Sikh Misls Capture Lahore

The prize of the Punjab

Lahore was the seat of Mughal and then Afghan power in the Punjab — the city the Sikhs had been broken against for half a century, where Guru Arjan died in custody in 1606.

In 1765, with Ahmad Shah Durrani’s grip loosening after each expensive invasion, the Bhangi misl chiefs Gujjar Singh and Lehna Singh, with Sobha Singh, occupied the city and divided its administration between them.^1,2 Durrani came back, as he always did. The occupation held in substance: from this point the misls, not the empire, commanded the capital of the Punjab.

Coin struck in the Gurus’ name

What gave the capture its meaning was monetary. The misls struck the rupee later called the Nanakshahi, carrying the legend the Khalsa had used since Banda Singh’s seal — deg o tegh o fateh, the kettle, the sword and victory.⁵

In the political grammar of the eighteenth century, whoever’s name is on the money is the sovereign. The money did not name Gujjar Singh or Lehna Singh or any chief. It named the Gurus — exactly as Banda’s seal at Lohgarh had done fifty-five years earlier, and for the same reason.

How this actually worked

The misls are often described as a confederacy, which is accurate and unhelpfully vague. The arrangement had a definite shape, set out in the diagram at the foot of this entry, and it is worth following because everything from 1716 to 1799 runs through it.

Authority after 1708 rested in two places at once: the Guru Granth Sahib for doctrine, and the Guru Panth — the initiated community — for decision. The community exercised that authority by assembling. The Sarbat Khalsa met at the Akal Takht at Amritsar, twice yearly at Vaisakhi and Diwali, and a resolution it passed — a gurmata — bound every Sikh.³

It was by gurmata, on Vaisakhi 1748, that some sixty-five roving bands were reorganised into eleven standing misls, together forming the Dal Khalsa.⁴ Each misl had its own chief, banner, territory and revenue. Territory was funded largely through rakhi: a village paid a fifth of its revenue assessment and received protection, an arrangement that began as something close to a protection racket and matured into a functioning tax system.^1,4

The weakness in the design

This structure did two things extremely well. It survived decapitation — there was no single leader whose death would end it, which is precisely why the executions of 1716 and the massacre of 1762 failed to finish the community. And it converted raiding into governance: by the 1760s the misls held territory from the Indus to the Jumna and were collecting revenue rather than plunder.¹

What it did badly was act as a state. Twelve sovereignties negotiating through a biannual assembly is a poor instrument for holding a frontier province against Afghans, Marathas and eventually the East India Company. The Sarbat Khalsa also depended on there being a safe place to meet, which was not reliably true.

That contradiction was resolved a generation later, and not by agreement. A young Sukerchakia chief named Ranjit Singh took Lahore for himself in 1799 and built a single kingdom out of the confederacy — keeping the Gurus’ legend on his coinage while ending, in practice, the assembly that had authorised it.