ਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦਰਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦਰ

Banda Singh Bahadur was the first Sikh commander to seize territory from the Mughal Empire and govern it in the Khalsa's name. Within two years of leaving Nanded, he had defeated the governor of Sirhind, set up a capital and a mint, and handed whole districts to the peasants who worked the land. His rule lasted only a few years, but it started the decay of Mughal authority in Punjab and the end of the feudal order behind it, as the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism puts it.

Who was Banda Singh Bahadur?

He was born Lachman Dev on 27 October 1670 at Rajauri, in the Punchh district of Kashmir, the son of Ram Dev. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, following Hakim Rai, calls the father a ploughman of the Sodhi subcaste; other accounts call the family Rajput. All agree the family was poor and that the boy learned riding, wrestling, archery and swordsmanship young. At fifteen, hunting, he saw a doe die and found her unborn young dying inside her. The sight shook him so deeply that he left home to become an ascetic.

He studied with the mendicant Janaki Prasad, then joined the Bairagi Ram Das near Kasur and received the name Madho Das. After years of wandering and yoga study under Aughar Nath at Nasik, he settled at Nanded on the Godavari and built his own monastery. There, as Madho Das Bairagi, he was locally known as a holy man with occult powers when Guru Gobind Singh Ji came south in 1708.

What happened when Guru Gobind Singh Ji met Madho Das at Nanded?

The chroniclers record that ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ ਨੇ visited the monastery on 3 September 1708. Madho Das, told that a visitor had taken his seat and made himself at home, tried the powers he was known for, and found they had no effect. He came before the Guru himself, fell at his feet and, in the word the chronicle keeps, called himself the Guru's banda, his servant. Guru Gobind Singh Ji took him to his own camp, initiated him into the Khalsa and named him Banda Singh after that word. The Mahan Kosh gives the name he received at initiation as Gurbaksh Singh.

The Guru gave him a drum, a banner and five of his own arrows as signs of authority, wrote hukamnamas calling on the Sikhs of Punjab to join him, and sent five Sikhs with him: Binod Singh, Kahan Singh, Baj Singh, Daya Singh and Ram Singh. His charge, as the Sikh accounts frame it, was to answer the wrongs done at Sirhind, where the governor Wazir Khan had ordered the execution of the Guru's two younger sons, Sahibzada Zorawar Singh and Sahibzada Fateh Singh. Banda Singh set out north. Guru Gobind Singh Ji died at Nanded that October, and the journey to Punjab took most of a year.

Chappar Chiri and the fall of Sirhind

Sikhs rallied as he came: Bhai Fateh Singh, Karam Singh and Dharam Singh among the first, and the Phulkian ancestors Ram Singh and Tilok Singh gave men and money. On 26 November 1709 he struck Samana, the home town of Jalal ud Din, the executioner of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji. Through the winter he took Ghurham, Thaska, Shahabad and Mustafabad, razed Kapuri, whose faujdar Qadam ud Din was notorious for persecution and abuse, and took Sadhaura, whose chief Usman Khan had tortured to death the Muslim saint Sayyid Buddhu Shah for aiding Guru Gobind Singh Ji at Bhangani. The long route was deliberate: he was gathering the Doaba and Majha Sikhs before turning on Sirhind.

On 12 May 1710 the armies met at Chappar Chiri, near Sirhind. Wazir Khan was killed in the battle, and on 14 May Sirhind was captured. Banda Singh appointed Baj Singh, one of the five who had come with him from Nanded, as governor of the city. He was now master of the land between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, worth, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says, thirty six lacs of rupees a year. The victory is still marked on the battlefield by the Fateh Burj at Chappar Chiri, a victory tower 328 feet high.

Lohgarh: a capital, a mint and land for the tillers

Banda Singh made the old fort of Mukhlisgarh, in the Shivalik foothills, his headquarters and renamed it Lohgarh, the fort of iron. He struck coins in the names of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji, and his seal joined the two words Sikhs still join: deg, the kettle of the Guru's langar, standing for charity, and tegh, the sword of the Khalsa. He dated a new calendar from Sirhind's capture, and appointed his own governors, among them Fateh Singh at Samana and Ram Singh at Thanesar.

