The Afghans and the Ghallugharas

Of everything produced in the Punjab in the middle of the eighteenth century — the chronicles, the letters,

the administrative records — the thing that has survived best is four lines of doggerel that nobody signed.

It is in Punjabi, it rhymes, and it says roughly this: Mannu is our sickle and we are his crop; the more

he cuts us down, the more we grow.

It was said in villages, by people with a price on their heads, about the man who was hunting them, and it

has been repeated for two hundred and seventy years.

Take it seriously as an argument, because it is one. It is an accurate strategic assessment delivered as a

joke. A crop that is mowed grows back thicker; a policy of killing a community faster than it reproduces

only works if you can actually find everybody, and Mir Mannu could not. He knew he could not. The

couplet is telling him so.

And notice what it does not contain. There is no god in it, no revenge in it, no self-pity in it, and no threat. It

is contempt, expressed as agricultural observation, by farmers.

This book has spent ten parts looking for the voice of the ordinary population of the Punjab and finding

almost nothing — a coin legend in Part Three, a hymn in Part Seven, a letter to an emperor in Part Nine.

Every one of those was produced by somebody exceptional.

This one is anonymous, it is funny, and it turned out to be right. Mir Mannu was dead within five

years and the crop took Lahore twelve years after that.

Diwan Kaura Mal was a Hindu Khatri from the Multan country who rose through the Mughal revenue

service to become the diwan — the chief financial officer — of the Punjab under Mir Mannu.

He is remembered in Sikh tradition with an affection that is almost unique for a government official of that

century, and the reason is a pun. His name, Kaura, means bitter. The Sikhs called him Mitha Mal — sweet.

What he did to earn it was practical rather than sentimental. In 1748 he argued Mir Mannu into lifting the

siege of Ram Rauni. He consistently advocated accommodation rather than extermination. He is credited

with securing the community’s access to Amritsar at points when the policy was to deny it, and with using

his position to moderate what the columns did in the districts.

He was not a sympathiser in any modern sense. He was a senior official of the government doing the

hunting, who thought the hunting was bad policy, and who had enough standing to say so.

He was killed in 1752 outside Lahore, fighting the Afghans, in the service of the Mughal governor.

Set him beside Lakhpat Rai from Part Ten — the other Hindu Khatri diwan of Lahore, who ran the worst

massacre of the 1740s to avenge his brother. Same community, same office, same city, fifteen years apart,

and opposite conduct.

That is what the eighteenth-century Punjab actually looked like from inside, and it is why this book

keeps refusing to write sentences that begin with the name of a religion and end with a verb.

The pool at Amritsar was dug in the 1570s by Guru Ram Das, and the town took its name from it — Amrit-

sar, the pool of nectar. Part Eight described its founding. The shrine in the middle of it was completed under

Guru Arjan by about 1589.

In this part it is destroyed twice — in 1757 and again in 1762 — and on both occasions the tank itself was

deliberately fouled: filled with rubble and with the carcasses of cattle, which in that context is not

vandalism but a message, and everybody involved understood it as one.

Both times it was cleared and refilled.

That is the whole of it, and it is worth pausing on because it is the most literal illustration in this

book of the difference between a place and an institution.

You can demolish a building in a day. What you cannot demolish is the fact that several thousand armed

men, scattered across a province, have agreed to be in the same field twice a year on two fixed dates. The

dates are in a calendar; the calendar is in a book; the book is in every congregation in the Punjab. The tank

is where they meet, not why.

Part Nine described a Guru taking initiation from five men he had just created so that the order would

outlive him. Part Ten described a movement that survived thirty years by owning nothing that could be

taken. Here is the same principle again, and the enemy testing it directly with gunpowder.

The Harmandir Sahib standing today is a later building. The tank is the same water in the same place, and

it has been cleared out and refilled more than once by people who were being hunted at the time.

The thing usually left out of the story of Baba Deep Singh is what he did for the fifty years before it.

He was a scribe. He worked on copies of the scripture — the painstaking, unglamorous business of

reproducing a large text by hand, accurately, so that congregations across the Punjab could have one. He

was associated with the establishment at Damdama Sahib, in the Malwa country, which is where the

definitive recension of the Guru Granth Sahib is traditionally held to have been prepared under Guru

Gobind Singh, and he is remembered as having been part of that work.

In a community being hunted with a price on every head, in a province where owning the book could be

fatal, somebody had to keep making copies.

Ten parts of this history have been about the loss of records. Taxila’s libraries burned in Part Four.

Anandpur’s manuscripts went into the Sarsa in the dark in Part Nine. The single greatest complaint of

this entire book is that the Punjab’s own account of itself keeps not surviving.

It survives from the eighteenth century, through the worst persecution in the province’s history, because

men like this one sat and copied it out while the columns were in the districts.

And then, at seventy-five, he put the pen down and went to Amritsar.

The warrior is what the paintings show. The scribe is why there is anything to paint.

In May 1758, Maratha troops stood on the bank of the Indus at Attock — the crossing where Timur bridged

the river in 1398 and where Akbar built the fort in the 1580s.

They had come from Pune. It is roughly two thousand kilometres in a straight line and considerably more

by road.

