Bandha Singh Bahadur  
 
 
 

Most Mughal court chroniclers have written lurid accounts of Bandh Singhs seven year campaign, yet according to a Mughal source of the period, ‘after the occupation of Sirhand, the Sikhs were issued with strict orders as not to permit the killing of even a single animal.’ On the other hand Emperor Bahadur Shah directed Mahabat Khan to issue edicts to ‘kill all worshippers of Nanak wherever they are found.’
But despite the anti-Sikh and Hindu measures of the Mughal government, Bandha Singh did not reduce his struggle to the level of communal strife. His was a political struggle, he would therefore not impose any restrictions on Muslims, the struggle of Bandha Singh was directed against the tyranny and high handedness of the Mughals in power.
 
Here is Dr. Gopal Singh's account of the Sikhs under Banda Bahadur:
 

But their leadership by and large was in the hands of the tried and devout followers of Guru Gobind, like Baj Singh, Fateh Singh, Karam Singh, Dharam Singh, Sham Singh and Alla Singh (the last one having joined him after abandoning the service of the Nawab of Sirhind).

Wazir Khan marched personally about ten miles out of Sirhind to give battle to the advancing enemy and the battle was joined o May 12, 1710, on the plain of Chapper-Chiri. Wazir Khan's troops fought with their backs to the wall and initially such was the consternation in Sikh ranks that the men who had joined them lured on by loot, fled the battle field. They were followed by a thousand others who had been smuggled in by Wazir Khan earlier. Seeing this, Banda himself leapt to the forefront and led the attack. The contemporary Muslim accounts of this battle are full invectives against the Sikhs who are called 'wretched and worthless dogs,' 'hellish infidels,' 'fanatical ruffians,' and their leader a veritable monster,' and yet they do not fail to admire the' reckless courage and spirit of sacrifice. Says Khafi Khan, "when the battle began, great bravery was shown on both sides but especially by the confederate sectarians. They advanced sword in hand against the elephants and brought two of them down. Many Musallmans found martyrdom and many of the infidels (i.e. the Sikhs) went to the sin of perdition. The Musallman force was hardly able to endure the repeated attacks of the infidels when a musket-ball made a martyr of Wazir Khan and they were put to flight."


"Money and baggage, horses and elephants fell into the hands of the infidels, and not a man of the army of Islam escaped with more than his life and the clothes he stood in. Horsemen and footmen in great numbers fell under the swords of the infidels who pursued the them as far as Sirhand.” The city of Sirhind was taken two days later. Continues Khafi Khan, "in this opulent town full of wealthy merchants, bankers and tradesmen, men of money and gentlemen of every class...no one found the opportunity of saving his life, wealth and family. When they heard of the death of Wazir Khan, they were seized with panic. They were shut up in the town and for one or two days, made some ineffectual resistance, but were obliged to bow to fate." Khafi Khan here charges the Sikh forces with extreme cruelty, sacrilege and appetite for blood-letting, carnage and loot. According to him, "they tore open the wombs of pregnant women, dashed every living child upon the ground, set fire to the houses and involved rich and poor in one common ruin. Whenever they found a mosque or a tomb, they broke it to pieces, dug it up and made no sin of scattering the bones of the dead."

But, such a strong statement from a Muslim writer, highly partial to his own regime and distressed at its shake-up, cannot be relied upon as an accurate account of events.


Of course, the hearts of the Sikhs were burning with revenge against Sirhind and its ruler. It was the determination of the Sikhs, therefore, to punish this accursed city, and especially its wily Nawab (and his accomplices like Suchanand, his Brahmin Wazier) from whose abandoned treasures they extracted a booty of over twenty to thirty million rupees, besides vast military stores and equipment. But the city was saved from complete ruin at the intervention of local Hindus against the payment of a large ransom.