His most far reaching act was social. Banda Singh abolished the zamindari system in the territory he held and gave proprietary rights to the tillers, making the people who worked the land its owners. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls this the demolition of the feudal system Mughal rule had built, and it is the part of his short rule that Punjabi memory has kept longest. His camp was open beyond the Sikhs: an imperial report recorded some five thousand Muslims from the Kalanaur and Batala country joining his forces, free to give the call to prayer and worship in his camp.

The empire answers: from Lohgarh to Gurdas Nangal

In summer 1710 he crossed the Yamuna and took Saharanpur, then Batala and Kalanaur, occupied Rahon in the Jalandhar Doab on 3 October 1710 and defeated the force gathered against him at Bhiloval, below Lahore. Emperor Bahadur Shah came north in person, ordered his governors to combine against the Sikhs and on 10 December 1710 issued a general order that Sikhs be killed wherever found. A huge imperial army, put at sixty thousand horse and foot, drove Banda Singh into Lohgarh and besieged him there. Starved of supplies, he cut his way out on the night of 10 December 1710 and escaped into the hills.

Within a fortnight he was fighting again, sending out hukamnamas. Bilaspur was ransacked, and Mandi, Kullu and Chamba submitted. After Bahadur Shah's death in February 1712 he reoccupied Sadhaura and Lohgarh. Under the next emperor, Farrukh Siyar, the pressure became relentless: Abdus Samad Khan, governor of Lahore, and his son Zakariya Khan, faujdar of Jammu, drove the Sikhs from the plains. In 1715 his main column was cornered at Gurdas Nangal village, about six kilometres from Gurdaspur, and besieged for eight months. Khafi Khan, a Mughal diarist, described the garrison eating leaves, ground bark and animal bones as food ran out. On 7 December 1715 the starving survivors were overrun, and Banda Singh was captured with them.

Execution at Delhi, 9 June 1716

The prisoners were paraded through Lahore, then marched to Delhi, arriving on 27 February 1716. The procession was staged to frighten: 740 prisoners in chains, seven hundred cartloads of heads and two thousand more heads on pikes, by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism's count. Banda Singh and about two dozen leaders were held in the fort while the rest, 694 men, were handed over for execution at a hundred a day. European merchants in Delhi watched and wrote home about the prisoners' refusal to save themselves by leaving their faith, in some of the earliest European accounts of the Sikhs.

Banda Singh was taken to the tomb of Khwaja Qutb ud Din Bakhtyar Kaki near the Qutb Minar, in today's Mehrauli, and offered Islam or death. He refused. His four year old son Ajai Singh was killed before his eyes. On 9 June 1716 Banda Singh himself was executed: blinded, his flesh torn with hot pincers, his body cut apart. The site is remembered today by ਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਸ਼ਹੀਦੀ ਅਸਥਾਨ ਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦੁਰ in Mehrauli.

How is Banda Singh Bahadur remembered?

Later tradition argued over Banda Singh. Accounts of a split between his Bandai followers and the Tat Khalsa circulated, and charges repeated against him, that he set himself up as a guru, were examined and largely rejected by the historian Ganda Singh, who wrote his life in 1935 and found no contemporary hukamnama behind the excommunication story. What is not disputed is the scale of what he did in seven years: the first territory held for the Khalsa, the first Sikh coinage, and a land settlement that broke the zamindars in the country he ruled. Historians of Punjab treat his rising as the opening of the road that led through the Dal Khalsa and the Sikh misls to the Sikh kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

He is remembered in stone at Chappar Chiri, where the Fateh Burj rises over the field of Wazir Khan's fall, at the Mehrauli gurdwara on his execution site, and among the martyrs of 1716. The five Sikhs who rode north with him from Nanded are remembered with him, on the gilded panels of Takht Sri Hazur Sahib, where his story began.