Mai Bhago
Warrior; commander at Khidrana, 1705
The woman who shamed forty Sikhs who had abandoned Guru Gobind Singh back into the field, led them at Khidrana in 1705, and was the only one of them to survive the battle. She afterwards served as a bodyguard to the Guru.
The forty who left
In the winter of 1704–05, with Anandpur under a siege that had run long past the point of hunger, forty Sikhs told Guru Gobind Singh they would follow him no further. He asked them to put it in writing. They did — a bedava, a document of disavowal — and went home to their villages in the Malwa.
What met them there was Mai Bhago. Born at Jhabal near Amritsar into a family already connected to the Guru’s service, she went from village to village and told the returned men, and their households, what they had done. The account that the tradition preserves is not one of persuasion so much as of public shame: she declared that if the men would not fight, the women would, and she would lead them.1,2,3
Khidrana
They rode back. In December 1705 the forty, with Mai Bhago among them and by most accounts at their head, met the pursuing Mughal force at the water reservoir of Khidrana in the Malwa. They fought as a screen while the Guru’s own party held a rise above the pool and shot into the attackers. The Mughal column, short of water in a country that had almost none, broke off and withdrew.
All forty men were killed or fatally wounded. Mai Bhago lived. Guru Gobind Singh came down to the field, and — the tradition holds — tore up the bedava over the dying. The forty are remembered as the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated Ones, and the place took the name it still carries: Muktsar, the pool of liberation.1,2,3
Afterwards
She did not go home. Mai Bhago stayed with the Guru as a member of his personal guard, in arms, and after 1708 travelled south, ending her life in meditation at Jinvara in the Deccan, not far from Nanded. A gurdwara there marks the site.
Her significance in the tradition is not that a woman fought — the Khalsa had been open to women from its founding in 1699, when Guru Gobind Singh initiated women alongside men and gave them the name Kaur. It is that at the moment the Panth’s men broke, the person who reassembled them was a woman, and the sources say so plainly rather than as a later gloss.1,2,3
In the chronicle
Before you go
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