The Sikh Way of War

The half-century after Banda's execution was the period of greatest danger and greatest doctrinal innovation. Imperial policy under successive Lahore governors aimed at extermination; prices were placed on Sikh heads. The response was to abandon territory altogether — to withdraw into the Lakhi jungle, the Shivalik foothills and the deserts of the Malwa, and to accept a form of war in which nothing was defended and nothing was permanently held.

Two organisational measures made this survivable. In 1734 Nawab Kapur Singh divided the fighting strength into the Buddha Dal and the Taruna Dal — the veteran and the young — allowing one to fight while the other recovered. In 1748 these were consolidated as the Dal Khalsa, with decisions taken by gurmatta at the Akal Takht at the biannual gatherings of Baisakhi and Diwali. Command was elective and dispersed. There was no headquarters to capture.

The tactical doctrine that emerged was named. Dhai phat — two and a half strikes — is recorded by Rattan Singh Bhangu in the Prachin Panth Prakash, drawn from the testimony of a veteran who had fought under it.

The three components were counted deliberately. The first full phat was the approach — everything that secured surprise, reckoned at some forty per cent of the whole action. The half phat was the shock itself, the brief violent contact intended to unbalance rather than to destroy. The second full phat — equal in weight to the approach — was the withdrawal, executed at speed and in order to ground the enemy could not follow onto.

That accounting is the conceptual breakthrough. In eighteenth-century warfare a retreat was a rout and dispersal was defeat. The Dal Khalsa made dispersal a manoeuvre — scattering by design, with an understood rendezvous, and reassembling at a time of its own choosing. An enemy who has driven the Sikhs from the field has not beaten them; he has merely watched them execute the second half of the doctrine.

Against Ahmad Shah Durrani's returning columns the method was refined further. Detachments appeared against the baggage and the rearguard and vanished when the main force turned; sections of the enemy were lured into pursuit, cut off and encircled. George Forster, travelling in the period, remarked that the Sikh mode of attack differed from that of any other cavalry in Asia — a rolling fire in which a party galloped forward, halted to discharge its matchlocks, then wheeled away to make room for the next.

The doctrine had one unavoidable weakness, and both great catastrophes of the century exploited it. Guerrillas must occasionally concentrate, and a force encumbered by its vahir — the baggage train carrying families and possessions — cannot disperse. At Kup-Rahira on 5 February 1762, Ahmad Shah covered some two hundred kilometres and two river crossings in under forty-eight hours and caught the Dal Khalsa encumbered in exactly this way. Unable to melt away, they formed square around the baggage and fought a pitched battle on the enemy's terms. The Wadda Ghallughara that followed was the price of being caught concentrated.

Lahore, 1739: The Doctrine Described by the Enemy

Sri Gur Panth Prakash, Episodes 94–96

Rattan Singh Bhangu devotes three consecutive episodes to the invasion of Nadir Shah, and together they form the single most valuable passage in the eighteenth-century Sikh sources on how the Sikhs were fighting — because the description is given by the man whose job it was to stop them.

Episode 94 sets the scene. Zakariya Khan — whom Bhangu calls Khan Bahadur, and the Sikhs called Khanu — had persecuted the Singhs on a scale the poet says cannot be counted, Bhai Mani Singh among them. When Nadir Shah reached Lahore, the governor collaborated and paid a ransom. The Singhs, far from being crushed, seized the moment: they waylaid traffic on the roads to Kabul, Kandahar, Lahore and Delhi, and stripped the invader's columns. Nawab Kapur Singh is recorded telling the Singhs that the destined hour had come. Bhangu reckons Nadir Shah's plunder of Delhi in the thousands of crores, itemising the Peacock Throne, the great diamond, and seventy thousand of the defenceless killed in Delhi alone.

Episode 95 is titled, in the translation, "Question-Answer Session Between Nadar Shah And Khan Bahadur." Returned to Lahore, Nadir Shah demands to know who robbed his baggage, and threatens to reduce their country to dust and ashes. The governor's reply is the passage that matters.

Read it as a military assessment and every element of the doctrine is there, stated by the opposition: no territory to invade, no base to burn, no supply line to cut, no fixed point at which the enemy can be made to stand. The governor is not describing fanaticism. He is explaining to a superior who wants results why a campaign built on catching and counting cannot work against an enemy who has given up holding ground. The Mughals, he adds, had exhausted themselves in exterminating the Singhs and could not reduce their numbers at all.

