Wazir Khan’s professional army — cavalry, artillery, war elephants — and broke it. Wazir Khan was killed. Two days later Sirhind fell and was sacked.^2,4

Khafi Khan, writing at the Mughal court and with no sympathy whatever for his subject, is useful precisely because of that hostility: he uses abusive language throughout and still concedes that imperial forces could not withstand the Sikhs in several parts of Punjab.¹ A provincial capital had been taken by men the empire classed as bandits.

The first Sikh state

From the fort of Lohgarh, Banda did the two things that constitute a claim to sovereignty in the idiom of the period. He struck coin, and he issued a seal — and neither carried his own name. The seal reads: the kettle, the sword, victory and unhesitating aid, received from Nanak Guru Gobind Singh.⁶ A new calendar was declared from the conquest of Sirhind.⁵

That refusal is the point. A conventional rebel makes himself king. Banda governed as an officer of authority vested elsewhere — in the Gurus, and by extension in the community and the scripture they had left behind. The precedent held: the misls would strike the same legend on their coinage when they took Lahore fifty-five years later.

What is disputed

The land reform. Banda is widely credited with abolishing the zamindari system in the territory he held and making cultivators proprietors of the land they worked — often described as among the earliest such reforms in India.⁴ The evidence is thinner than the confidence with which the claim is usually made: it rests largely on later reconstruction rather than on surviving revenue records, and Khafi Khan attests to an administration existing without describing its land settlement in those terms.¹ That something changed in the countryside’s favour is well supported. The precise shape of it is not.

The sources themselves. Judgements about Banda are unusually tangled. The Punjabi chronicles — Rattan Singh Bhangu’s Sri Gur Panth Prakash, Giani Gian Singh’s works — are regarded by modern scholars as hostile to him, reflecting a later dispute between the Tat Khalsa and the Bandai Khalsa over whether Banda had claimed too much for himself. Ganda Singh’s 1935 biography deliberately worked from Persian sources instead, on the grounds that the Punjabi tradition could not be read straight.²

Sovereignty lasted barely six years before the empire closed in. The precedent — that the Khalsa could hold ground and govern it — outlived him by a century.