The Sikh Occupation of Delhi

Riding south

By the 1780s the misls held the Punjab and were raiding well beyond it, into the Ganges plain that the Mughal empire still nominally governed from Delhi. The empire of Shah Alam II was by then an authority over not much more than the city itself.

In March 1783 a large force under Baghel Singh, with Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and Jassa Singh Ramgarhia among the leaders, entered Delhi and occupied the Red Fort — the Diwan-i-Am, the hall the emperors gave audience in.^1,3

What was asked for

They did not annex the city, install a governor, or depose the emperor, and there is no sign they intended to. The Punjab was five hundred miles behind them and holding Delhi was not a proposition.

What was negotiated instead was specific. Baghel Singh would withdraw the bulk of the force and remain in the city with a detachment, drawing a share of the octroi — the duties collected at the city gates — and he would be permitted to identify and build shrines at the sites of Sikh history in Delhi.^1,3

He stayed some months and built seven. Among them:

• Sis Ganj, in Chandni Chowk, at the place where Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded in 1675 for refusing to convert and for defending the right of a community not his own to keep its religion.
• Rakab Ganj, where his body was cremated — in a house that was burned down around it, because it could not be taken openly.
• Bangla Sahib, where Guru Har Krishan had stayed, and died of smallpox contracted while tending the sick, at eight years old.

Why this and not territory

A hundred and eight years separate the execution in Chandni Chowk from the force that rode into Delhi and asked to build on the spot. In 1675 the Sikhs could not safely retrieve a body from that city. In 1783 they held its fort and set the terms.

They used the leverage to mark the ground. It is a fair summary of what the Panth of the misl period thought it was for, and it is why the argument that these were simply successful raiders does not quite survive contact with what they did when they succeeded.

The shrines are still there, still functioning, and still the reason most visitors to Sikh Delhi go where they go.³