Nadir Shah then asks whose followers these people are — whether the sect grew of itself or converted from another. Khan Bahadur traces the whole descent from Guru Nanak, and recounts the executions: Guru Tegh Bahadur, the Sahibzadas. And Bhangu gives the invader the closing verdict, which is worth more than any Sikh chronicler's praise: the Mughals had reaped what they had sown, and how was one to conquer people whom God Himself had come to protect?

Episode 96 supplies the consequence, and it is the hinge of the whole period. Bhangu is explicit that it was the namoshi — the disgrace — of that exchange that drove what followed. Nadir Shah left for Kandahar; Khan Bahadur, humiliated, resolved that no one with unshorn hair would be allowed to live in his country. The Singhs were now hunted in batches, in the poet's phrase, as game is killed in a hunt. Instant rewards were given for information, and a rate is named: five rupees to whoever pointed out a Singh, with letters sent to neighbouring territories to publicise it. The Singhs moved by night and lay hidden by day, in thickets, in other men's houses, or across the frontier.

So the bounty system was not simply cruelty. It was a governor's answer to having been humiliated in front of an invader by an enemy he could not produce.

Delhi, c. 1732: The Impersonators

Giani Gian Singh, Naveen Panth Prakash, Uttarardh

The most remarkable episode of the persecution years is not in Bhangu at all. It is in Giani Gian Singh's Naveen Panth Prakash, and it turns on precisely the problem the bounty system created.

The scene is the imperial court at Delhi. Reports have come from the governor at Lahore that the Singhs are growing stronger, and the emperor demands of his Wazir an explanation: what is this business, and how has this people multiplied so? The Wazir's answer runs for eighty verses. He traces the Panth to Guru Nanak; he describes the preparation of amrit in exact ritual detail — the five Singhs, the khanda, the iron vessel, the water of Amritsar; he sets out the rahit; and he explains its effects, that cowards become brave and goats become lions, that heat and cold do not touch them, that wounds heal without dressing. "That is why they do not die though they are killed," he says, "and day by day they increase without limit."

Then he adds the sentence on which everything turns. They are worth seeing, he tells the emperor — but only in war. And since Your Majesty cannot see the real thing:

The emperor consents, and the Wazir summons the professional mimics of the court — the bhands, the nakalias, the bahurupias, the "takers of many forms." Show me the imitation of the Singhs, the emperor orders.

And the mimics are terrified. Their objection is the heart of the episode, and they state it before a costume is put on:

They plead that a good imitation of such people cannot be made; that if the Shah takes offence they will be crushed with their children; that there is great danger in mimicking men who wish him ill. The emperor pardons them in advance. They ask for three days, and go away to prepare.

What they bring back is exact. Some make themselves up as Nihangs in blue, some as Bhujangis in white; loose dumalas swinging like a lion's tail, torn kachhehras, grey blankets and ragged cloth, broken and rust-eaten weapons, chakkars and khandas bound on their heads, each man carrying maunds of iron. They come into the court roaring "Fateh! Akal! Akal!" and raise an uproar in the hall.

Then they announce their names — names, the poet says, that nobody had heard even in a dream. Bakhera Singh and Jhera Singh, Takra and Lakra, Baghar and Khaghar, Dilli-Tor Singh (Delhi-breaker), Mugal-Mar Singh (Mughal-killer), Khan-Mar Singh, Turak-Mar Singh. The court is scandalised and then helpless with laughter. They perform the Khalsa bole, the Singhs' own coded battle-argot, which Gian Singh sets out at length — boiled chickpeas called almonds, days of starvation called a full deg, a stick called a swift horse, grinding at the quern called going for a ride. They taunt the Mughal and Sayyid women. They declare that they will now take charge of the throne of Delhi. And they recite Raj Karega Khalsa.

Then the same troupe changes costume and performs the other side: Turkistanis and Hindustanis, Mughals, Pathans and Duranis, Sayyids and Sheikhs, in fine pashmina, bright sharpened weapons, iron helmets and gauntlets, mounted on horses of their own countries. A great host advances. The "Singhs'" lookout calls that dust has risen and the Turks are coming — and the poet says the Singhs' hearts rejoiced.

And then the performance stops being one. The hair of the mimics playing Singhs stands on end; their bodies swell; their eyes go red and terrible. They fasten their broken tack — rope for stirrups, a torn saddle — and two and four men together drag rusted swords out of the scabbards and scour them with sand and stone. Some load their muskets backwards, ball before powder, and when this is pointed out reply that the Guru will set it right.