No power based in peninsular India had ever reached that point. Not the Satavahanas, not the

Chalukyas, not Vijayanagara, not the Bahmanis. The Mauryas and the Guptas and the Mughals had all held

the Indus, but they were northern powers reaching west. This was the Deccan reaching the Afghan

frontier, and it had never happened before and has not happened since.

It lasted about eighteen months in the Punjab as a whole and four months at Attock.

Two and a half years later, on 14 January 1761, the army that had done it was destroyed sixty miles from

Delhi and the Maratha empire never recovered its ambitions in the north.

There is a lesson here that this book has been repeating since Part Three and that gets forgotten every time.

The furthest extent of an empire is almost always the moment before its collapse, and for exactly

the same reason: the reach that produced it is the overreach that ends it.

Chandragupta II’s inscription boasts of crossing the seven mouths of the Sindhu. Muhammad bin

Tughluq’s empire reached its greatest extent about four years before it dissolved. The Maratha flag at

Attock in May 1758 is the same phenomenon, dated to the month.

The news had to be sent to Pune, two thousand kilometres away, and the letter that carried it is one of the

most famous sentences in Indian history.

It reports the disaster in code, in the language of a jeweller taking stock. Two pearls have been dissolved.

Twenty-seven gold coins have been lost. And of the silver and the copper, the total cannot be cast

up.

The two pearls were Vishwasrao, the Peshwa’s son and heir, and Sadashivrao Bhau, his cousin and the

commander. The gold coins were the senior commanders. The silver and copper were everybody else.

Of the silver and the copper, the total cannot be cast up.

Modern estimates of the dead run from forty thousand upward for the battle itself, with a comparable

number of prisoners killed afterwards and an unknown but very large number of the civilians who had

come north with the army. Almost every substantial family in Maharashtra lost somebody at

Panipat, and the phrase is still used in Marathi to mean a catastrophe.

The Peshwa, Balaji Baji Rao, received the news and died in June, five months later.

And here is the part that makes it a Punjab story rather than a Maratha one. Abdali had just destroyed

the largest army in India and had northern India lying open in front of him. He did not take it. His

own troops were owed pay and wanted to go home; his supply position was bad; and he had no

administration capable of governing anything east of the Indus.

So he went back up the Grand Trunk Road, through the Punjab, with his columns strung out and loaded —

and that is War Seven.

Stand back from January and February of 1761 and look at the whole shape of it, because it is the clearest

strategic lesson in this part.

The Marathas fought Abdali properly. They brought the largest and best-equipped army in India, with

European-trained infantry and a modern artillery train, met him on a chosen field, and were destroyed in

an afternoon along with tens of thousands of their people.

The Sikhs did not fight him at all. They watched him go past, let him win, and then attacked his baggage

on the road home.

Nine months later the Marathas were finished as a power in northern India, and the Dal Khalsa was in

Lahore proclaiming a king.

It is worth being honest about how this looks. There is no glory in it. Nobody has painted the raids on the

Grand Trunk Road in February 1761. The battle honours belong to Panipat, and Panipat was a catastrophe.

But look at what forty-five years of being hunted had taught. Never fight the enemy’s battle. Never hold

what he can take. Attack what he cannot defend, when he is going away. Have no capital to lose

and no army that dies with a commander.

Part Ten described where that method came from — the Lakhi Jungle, the bounty years, Gurdas Nangal.

This is what it was for.

And the thing it produced on that road was not only plunder. Several thousand people who had been

taken north as slaves were pulled off those columns and walked home, to places all over northern

India, by a confederacy that was itself under a standing order of extermination.

Of everything in this part, that is the paragraph to keep.

The battle was fought a few miles from the small state of Malerkotla, whose Afghan ruling family sent

troops to join Abdali on that February morning.

And Malerkotla is the one place in the Punjab that Sikh armies afterwards did not touch.

The reason goes back to Part Nine, to Sirhind in December 1704. When the two younger sons of Guru

Gobind Singh were brought before Wazir Khan and sentence was passed, the tradition records that the

Nawab of Malerkotla, Sher Muhammad Khan, spoke against it — objecting that whatever quarrel

there was with the father, it could not be visited on children. The protest is remembered as the haah da

naara, the cry of protest, and it did not save them.

It saved Malerkotla. In the decades when Sikh power was sweeping the Malwa and every Afghan-held town

in the plains was being taken and in several cases destroyed — Sirhind twice — Malerkotla was spared,

and the reason given was always the same one.

It survived as a princely state into the twentieth century. And in 1947, when the Punjab was being

partitioned and the killing on both sides of the new border was as bad as anything in this book,

Malerkotla is recorded as having come through it without the massacres that consumed the

districts around it. The explanation offered locally, then and since, was a protest made in a courtroom in

1704.

How much weight that single act can really bear across two hundred and forty years is a fair question and

this book will not pretend to settle it.

What is certain is that a community which lost perhaps half its people a few miles from that

town, partly to troops sent from it, chose to remember instead a Muslim nobleman who had

objected to the killing of two children — and acted on that memory for two centuries.

