Banda Singh Bahadur

The man later celebrated as Banda Singh Bahadur was born Lachman Dev on October 27, 1670, in Rajauri, a hill town in the Poonch region of Jammu, into a Hindu Rajput farming family ^[1]. His father, Ram Dev, worked the land, and the boy grew up hunting and riding in the foothills, skills that would matter greatly in his later life ^[2].

A hunting incident is said to have changed his course. While still a teenager, Lachman Dev shot a doe and watched her and her unborn young die before him. The experience disturbed him deeply, and he abandoned his home to become a wandering ascetic ^[1]. He took the name Madho Das and drifted through northern and central India, studying under yogis and eventually settling on the banks of the Godavari river at Nanded, in the Deccan, where he established a monastery and gained a local reputation for occult learning ^[3].

For roughly two decades Madho Das lived as a bairagi, a renunciant detached from worldly affairs. Contemporary accounts and later Sikh chronicles describe him as proud of his powers and accustomed to humbling visitors to his hermitage ^[2]. Nothing in those years suggested that he would end his life as the most feared rebel commander in the Mughal Empire.

In September 1708 Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, arrived at Nanded in the company of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah I. The Guru had suffered grievously in the preceding years: his four sons were dead, two killed in battle at Chamkaur and two executed at Sirhind by the Mughal governor Wazir Khan, and his mother had died of grief ^[1]. Accounts hold that the Guru visited Madho Das at his monastery and, through a combination of composure and force of personality, won the ascetic over completely ^[3].

Madho Das is reported to have declared himself the Guru's banda, his slave or servant, and the name endured. Guru Gobind Singh initiated him into the Khalsa, the Sikh order of initiated warriors, giving him the name Banda Singh, to which the title Bahadur, meaning brave, was later attached ^[2]. The Guru then charged him with a mission: travel north to Punjab, rally the Sikhs, and punish Wazir Khan of Sirhind for the execution of the Guru's young sons ^[1].

Guru Gobind Singh gave Banda Singh five arrows from his own quiver, a war drum, a banner, and letters (hukamnamas) instructing Sikhs across Punjab to join him. Five trusted Sikhs were appointed as his advisers ^[3]. Weeks later, in October 1708, the Guru died at Nanded from wounds inflicted by an assassin. Banda Singh set out for the north carrying the authority of a Guru who would have no human successor.

Banda Singh reached the outskirts of Punjab in 1709 and began gathering followers. The Guru's letters worked powerfully on the Sikh peasantry, and men joined him from the Malwa and Majha regions along with landless cultivators and others with grievances against Mughal revenue officers ^[2]. His first successes came at Sonipat and Samana. Samana, a wealthy town that was home to the professional executioners who had beheaded Guru Tegh Bahadur and the younger sons of Guru Gobind Singh, fell to his forces in November 1709 and was sacked ^[1].

Towns across the Cis-Sutlej territory followed: Ghuram, Thaska, Mustafabad, and Sadhaura, where the local chief had persecuted the Muslim saint Sayyid Budhu Shah for aiding the Guru ^[3]. Each victory swelled Banda Singh's army and his treasury, and each alarmed the imperial administration further.

The decisive confrontation came in May 1710 at Chappar Chiri, near Sirhind. Wazir Khan marched out with a professional army equipped with artillery and war elephants, facing an irregular force of Sikh horsemen and peasant infantry ^[2]. The battle was hard fought until Wazir Khan was killed, at which point his army broke. Banda Singh's forces entered Sirhind on May 14, 1710, and the city that Sikhs regarded as accursed for the execution of the Guru's children was plundered ^[1]. The victory gave Banda Singh control of the territory between the Sutlej and the Yamuna, a region yielding substantial annual revenue to the Mughal crown.

After Sirhind, Banda Singh set about governing rather than merely raiding. He made the hill fortress of Mukhlisgarh, in the lower Shivalik hills, his capital and renamed it Lohgarh, the fortress of steel ^[3]. From there he issued orders in the name of the Gurus and administered the conquered districts through appointed officials.

His government carried the marks of sovereignty. He struck coins, not in his own name but in the names of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, and introduced an official seal for state documents along with a new calendar dating from his capture of Sirhind ^[1]. Historians treat these acts as the founding of the first sovereign Sikh state, decades before the misls and nearly a century before Ranjit Singh's kingdom ^[2].