 

FOOTNOTE :
According to S. M. Latif (History of the Panjdb, P. 274) Wazir Khan was killed by an arrow, but another Muslim source describes his death this wise :—"Wazir Khan came face to face with Baj Singh, shouting 'be careful, you dirty dog,' rushed upon him with a lance. Baj Singh snatched the weapon from Wazir Khan and struck it on the head of his horse and wounded it. After a while, Wazir Khan pulled out an arrow and thrust it at the arm of Baj Singh. Then drawing his sword he sprang forward to make an end of him. Fateh Singh who was stand' nearby, took his sword and struck Wazir Khan with it so strongly that it passed through his shoulder down to his waist and his head fell to the ground (Ahwal-i-Salatin-i-Hind, folio 35b-36b).

 
 
The next to fall to Bandhas forces were the towns of Rai Kot, Saharanpur, Jalalabad, Ludhiana, Jullundur, Hoshiarpur, Batala, Kalanaur, and Pathankot. These conquests took him to the very gates of Lahore and he was now in control of most of the Punjab. In the mean time the emperor feeling distressed by Bandhas victories gathered his forces from Oudh, Moradabad, Allahabad and Barha and setout with his emperial army.
 
 

After taking Sadhaura, Bandha Singh chose the fort of Mukhlispur as capital of the emerging Sikh state. Bandha restored the crumbling fort, renamed it Lohgarh and planted the Khalsa flag upon it. To give Lohgarh added authority and official seal and coins were minted to celebrate Sikh rule. But unlike the seals and coins of the Mughals which sang the praises of the Mughal rulers, Bandha’s were dedicated to Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. The Persian inscription read :

  Degh O Tegh O Fateh O Nasrat-I-bedirang
Yaft az Nanak Guru Gobind Singh.

The inscription eulogised the cauldron (representing Sikh commitment to feed the poor) and the sword ( the symbol of power) and unqualified patronage as attributes bequeathed by Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh Ji.
 
 
Nothing but the total destruction of Lohgarh and of Bandha Singh was the aim of the vast emperial army which an alarmed emperor was now leading into the Punjab. There were 60,000 horsemen, in addition there were foot soldiers. Opposing them were 3,000 Sikhs on horseback and 2,000 on foot. The battle was so bloody that at times the dead and dying of the emperial forces were so large that for a time it looked that they were losing ground. The remaining Sikhs retreated to the Lohgarh fort where they were besieged by the enemy. Despite the odds and heavy hand to hand fighting Bandha and many of his Sikhs managed to escape.
 
 
Within a fortnight of his escape Bandha issued hukamnana’s to the Khalsa ‘calling them to join him at once.’ Before long he felt strong enough to take on the Rajas of the Shivaliks. These were the Rajas who had sided with the Moghals , principle amongst them was Raja of Kahlur, an old foe of the Sikhs. His defeat was swift and he lost 1300 men and a large booty fell in to Sikh hands.
 
 
The other rajas hastened to offer their allegiance to Bandha, and one Raja of Chamba offered the hand of a lady in his family to him. They dually married and a son named Ajai Singh was born in 1711.
 
 
In 1712 Emperor Bahadur Shah died, the usual struggle for power ensued with Muhammad Farrukh Siyer succeeding him to the throne. His first goal was the destruction of Bundha Singh. With the combined forces of the Mughals and heavy artillery Sadhaura and Lohgarh once again fell to the Moghals but not before many of their commanders and large numbers of their troops had been killed by the Sikhs. Eluding capture Bandha and the Khalsa vanished into the hills. To celebrate their victory Lahors governer Abdus Samud Khan sent for his son Zakariya Khan to Delhi to carry the good news to the emperor with a large number of Sikh heads.
 
 
From 1713 to 1715 Bandha stayed in the remote hills of Jammu, now called Dera Baba Bandha Singh, it lies on a bend in the river Chanab. The Sikhs were regrouping and taking stock of their weapons and horses. Then suddenly in 1715 Bandha and his men appeared on the plains below Jammu and headed for Kalanaur. Suhrab Khan the commander of Kalanaur headed an impressive force of soldiers but were overrun and the victors headed towards Batala, which was also taken.
 
 
Alarmed at this news the emperor mobilised the largest force he could muster to head off the Sikhs. On being informed of the extensive preparations underway, Bandha chose to take a stand half-way between Batala and Kalanaur. When the combined Moghal forces and the heavily outnumbered Sikhs clashed, Bandha stood his ground and in the first encounter fought to heroically that he came very near to victory. Hard pressed, he made cunning use of the terrain to maks constant changes in position. Khafi Khan records that ‘ the infidels fought so fiercely that the army of Islam was nearly overpowered, they over and over again showed the greatest daring.’
 
