ਨਵਾਬ ਕਪੂਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀਨਵਾਬ ਕਪੂਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Nawab Kapur Singh Ji (1697 to 1753) was the Sikh leader who turned a hunted, scattered community into an organised fighting commonwealth. In the worst years of persecution under the Lahore government, he held the Panth together, accepted the title of Nawab from the very empire that had outlawed the Sikhs, and used the breathing space to build the Dal Khalsa, the united Sikh army from which the twelve misls, and eventually the Sikh kingdoms of Punjab, grew. Contemporaries obeyed him, the tradition says, because his character was beyond reproach: he was found fanning the assembly like a servant on the day it chose him as its chief.

Who was Nawab Kapur Singh Ji?

He was born in 1697 into a Virk Jatt family of Kaloke village, now in Sheikhupura district of Pakistan. His father's name was Dalip Singh. He was eleven years old when Guru Gobind Singh Ji passed away and nineteen when ਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦਰ was executed at Delhi, so his youth was formed by the memory of the Guru and the suffering of the Panth. As a young man he seized the village of Faizullapur, near Amritsar, renamed it Singhpura and made it his headquarters. From it he is known as Kapur Singh Faizullapuria, and the chiefdom he founded as the Singhpuria misl. In 1721, at a large gathering at Amritsar, he took amrit at the hands of ਭਾਈ ਮਨੀ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ.

How did Kapur Singh become a Nawab?

Zakariya Khan became governor of Lahore in 1726 and set out to crush the Sikhs, who were driven into the hills and forests. Kapur Singh organised bands of warriors who struck at government treasuries and caravans, both to paralyse the administration and to carry food to the Sikhs in hiding. The attacks worked. In 1733 the Delhi government, at Zakariya Khan's own urging, lifted the measures against the Sikhs and offered them a grant: the title of Nawab for their leader, with a jagir of the three parganas of Dipalpur, Kanganval and Jhabal. The offer was brought to the Sikhs assembled at Amritsar for Vaisakhi by Subeg Singh, a Sikh serving under the Lahore government.

At the ਸਰਬੱਤ ਖਾਲਸਾ the title was first offered to the veteran Baba Darbara Singh, who declined it. It was then offered to Kapur Singh, who was at that moment humbly waving a hand fan over the congregation. He accepted only with reluctance, and before putting on the robe of honour sent by the Mughals he placed it at the feet of five revered Sikhs. The chroniclers kept the detail because it defined the man: the Panth's highest honour was received as a servant receives a task.

Building the Dal Khalsa and the misls

Kapur Singh used the peace to rebuild. He merged the many separate Sikh jathas into one force in two divisions. The ਬੁੱਢਾ ਦਲ, the army of the elders under his own charge, guarded the shrines, preached and administered amrit. The Taruna Dal, the army of the young under Hari Singh Dhillon, was the fighting division. As the Taruna Dal grew past twelve thousand, Kapur Singh split it into five parts, each with its own centre, banner and drum. Those five, and the groups formed after them, are the seed of the twelve Sikh misls that ruled Punjab by the end of the century, their conquered territories recorded at the Akal Takht in registers called misls, which gave the confederacies their name.

The peace did not last. Before the harvest of 1735 the jagir was seized back, and the years of war returned. Kapur Singh campaigned across the Malwa and the lands south of the Sutlej, took Sunam and made it over to Ala Singh, the Phulkian chief, whom he had himself initiated, and led the Dal to the outskirts of Delhi. In 1739, when Nadir Shah of Persia was marching home laden with the plunder of Delhi, Kapur Singh fell on his rearguard near Akhnur on the Chenab and rescued girls who were being carried off, restoring them to their families. It is one of the episodes Sikh memory treasures most: an outlawed army doing the work of protectors when no state would.

Why did Kapur Singh hand over command in 1748?

On Vaisakhi, 29 March 1748, the Sikhs assembled at Amritsar in strength for the first time in years. At Kapur Singh's instance the sixty five or so separate groups were formally leagued into eleven associations under one supreme command, and the united force took the name ਦਲ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ. Then Kapur Singh, now past fifty and feeling his age, asked the Panth to relieve him, and at his suggestion Jassa Singh Ahluwalia was chosen supreme commander in his place. He had built the institution and now, characteristically, he stepped out of its highest seat and let it belong to the Panth. He died at Amritsar in 1753 and was cremated within the premises of Gurdwara Baba Atal. His Singhpuria chiefdom passed to his nephew Khushal Singh, and the village of Kapurgarh in the Nabha country still carries his name.

How is Nawab Kapur Singh Ji remembered?

He is remembered as the organiser of the Sikh commonwealth: the man who received a title from an empire and turned it into the charter of a nation in arms. The structures he set, the two Dals, the misl confederacies and the Dal Khalsa under a commander chosen by the Panth, governed Sikh Punjab for the rest of the century. Paintings of him show an old commander in armour beside his horse, but the tradition's own portrait is simpler and more telling: the chief of the Khalsa, fanning the sangat.