How the Sikhs Took the Punjab
From a price on every head to Lahore, in fifty years · 8 stops
In 1746 the Lahore government came close to finishing the Sikhs as a political force. In 1765 the Sikhs struck coin in Lahore as its rulers. This path follows how that happened — a massacre, a constitution written by an assembly, an elderly scholar who should not have marched, and a confederacy that reached Delhi.
1738. Not a battle — a licence fee, an ambush prepared inside the permission, and a capital charge from the shortfall. This is what the decade was.
The custodian of the Harmandir Sahib was executed at Lahore over an unpaid licence fee for a gathering the authorities had permitted and then set out to ambush — the clearest single instance of how the Panth was administered out of existence in the 1730s.
1746. Caught in the marshes at Kahnuwan with the river behind them. Around a fifth of the Panth, inside a week.
Sikh bands driven into the marshes at Kahnuwan were caught against the Ravi and the hills in the summer of 1746. Around seven thousand were killed and three thousand taken to Lahore and executed — a fifth of the Panth, in a week.
1748. Two years later the survivors meet at the Akal Takht and reorganise into one army under one commander, divided into the misls.
Two years after Kahnuwan, a Sarbat Khalsa assembly at the Akal Takht folded the surviving Sikh bands into a single army under one commander, divided into the confederacies later known as the misls. It was the constitution the Punjab was won with.
Baba Deep Singh
1682–1757A scholar who spent his life copying scripture, and at seventy-five raised a force to answer for a desecrated shrine.
A scholar who prepared copies of the Guru Granth Sahib and a soldier who died at seventy-five retaking Amritsar after Afghan forces desecrated the Harmandir Sahib in 1757.
1757. The Harmandir Sahib blown up and the pool filled with carcasses; his march on Amritsar, and his death outside it.
Afghan forces blew up the Harmandir Sahib and filled its pool with the carcasses of cattle. Baba Deep Singh, a seventy-five-year-old scholar with no command, raised a force at Damdama Sahib and marched on Amritsar. He did not survive it.
1762. The greater massacre — a far larger number killed in a single day near Kup.
Ahmad Shah Durrani's forces killed Sikhs in tens of thousands in a single day near Kup — the gravest catastrophe in Sikh history, and one the community had reversed within three years.
1765. Three years after the worst day in their history, they hold the capital and strike coin in the Gurus' names.
The Sikh misls took the capital of the Punjab and struck coin in the name of the Gurus — the moment a persecuted community became the province's governing power.
1783. The Red Fort, and what they asked for once they had it: permission to build on the ground where the Gurus had been killed.
Misl forces entered Delhi and occupied the Red Fort. What they took away was not territory but permission — to build gurdwaras on the sites where the Gurus and their followers had been executed, which is why those shrines stand in Delhi today.