Jassa Singh Ahluwalia

Command

Jassa Singh was born in 1718 and trained by Nawab Kapur Singh, who handed him the command of the Dal Khalsa when it was constituted in 1748. He held it, in practice, until his death thirty-five years later.

The period he commanded through is the one in which the Sikhs went from being hunted to holding the Punjab. He led at the rescue of Abdali’s captives at the Goindwal ferry in 1761, was in the column caught at Kup in the Vadda Ghallughara in 1762 and survived it wounded, took Sirhind in 1764, held Lahore in 1765, and was among the leaders who rode into Delhi in 1783.^1,2,3

The title, and its limits

When the Sikhs took Lahore the Panth conferred on him the title Sultan-ul-Qaum — king of the nation.

It is worth being precise about what that did and did not mean, because it is easy to read as a coronation and it was not one. The Dal Khalsa was a confederacy whose binding decisions were taken by the Sarbat Khalsa as gurmatas; a supreme commander executed those decisions and did not replace them. He struck coin at Lahore in the Gurus’ names, not his own — the same formula Banda Singh Bahadur had used and that Ranjit Singh would use after him.

He was, in other words, the head of an army answerable to an assembly, given a royal title by that assembly and never permitted to behave as though it made him a king. That distinction is the whole difference between the misl period and the monarchy that replaced it.^1,2,3

Afterwards

He died at Amritsar on 23 October 1783, the year of the Delhi expedition. The Ahluwalia misl he headed became the state of Kapurthala.

Sixteen years after his death, Ranjit Singh took Lahore and began absorbing the confederacy into a single monarchy — more powerful than what Jassa Singh had commanded, and gone within a decade of its founder’s death.^1,2,3