The Battle of Muktsar
December 1705 · Khidrana, now Sri Muktsar Sahib, Punjab, India
The forty Sikhs who had abandoned the Guru at Anandpur were shamed back into the field by Mai Bhago, and died covering his position at a water reservoir in the Malwa. He tore up their disclaimer over the dying.
The forty who left
During the siege of Anandpur, forty Sikhs told Guru Gobind Singh they would follow him no further. He asked them to put it in writing; they did, and the bedava — the document of disavowal — was signed and they went home to their villages in the Malwa.1,2
What met them there was Mai Bhago, of Jhabal near Amritsar. She went from village to village and told the returned men and their households what they had done, and declared that if the men would not fight, the women would, and she would lead them.2
Khidrana
They rode back and found the Guru in the Malwa with a Mughal column in pursuit. In December 1705 they met it at the water reservoir at Khidrana, in a dry country where the pool was the only water for some distance.
They fought as a screen in front of it while the Guru’s own party held rising ground above and shot down into the attackers. The Mughal force, unable to reach the water, broke off and withdrew.1,2
All forty men were killed or fatally wounded. Mai Bhago survived, and afterwards stayed with the Guru in arms as one of his bodyguard.
The paper
The Guru came down onto the field among the dying. The tradition holds that Bhai Mahan Singh, the leader of the forty, asked one thing of him — that he tear up the bedava — and that he did it there.
They are remembered as the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated Ones. Khidrana took the name it still carries: Muktsar, the pool of liberation.
How to read it
This is the last battle Guru Gobind Singh fought, and it is the one the tradition tells most as a moral rather than a military event. The military facts are modest — a rearguard action at a waterhole, won because the other side could not drink.
Its work in the tradition is to say something specific about what the Khalsa is: that the forty were not readmitted by being forgiven from above, but by going back and dying in front of the man they had left. Purnima Dhavan’s study of the eighteenth century is useful here, because it traces how stories of exactly this kind were told and retold as the Khalsa worked out what loyalty and sacrifice were going to mean — a process she argues ran across the whole century rather than being settled in 1699.4
Cross-references
Before you turn the page
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