The Martyrdom of Bhai Mani Singh

Proscription as policy

By the 1730s the Mughal administration at Lahore under Zakariya Khan had settled on a method against the Sikhs that was less dramatic than what had been done to Banda Singh and considerably more effective. Prices were put on Sikh heads. Access to Amritsar was closed. The bands were pushed out of the villages and into the hills and the waste.^1,2

A short-lived accommodation in 1733 — a grant and a title offered to the Panth — had broken down. What remained was pressure applied to the one thing the community could not disperse: its centre.

The licensed gathering

Bhai Mani Singh had held the Harmandir Sahib for some three decades on Mata Sundari’s authority. In 1738 he applied for permission to hold the Diwali assembly at Amritsar. It was granted, against a fee of five thousand rupees, to be met out of the offerings the assembly would bring.^1,3

He then learned that troops were to be moved up and the gathering attacked once it had assembled. He sent word out telling Sikhs to stay away.

They stayed away. No assembly, no offerings, no fee.

The charge

He was arrested for the debt, offered his life for conversion, refused, and executed at Lahore. The tradition holds that the sentence was dismemberment joint by joint, and that he corrected the executioner who began at the wrist rather than the finger.^1,3

What it shows

The individual details of the execution come from Sikh tradition rather than from Mughal record — principally the Punjabi chronicles, of which Bhangu’s is the fullest — and are held with the confidence usually given to a tradition rather than a document.^2,4 The structure of the case is not in that category and is what the entry is for.

There was no battle here, and no rebellion to suppress. A permission was issued, a fee attached to it, an ambush prepared inside it, and a capital charge produced out of the shortfall when the intended victims failed to walk in. This is administration, not warfare — and it is a fair summary of what the decade was.

Eight years later the same government caught Sikh bands in the marshes at Kahnuwan and killed several thousand of them in a week. Ten years after that, the Harmandir Sahib itself was destroyed. Within thirty years of this execution the Sikhs held Lahore and struck coin there.