The Sikh Capture of Sirhind

Sirhind again

Sirhind sat on the road between Delhi and Lahore and had been the seat of the provincial administration under which Guru Gobind Singh’s two youngest sons were executed in 1704.

Banda Singh Bahadur had taken it in 1710 and killed its governor Wazir Khan, and had not been able to hold it. Six decades later it was held for the Durranis by Zain Khan, who by 1764 had stopped paying his troops and revenue men and was making up the difference by plundering the villages around him — a governor with a garrison that had no reason to fight hard for him and neighbours with no reason to help.^1,3

14 January 1764

The Dal Khalsa came against Sirhind under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia with the misls in concert. Zain Khan was defeated and killed in the field.^1,3

The town was sacked, and the territory of the province was divided among the misls and the Phulkian chiefs — Patiala, Nabha, Jind — who took the eastern share.

What it settled

Three things followed from it, and they are not the same size.

The immediate one is that Mughal and then Durrani authority in the eastern Punjab effectively ended here. What had been a provincial capital on the imperial trunk road became Sikh territory, held and administered by Sikh chiefs, and it stayed that way.²

The second is that Sirhind became the launching point for the raids east into the Gangetic Doab that took the misls to Delhi in 1783.

The third has nothing to do with strategy. The Sikh accounts do not treat 1764 as the capture of a road junction. They treat it as the closing of an account opened in a tower in that town in December 1704, and the district today carries the name Fatehgarh Sahib after the younger of the two boys killed in it.

Whether sixty years is a long time to hold a grievance or a short one depends on what you think the grievance was about. The Sikh reading is that it was never only a grievance: Sirhind was the standing demonstration that the state could kill children over religion and suffer nothing for it, and taking the town was the demonstration that it could not.