The other formidable challenge to Mughal authority in the eighteenth century was mounted by the Sikhs. Unlike the Marathas, who contested Mughal power throughout India, the Sikh rebellion was confined to the Punjab. And whereas the Marathas initially resisted the Mughals but ended up defending the crippled empire, with the Sikhs it was the reverse. The movement launched by Guru Nanak had emerged in the sixteenth century within the matrix of the Mughal imperium, with which it was once on generally good terms. But over time relations between the two grew increasingly hostile. How and why, then, did the Sikhs’ militantly anti-Mughal posture incubate and grow?
We have seen that following Jahangir’s execution of Guru Arjun, the latter’s son and successor, Guru Hargobind, adopted a distinctly martial profile. Claiming both temporal and spiritual authority over the Sikh community, he built a fort at Amritsar, where he also established a court and ‘immortal throne’ (Akal Takht). Suspicious of others adopting the trappings of sovereignty within his domain, Jahangir had him imprisoned for twelve years. Even while relations with the Mughals continued to deteriorate, the Sikhs faced formidable internal threats, as collateral descendants of the fourth guru fiercely contested successions to that office. Guru Hargobind’s authority was challenged by his uncle, whose own son and later his grandson set themselves up as an alternative line of gurus. Owing to such internal challenges, combined with periodic skirmishes with Mughal forces, Guru Hargobind withdrew from Amritsar and established his court in the Himalayan foothills in the Siwalik range to the north-east, beyond directly administered Mughal territory. There, among the hill rajas, the last five of the ten Sikh gurus spent most of their time. Yet relations with the Mughals continued to worsen. In 1675, imperial authorities interpreted the activities of the ninth guru, Tej Bahadur (G. 1664–75), as threatening and had him arrested and executed.23
Although residence in the hills had minimized the gurus’ direct contact with Mughal authorities, it also cut them off from the bulk of the growing Sikh community, which dwelt on the plains of the eastern Punjab. As a result, dissenting factions outside the lineage of the tenth guru, Gobind (G. 1675–1708), were able to take control of Amritsar and the sacred precincts of the Golden Temple. What is more, many of his masands – the institutional link between the gurus and the bulk of their followers – were appropriating power for themselves, appointing their own deputies for collecting offerings from the faithful, following rival claimants to the guruship, and interfering in succession struggles. In these circumstances, Guru Gobind concluded that radical reforms were needed to reassert his sole authority over the Sikh community and to end the divisive succession disputes.
His solution was dramatic. In 1699 he declared that the lineage of gurus would end with himself, thereby resolving the issue of any future succession struggles, and that his spiritual authority would henceforth be invested in a new, self-governing corporate body, the Khalsa, sworn by rites of initiation and dedicated to undertaking certain reforms. Initiates would leave their hair and beards unshorn, disavow previous caste identities, renounce the use of tobacco, cease patronizing masands, collectivize the community’s material resources and visit the guru bearing arms. Guru Gobind took this drastic initiative in order to resist Rajput incursions into Sikh domains, halt dissenting groups from encroaching on the Sikh community, and eliminate the many masands that stood between the guru and the larger Sikh community.24 The importance of the last concern is seen in the very name Khalsa. In Mughal usage, the familiar category khalisa – an administrative term derived from the Arabic khalis meaning ‘pure’ or ‘unmediated’ – denoted land whose wealth flowed directly to the state, unmediated by jagirdars. Similarly, Guru Gobind understood the Khalsa as a family of faith whose loyalty was unmediated by masands or other human agents, such as rival claimants to the guruship.