 
Inevitably, the Khalsa had to fall back to Gurdas Nangal and hastily built fortifications. Even in the annals of those violent times, the siege of Gurdas Nangal, which lasted eight months, stands out as an epic event. Hopelessly out numbered, starving, sick and suffering the besieged force fought back with heroism and tenacity which earned the begrudging admiration of the enemy. When the end came it was due to sheer hardship. When the grass and leaves that the Sikhs had lived on had ran out and the bark of the trees which they had ground to make flour also ran out and with men dying of starvation, Gurdas Nangal was overrun on 17 December 1715. About 300 Sikhs were executed on the spot, their heads mounted on spears. Bandha was manacled and placed in an iron cage and let off to Delhi with the rest of the prisoners. Rather then present the emperor with just 200 prisoners, Zakariya Khan scoured the country side to make the figure more respectable.
 
According to one account in Ibrat Nama by Mirza Mohammed Harisi, ‘The procession had in the lead nearly two thousand heads of executed Sikhs stuffed with straw and another thousand in chains. The executions began on 5th March 1716 as a prelude to Bandhas own killing. As one account states, most of the captured Sikhs seemed happy and cheerful, joyfully singing the sacred hymns from their scriptures. And if any one said to them “Now you will be killed,” they shouted ‘Kill us, when were we afraid of death ?”
 
 
 
William Irvine describes the course of events in his Political History of the Sikhs :

‘Every day a hundred brave men perished and at night their headless bodies were loaded into carts, taken out of the city and hung on trees. It was not until June 9, 1716 that Bandha himself was lead out to execution, all efforts having failed to buy him off. They took him away to the old city where the red Qutb Minar lifts its proud head of white marble over the crumbling walls of the Hindu fortress. Here they paraded him around the tomb of the later emperor, Bahadur Shah and put him to barbarous death. First they placed his child in his arms and bade him to kill it. When he refused they ripped open the child infront of his fathers eyes, thrust his quivering flesh into Bandhas mouth, with hot pincers they tore out his eyes and hacked him to pieces limb by limb.’

 
 
The historian Kamwar Khan writes :

‘It was by the grace of God and not by wisdom or bravery that this came to happen. It is known to everyone that the late emperor and his four sons and numerous generals had made efforts to repress this rebellion, but it was all fruitless, and now that the infidel of the Sikhs and a few thousand of his companions have been starved into surrender.’ (Taskira-Salatin Chughtiya, 179.)
 
 
So ended the life of a man who is seven short years had so mocked the might of the Moghals with his victories that they could never again reassert their authority over the land they once ruled with such confidence. Though their numbers were tiny compared to the Moghal forces, Bandha and his men had taken control of extensive territories and established the first independent Sikh state complete with it’s royal seal, its own coins and an administrative system. In the absence of first hand written accounts by Sikh chroniclers, the reporting of Muslim and other observers has led to a very distorted picture of Bandha and exaggerated tales of atrocities committed by his followers , painted by people resentful of his meteoric rise.
 

Bandha Singh was a great man and leader with immense innocence of heart. He possessed good conduct in abundance, he was courageous and intelligent and wanted to infuse the spirit of self-confidence and honour in his followers. He was neither a religious Guru of the Sikhs and nor pretended to be. He was appointed their temporal leader .

Guru Gobind Singh Ji had not only foreseen the inherent weakness of the decaying Moghal empire, Guru Ji had also accurately assessed Bandhas potential for carrying out the Khalsa’s mission of asserting Sikh authority in Punjab. Even though the brutality of the Moghal rulers and the genocide of the Sikhs would reach new levels after Bandhas death, there was no longer any question of curbing the growth of Sikh power. Much blood would be spilt before the Khalsa fulfilled its destiny, but the way ahead had been shown by Bandha Singh Bahadur, or Bandha Singh the Brave, as all Sikhs admiringly call him.

 
 
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