Nawab Kapur Singh

The title he did not want

Kapur Singh was born in 1697 at Kaloke in the Lahore province, in what is now the Sheikhupura district of Pakistan. He came up through the fighting bands of the 1720s, in the decade when the Panth had a price on its head and no organisation to speak of.

In 1733 the Lahore government, having failed to destroy the Sikhs, offered them a grant instead — a jagir and the title of Nawab for their leader. The Sarbat Khalsa offered the title first to Baba Darbara Singh, who refused it; Kapur Singh accepted, and carried the name for the rest of his life and in the record ever since.

The tradition is emphatic that he took it as a duty rather than an honour, and the detail is consistent with everything else about him: a man given a Mughal rank by an assembly that did not believe Mughal ranks conferred anything.^1,2,3

What he built

The three years of truce are what he is actually remembered for. He used them to organise.

The fighting men were divided into the Budha Dal, the veterans, who took charge of the shrines, of preaching, and of administering initiation; and the Taruna Dal, the young, who did the fighting. It gave the Panth a standing structure with a division of labour, at a moment when it had neither.

When the accommodation collapsed and the persecution resumed — through Bhai Mani Singh’s execution in 1738 and on to the marshes at Kahnuwan in 1746 — the men who went back into the field were organised in a way they had not been before.

He also took Faizullapur near Amritsar, renamed it Singhpura, and from it the Singhpuria misl took its name.^1,2,3

1748

Two years after Kahnuwan the Sarbat Khalsa met at the Akal Takht and folded the surviving bands into the Dal Khalsa and the misls. That was Kapur Singh’s structure, consolidated and given a single command.

He did not keep the command. He handed it to Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, thirty years his junior, whom he had trained himself.

He died at Amritsar in 1753, twelve years before the Sikhs took Lahore. Almost everything the misls did afterwards was done with the machinery he assembled during a truce that lasted three years.^1,2,3