The Rescue at the Goindwal Ferry

The road home from Panipat

Ahmad Shah Abdali destroyed the Maratha army at Panipat in January 1761 and started back for Afghanistan in the spring. His column carried the proceeds of the campaign, and those included people — captives taken to be sold in the slave markets at the other end of the passes, most of them women.

The route ran through the Punjab, which by 1761 was territory the Dal Khalsa moved through more freely than any imperial army did.

The decision

The Sikhs were assembled at Amritsar — the Sarbat Khalsa met there twice a year — when appeals reached them from the captives’ families. The assembly resolved by gurmata to take the prisoners off Abdali’s column.^1,4

They struck the column at the ferry crossing on the Beas at Goindwal, took the captives, and arranged to return them to their homes, which in most cases meant escorting them a considerable distance into country that was not the Sikhs’ own and had no particular reason to be friendly.^1,3

What the numbers will bear

Figures given for this run from around two thousand rescued to twenty-two thousand taken, and the larger numbers should be treated with caution. The main source is the Sikh chronicle tradition rather than any documentary record — no register of that column exists — and Bhangu is writing to establish what the Khalsa was and by what right it held the Punjab.³

What is well attested is the shape of it: that the Dal Khalsa attacked a returning Afghan army specifically to free non-Sikh captives, resolved to do it in open assembly, and delivered the freed prisoners home rather than keeping or ransoming them.

Why it is in the chronicle

The misls are easy to write about as successful raiders who happened to be Sikh, and the eighteenth-century Punjab gives you plenty of material for that reading.

This episode is the standing objection to it. The people freed at Goindwal were not Sikhs and had no claim on the Panth. There was no territory in it and no money — returning captives costs rather than pays. The decision was taken by the assembly, in the form the assembly used for binding decisions, and executed at cost against the strongest army in the region.

The year after, the same Abdali caught the Sikh column near Kup and killed a very large number of them in a day — the Vadda Ghallughara. Three years after that, they held Lahore.