Chhota Ghallughara — the Lesser Massacre

The pretext

Lakhpat Rai was Diwan at Lahore. In early 1746 his brother Jaspat Rai, an officer at Eminabad, was killed in a skirmish with a Sikh band.

What followed was not a punitive raid but a declared campaign of extermination. Sikhs in Lahore were rounded up and killed; the reading of Sikh scripture was banned; the word gur was reportedly to be struck from ordinary speech, so that gur, unrefined sugar, had to be called something else. Then the field force went out after the bands themselves.^1,3

Kahnuwan

The Sikhs fell back the way they always had — east and north, towards the Gurdaspur country, the marshes at Kahnuwan and the wooded foothills behind them. This time the force followed, with artillery, and with the local zamindars pressed in to close the gaps.

They were caught in the marshes with the Ravi at their back and the hills held against them. The fighting ran through the summer days of 1746 as the bands tried to break out east across the river, encumbered — the accounts stress this — with their families and their copies of the scripture.

The usual figures are around seven thousand killed in the marshes, and about three thousand taken alive, marched to Lahore, paraded and executed there.^1,3

Those figures reach us mainly through Rattan Singh Bhangu’s chronicle, written from inside the community some sixty years later by the grandson of a participant, and they should be held as the tradition’s own count rather than as a return anybody compiled at the time.⁴ What is not in question is the order of magnitude, or that the campaign was declared as extermination rather than as punishment.

The name

Ghallughara is the word Sikh memory keeps for this kind of event, and there are two. This is the chhota — the lesser — one. The greater one came sixteen years later in 1762, when Ahmad Shah Abdali caught a Sikh column near Kup and killed a far larger number in a day.

Calling this the lesser is a statement about scale and nothing else. It was, on the usual estimates, something close to a fifth of the entire Panth, inside a week.

Why it did not work

The campaign was designed to finish the Sikhs as a political force in the Punjab, and it is worth being plain that it very nearly did.

It failed for reasons the Lahore government could not control. The Mughal hold on the province was itself collapsing, and Afghan invasion from the north-west would shortly make the Punjab ungovernable from Delhi or Lahore. The survivors of Kahnuwan had two years later reorganised at Amritsar into a standing structure — the Dal Khalsa and the misls — that was better suited to the conditions than anything the Panth had fielded before.^1,2

Grewal’s account of the period makes the general point directly: repression on this scale, applied by a state that was itself failing, converted a scattered religious community into an organised military one.²