The Mughal government’s position towards these developments was generally benign but wary. In 1689 Guru Gobind had established himself in Anandpur, in the Siwalik range seventy kilometres north-east of Ludhiana. Ten years later, immediately after the Khalsa was formed, substantial numbers of volunteers, arms and funds began pouring into the region. In response, ‘Alamgir ordered local officials to leave the guru alone as long as he adopted a modest lifestyle like other spiritual mendicants, but to make him submit and pay taxes if he imitated kingly ways.25 At that time, the guru’s most immediate adversaries were not Mughal authorities but neighbouring hill rajas who presided over hierarchically ordered societies and Brahmin-dominated royal courts that clashed with the Sikhs’ egalitarian social vision and guru institution. Moreover, to accommodate the host of followers who had arrived from the plains, the Sikhs at Anandpur had been raiding richer, nearby villages for supplies. This, in turn, angered the hill rajas, who in 1704 (or 1705) subjected Anandpur to a protracted siege.26 The rajas also appealed to the Mughals to intervene in the conflict.27
As a consequence of the siege, Guru Gobind and his followers were ultimately forced to abandon the town and its forts. But in the confusion that followed, Mughal authorities captured and killed the guru’s two youngest sons, notwithstanding the government’s sworn promise to ensure the Sikhs’ safe passage from Anandpur. The aggrieved guru then appealed directly to ‘Alamgir for redress, using an extraordinary medium – a long Persian poem in which he defiantly censured the Mughals for their perfidy. He also demanded a personal meeting with the emperor to obtain justice and, more generally, to sort out Sikh–Mughal relations.28 ‘Alamgir agreed and ordered his officials in the Punjab to arrange for the guru’s safe passage to his court in the Deccan. After Guru Gobind left the Punjab, however, news arrived that in March 1707 ‘Alamgir had died. But the guru proceeded anyway, meeting Bahadur Shah in Delhi as he was consolidating his power there, and then accompanying the new emperor to the Deccan. There, in 1708, the guru himself died, leaving the community momentarily leaderless so soon after the Khalsa institution had been launched.29
In this fluid atmosphere, before the idea of shared Sikh governance had had time to take root, in 1709 a mysterious, charismatic figure named Banda Bahadur appeared on the scene claiming to be the guru’s chosen representative and promising to lead the still-fractured Sikh community into glory. His followers, consisting mainly of Khalsa Sikhs drawn from small zamindars and Jat farmers of rural east Punjab, grew tenfold within a year or so, from 4,000 to 40,000.30 For the next six years, until 1715 when he was captured by Mughal authorities, this quasi-millennial figure led his supporters against wealthy cities, plundering and gathering strength. The rebellion initially targeted the prosperous Mughal city of Sirhind in south-eastern Punjab, the base of the imperial officer who had betrayed Guru Gobind, killing members of his family. The movement thus had a specifically anti-Mughal basis from the start. It then spread to larger Mughal centres, notably Lahore, disrupting the functioning of provincial government generally. Although Bahadur Shah sent armies to suppress the revolt shortly after it had begun, further imperial energies were sapped with that emperor’s death in 1712, followed by three years of factional turmoil in Delhi during the reign of Jahandar and the coup that brought Farrukh Siyar to power.
Banda’s successes also built on a century of material prosperity in the Punjab, as lineages of Jat farmers opened up new tracts for settlement and cultivation. On the one hand, this spurt in rural prosperity enabled many villagers to afford more and better weapons with which to participate in the Punjab’s growing military labour market. On the other hand, the establishment of the Khalsa presented an attractive alternative to participation in that market. Initiation into the community conferred on every male Sikh the prestigious name ‘Singh’, a title hitherto claimed only by aristocratic Rajputs, who were rulers or landholders, or in some cases by Khatris, the dominant commercial class.31 For prosperous Jat agriculturalists, then, becoming not just Sikhs but members of the Khalsa constituted a rise in social status commensurate with the greater prosperity that they and the Punjab generally were experiencing. Shunning the idea of fighting for money as opposed to fighting for community and religion, Khalsa Sikhs joined Banda Bahadur’s military movement rather than participate in the cash-driven military labour market.
