The Nawabi Offered to the Khalsa

An offer instead of a campaign

By 1733 Zakariya Khan, governor at Lahore, had been trying to destroy the Sikhs for a decade and had produced only a population that had moved into the hills and the waste and was harder to reach every year. On his urging the Mughal government changed approach: the repressive measures were revoked and a grant was offered — the title of Nawab for the Panth’s leader, and a jagir of three parganas, Dipalpur, Kanganval and Jhabal.^1,3

Taken in assembly, and taken reluctantly

The offer was put to a Sarbat Khalsa at Amritsar — which is itself the interesting part, because there was no individual with authority to accept it. The assembly had to.

The title was offered first to Baba Darbara Singh, who declined it. It went then to Kapur Singh, who accepted, and who is known ever afterwards as Nawab Kapur Singh. The tradition holds the assembly took the honour without enthusiasm and that Kapur Singh accepted it as a duty rather than an elevation — a chief given a Mughal rank by a body that did not think Mughal ranks conferred anything.^1,3

What was done with the three years

This is why the episode matters, and it is easy to miss.

Kapur Singh used the interval to reorganise. The fighting men were tabulated into two standing bodies: the Budha Dal, the army of the veterans, charged with the shrines, with preaching, and with administering initiation; and the Taruna Dal, the army of the young, which did the fighting.³

That is a functioning military and religious administration, created under a truce, by a community that had spent the previous decade being hunted. When the accommodation broke down — as it did within about three years — the Sikhs who went back into the field were organised in a way they had not been before.

The line runs directly from here to 1748: it was this structure that the Sarbat Khalsa consolidated into the Dal Khalsa and the misls, under the same Kapur Singh’s authority, after Kahnuwan.

The breakdown

The grant was withdrawn and the persecution resumed. What followed in the next decade was worse than what had preceded it: the execution of Bhai Mani Singh in 1738, the killing of Bhai Taru Singh in 1745, and in 1746 the campaign that ended in the marshes at Kahnuwan.

Read forward, 1733 is the clearest case in the century of a state trying both instruments on the same problem, in sequence, and finding that neither worked — and of a community using the gentler one to prepare for the return of the other.