The two sides close, and the Singhs overcome the Turks. The sharpened Turkish blades strike and do not cut a hair. The more wounds they take, the more the lion-rage wakes in them. They strike with rusted swords scabbard and all; they cut through armour; their broken-down horses run; they leap at the elephants. The reversed muskets fire straight. Barbers, water-carriers, calico-printers and carpenters, Brahmins, Baniyas and Jats, Sainis and goldsmiths — men the poet lists by caste, high and low alike, and says that those who had been like jackals were known for lions.

The butcher's bill is given precisely. About ten of the "Turks" killed and many wounded; two of the "Singhs" dead and six wounded — and they take the Turks' horses and plunge into the forest crying that the Satguru has given victory. In the houses of the bhands, Gian Singh adds, the widows raised the death-wail. These were performers, and they had killed one another in earnest.

The emperor bites his finger in astonishment, draws a long breath, and gestures to his ministers:

The consequence is the point of the whole episode, and it is a political one. The Wazir observes that the Lahore governor's report understated the case tenfold; that Nadir Shah is threatening to come; and that a people like this should be bought rather than fought. A courtier advises that they are easily won — give them sweet bhang and halwa and they ask for nothing else — and that they will straighten out any province that troubles the empire.

So the emperor writes to Khan Bahadur at Lahore: never make enmity with the Singhs; keep them contented by whatever means, so that the country is not laid waste. A robe of investiture is sent, and a grant of twelve villages near Amritsar, with cash for expenses and grazing land for horses. The Singhs accept. The disturbances cease and the people are at peace. Gian Singh dates it VS 1789 — AD 1732–33.

That is the offer of the Nawabi: the khilat and jagir which the Khalsa accepted through Kapur Singh, who has been Nawab Kapur Singh ever since. Gian Singh's impostor episode is his explanation of why the Mughal court decided to conciliate the Sikhs instead of exterminating them — because at Delhi, in front of the emperor, hired actors put on the outward form of the Khalsa and it took hold of them.

The Man Taken for an Impostor

Bhangu, Panth Prakash, Episode 98

Bhangu has no impersonators, but he has the same question turned inside out. After the killing under Zakariya Khan, no Singh was seen for four months and people concluded the Khalsa was extinct. Someone then caught sight of Bota Singh in the open and could not believe it — a real Singh could not have survived. The verdict was that the man must be an impostor in the disguise of a Singh.

Stung by it as by a scorpion, Bota Singh set up a platform at a road junction near Sarai Nurdin, called it a fort, levied a toll of an anna on a cart and a paisa on a donkey, and wrote Zakariya Khan a letter calculated to be unbearable — sending word by way of the Nawab's wife, addressed as his sister-in-law. Troops came, as intended. Offered his life if he came quietly, he answered that the Singhs had never sought to save their lives.

Between the two chroniclers the whole question is framed. In Gian Singh, false Singhs become real ones. In Bhangu, a real Singh is called false and has to die to prove otherwise. Both are asking what the identity actually consists of — and both answer that it is not the costume but the willingness to fight in it.

The army that met the British on the Sutlej in December 1845 was the most formidable indigenous force the Company had encountered in India. Its artillery was served with a skill British officers acknowledged without qualification; its infantry stood in line and delivered volleys under fire. Ferozeshah was, by Hardinge's own private account, very nearly a British defeat. At Sobraon and Chillianwala the Khalsa inflicted casualties on a scale the Company had not previously sustained in the subcontinent.

And it lost. The reasons most often given are political rather than military — the Darbar in disorder after the murders of 1840–43, commanders whose loyalty to the army they led was doubtful, a court that had reason to fear its own soldiery. All of that is true and is treated on the First and Second Anglo-Sikh War pages.

The doctrinal observation is narrower, and worth stating carefully. The Khalsa fought the British in precisely the manner at which the British were most practised. Entrenched positions, artillery duels, infantry in line: this was the European way of war, and the Company's armies had spent a century perfecting it in India. The one method that had never failed the Sikhs — refusing battle, dispersing, striking the baggage and the line of communication, and returning at a time of their own choosing — was no longer structurally available. An army of sixty thousand with fixed arsenals, siege trains and provinces to garrison cannot melt into the Lakhi jungle.

This is not an argument that the modernisation was a mistake. Without it there would have been no empire to defend, no Multan, no Kashmir, no Peshawar, and very probably no Sikh state at all by 1830. It is an argument that the transformation carried a cost that was invisible until the moment it was tested — and that the cost was the doctrine which had kept the Panth alive through the fifty years when it possessed nothing else.

It is worth adding that the older method did surface once more. In 1848–49 the risings that opened the second war spread through exactly the channels the misls had used — local sardars, dispersed commands, and a countryside that supplied and concealed them. By then the Company held the arsenals.