All this lent socio-religious force to Banda’s rebellion, which inflicted damaging attacks on Mughal centres across the Punjab, especially in the east, where most of Banda’s supporters were rural Jats recently absorbed into the Khalsa. But the rebellion cannot be reduced to neat binaries, such as Sikhs versus Muslims, or peasants versus feudal landholders. Banda’s most proximate adversaries were hostile neighbours such as the Ranghar Rajputs, the Mein Rajputs and the Qasur Afghans, just as Guru Gobind’s immediate adversaries at Anandpur had been neighbouring hill rajas. Because zamindars varied enormously in the amount of land they controlled, they never formed a single class. As a result, they too were found on both sides of the rebellion. The uprising also exposed rifts within the Sikh community, most importantly between Khatris – the caste to which Guru Nanak and subsequent gurus had belonged – and Khalsa Sikhs, who never comprised more than a tenth of the total community. Many Khatri Sikhs were big cloth and textile merchants who opposed the disruptions to business caused by Banda’s plundering raids. Others were revenue farmers who, being closely tied to the imperial administrative system, supported Mughal efforts to suppress the rebellion. Still others held high mansabs in Mughal officialdom, appearing in imperial literary works as notables or even nobles. They also served as agents or clerks for imperial jagirdars, in which capacity they maintained their own aristocratic establishments, including elephants, workshops and servants. Such Khatri Sikhs, too, were inclined to defend the existing order.32 Nor did Banda’s efforts to project his movement as a holy war (dharma yudha) find favour among Hindus, even those who had their own grievances against the Mughals.33 In short, Banda’s fiercely anti-Mughal rebellion elicited anything but a unified response across Punjabi society.
But this soon changed. When the Mughals finally managed to crush the uprising, they did so harshly, culminating in 1716 with the execution of Banda and more than 700 of his followers in Delhi. This public episode was spectacularly brutal: the rebel leader was first made to kill his own son and then was torn to pieces.34 What provoked the Mughals’ violent suppression of the movement was not just its seizure of de facto control of virtually all the Punjab east of Lahore. Equally serious was Banda’s minting of his own coins – a sign of independent sovereignty – and establishing his own calendar, vaguely projecting the rebel as a millennial figure.35 Neither of these could be tolerated by the Mughal state: the former challenged the regime’s claims to sole sovereignty in the Punjab, and the latter its monopoly of sacred kingship.
The rebellion had far-reaching consequences. With the abandonment of the guru’s court in the Himalayan foothills, Amritsar and the Golden Temple’s sacred precincts once again became the primary locus of the Sikhs’ religious and political aspirations. Second, as the Mughals’ harsh suppression of the revolt polarized the Punjab’s population between supporters of the regime and those of the Khalsa Sikhs, the latter grew more militant and more implacably opposed to the state. Ever since Banda’s rebellion, and in a sense building on it, Khalsa Sikhs had begun organizing themselves into war bands called misals, which sought to replace Mughal sovereign territory with their own. Using light cavalry and guerrilla tactics not unlike those of the Marathas in the early days of Shivaji or Tarabai, these bands and their sardars filled the political and military vacuum created by the ebbing of Mughal authority throughout the central, eastern and southern Punjab. By the middle of the century, twelve such bands controlled those regions. By that time, there had also appeared within the Sikh community a genre of texts called rahit-namas, which drew clear lines between Sikhs and other religious communities, often demonizing Muslims. On the other hand, once individual misal chiefs acquired control of territory, the practical business of governance compelled them to cut deals with Afghans, Marathas or even Mughals, ignoring the advice of the rahit-namas. Depending on the political realities of the moment, misal chiefs might join the campaigns of any of those groups, or hire Muslims in their own service just as the Mughals hired Sikhs in theirs.36
It was overland invasions from the west, however, that destroyed what little remained of Mughal power in the Punjab. Nadir Shah’s 1739 raid on north India and sacking of Delhi clearly exposed the Mughals’ increasingly feeble condition under Muhammad Shah.37 Then in 1748 Ahmad Shah Abdali, the powerful Afghan warlord, made the first of seventeen annual raids on north India. Although the Mughals repulsed the first of these, just four years later matters had deteriorated such that the Mughal governor of the Punjab agreed to send his land revenue to Ahmad Shah rather than to Delhi. This effectively removed the province administratively from the Mughal empire. As discussed above, in 1761 the Afghan warlord crushed an immense Maratha army at the Third Battle of Panipat, thereby ending the Marathas’ bid to control the Punjab. Within six years of that battle, with the Afghans in no position to collect revenue in the province, a loose confederation of Sikh misals gained control over the greater part of the Punjab plains. By this time, though, the Mughals had sunk to little more than onlookers from the political sidelines.