The most consequential of his measures was agrarian. Banda Singh abolished the zamindari system in the territories he ruled, ending the claims of hereditary landlords and granting proprietary rights to the cultivators who actually tilled the soil ^[1]. The reform bound the peasantry to his cause and has been described by modern historians as one of the earliest large-scale land reforms in Indian history ^[4]. Contemporary Persian chroniclers noted with dismay that men of low birth were serving as his officers and that ordinary villagers obeyed his appointees rather than the old gentry ^[2].

The loss of Sirhind stung the empire into a massive response. Emperor Bahadur Shah I abandoned his campaign in Rajasthan and marched north in person, ordering the faujdars of the region to converge on the Sikhs. In December 1710 imperial armies besieged Lohgarh. Banda Singh escaped the encirclement into the hills, reportedly slipping out at night while a devoted follower dressed in his garments to deceive the besiegers ^[3].

The following years were a grinding contest. Banda Singh raided into the Jammu hills, took Sadhaura and Lohgarh again in 1712 after Bahadur Shah's death set off a Mughal succession struggle, and was again forced out ^[2]. The new emperor Farrukhsiyar, enthroned in 1713, made destroying him a priority and appointed Abd us-Samad Khan as governor of Lahore with orders to finish the war ^[1].

In 1715 Banda Singh and several hundred followers were trapped in the fortified village of Gurdas Nangal, near Gurdaspur. The imperial army, tens of thousands strong, blockaded the position for around eight months. Supplies ran out; the defenders ate boiled leaves, bark, and finally the flesh of their dead animals ^[3]. On December 7, 1715, the starving garrison was overrun and Banda Singh was taken alive, bound in chains ^[1]. During these years he had married, and a young son, Ajai Singh, was captured with him ^[2].

The prisoners were paraded to Delhi in February 1716 in a deliberately humiliating procession. Banda Singh was displayed in an iron cage mounted on an elephant, and hundreds of captured Sikhs were carried behind him, while cartloads of severed heads on spears accompanied the column ^[1]. The spectacle was recorded by Mughal court chroniclers and by two employees of the British East India Company, John Surman and Edward Stephenson, whose letter of March 1716 to the Company survives as an independent eyewitness account of the executions ^[5].

For a week in March 1716, batches of roughly one hundred Sikh prisoners were beheaded each day at Delhi. Observers, including the Company writers, remarked that the condemned men went to their deaths without visible fear and refused offers of pardon in exchange for conversion to Islam ^[5].

Banda Singh himself was kept alive for three more months while officials attempted to extract the location of his treasure. On June 9, 1716, near the shrine of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli, he was executed with prolonged torture. Accounts state that his young son was killed before his eyes, that he was offered his life if he accepted Islam and refused, and that he was then dismembered ^[1]. He was forty five years old.

Any serious Banda Singh Bahadur biography must weigh a public career of barely seven years against consequences that lasted centuries. He demonstrated that the Mughal Empire, still formidable on paper, could be defeated in the field by a peasant army, and he gave the Khalsa its first experience of territorial rule ^[2]. The institutions he improvised, coinage in the name of the Gurus, the official seal, and government by initiated Sikhs, were revived by the Sikh misls later in the eighteenth century and by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose Lahore kingdom retained the Nanakshahi coinage tradition ^[1].

His land reform outlived his state in memory if not in law. The idea that the tiller rather than the hereditary landlord held the primary right in the soil resurfaced repeatedly in Punjabi agrarian politics, and historians such as Ganda Singh and Hari Ram Gupta treated his abolition of zamindari as a founding act of the Sikh political tradition ^[4]. Assessments of his severity toward captured towns vary; some contemporary Persian sources portray him as ruthless, while Sikh tradition frames the campaigns as retribution for the execution of the Guru's children, and modern scholarship generally reads the violence within the norms of eighteenth century warfare ^[2].

Commemoration of him is extensive. Gurdwaras mark the sites of his victories and his death, and in 2011 the Fateh Burj at Chappar Chiri, described as the tallest victory tower in India, was inaugurated near Mohali to mark the tercentenary of the battle of Sirhind ^[6]. For anyone asking who was Banda Singh Bahadur, the answer given at these memorials is consistent: the ascetic turned general who built the first Sikh state and died refusing to renounce his faith.