Count the interval, because it is the single most extraordinary fact in this part and it is easy to read past.

5 February 1762: the Dal Khalsa is caught in the open with its families and loses something between ten

and thirty thousand people in a day. Its commander-in-chief is carried off the field with wounds beyond

counting. The survivors are in the desert.

April 1762: their central shrine is blown up and their sacred tank filled with carcasses, for the second time

in five years.

17 October 1762: they are back at Amritsar in force, for the Diwali assembly, and they fight Ahmad Shah

Abdali to a standstill on that ground.

Eight months from the worst day in their history to standing on the same field as the man who caused it.

This book has described a great many recoveries and none of them are like this. The Shahis took sixty

years to lose in Part Five and never came back. The Marathas lost once at Panipat and never

returned to the north. The Lodis, the Suris, Hemu, Banda — every defeat of this magnitude in

these eleven parts ended something.

The mechanism is the one Part Nine built and Part Ten tested. There was no leader whose death would

end it, no capital whose loss would end it, and no army whose destruction would end it — only an

assembly with two fixed dates in a calendar that every congregation in the Punjab possessed a copy of.

Abdali could kill people, and did, on a scale this book has rarely had to describe. He could not make

Diwali not happen.

Consider what the Sarbat Khalsa actually was, as a piece of military technology, because that is the right

way to look at it.

It was two dates. Vaisakhi in the spring and Diwali in the autumn, at Amritsar. On those days,

whoever could come, came, and what was decided bound everybody.

That is all. There was no permanent headquarters, no standing council, no records office, no capital and

nothing to garrison. The entire command apparatus of the Dal Khalsa consisted of an agreement

about when to be in the same field.

Now look at what it did between 1748 and 1765. It appointed a commander-in-chief. It divided the province

among eleven misls and made the division stick. It allocated campaigns. It set the rakhi arrangements. It

decided whether to accept an Afghan king’s offer of terms — and decided not to.

And it could not be attacked. Abdali could burn Amritsar, and did, and the assembly met at Amritsar

anyway, because the assembly was not the buildings.

Set this beside every other command system in these eleven parts. Alexander’s, which was Alexander.

Prithviraj’s coalition, which had no mechanism to decide anything. The Maratha army at Panipat,

which dissolved when two men went down. Abdali’s own, which was a king and his household

troops and which ceased to exist when he died in 1772.

The most durable political institution in this book is two dates and a rule about who has to obey the

outcome — and it was built by people who could not afford a building.

The interesting part of January 1764 is not the battle. It is the meeting afterwards.

An entire Mughal province had just fallen to a confederacy of eleven autonomous divisions, none of which

was subordinate to any other, all of which had been in the fighting, and all of which now wanted a share.

This book has watched exactly this moment go wrong for eleven parts. Yashodharman’s coalition

dissolved on the day it won in Part Four. The Malavas and Kshudrakas could not agree on a

commander in Part Two. Anandapala’s confederacy in Part Five did not survive one afternoon.

Winning together and then dividing the proceeds is the point at which every alliance in this history has

come apart.

The misls divided the Sirhind province among themselves, by agreement, and the division held.

It held well enough that the resulting territories — Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Kaithal, Kalsia and the rest — were

still functioning states eighty years later. They are on the map when the British arrive in Part

Fourteen; some of them survived to 1947, and one of them gave its name to a district of modern

Punjab.

The mechanism was the one described in the last war. The Sarbat Khalsa met, a gurmata was passed,

and it bound everybody — not because anybody could enforce it, but because the alternative was the

thing that had destroyed every Indian coalition in these sixteen parts, and they had all read the same book

about it.

Not perfectly. The misls fought each other repeatedly afterwards and the confederacy tore itself apart in the

1790s, which is how Part Twelve ends.

But in January 1764 they took a province together and split it without a war, and nothing in the

previous eleven parts of this history had managed that.

This book has asked one question in every part for five thousand years: who is writing, and what do they

need you to believe?

Almost every source in these eleven parts fails that test in an obvious direction. Greek writers glorifying

Alexander. Harishena praising Samudragupta on a pillar. Al-Utbi counting the dead for Mahmud. Abul Fazl

establishing Akbar’s greatness. Sikh devotional literature edifying the community. Persian chroniclers

describing Banda as a monster.

Every one of them is telling you something true, and every one of them is doing it for somebody.

The two most valuable documents in Parts Ten and Eleven are both by people who had no dog in

the fight, or who had the wrong one.

In 1716, two East India Company merchants in Delhi wrote home about a procession of condemned

prisoners and mentioned, because it struck them, that none of them recanted. They were negotiating

customs duties. They did not care.

In 1765, a qazi riding with an Afghan army wrote a poem calling the enemy dogs on every page — and

recorded that they would not strike a man who was running away and would not touch a woman.

Neither man was trying to help. The first was writing a business report. The second was writing

propaganda and could not stop himself putting in what he had actually seen.

That is what evidence looks like when it is worth something. And it is why this book keeps labelling its

sources instead of simply telling you what happened: because the difference between a tradition and a

fact is usually just the identity of the person who had no reason to lie.

In April 1765, Punjabis governed the Punjab.

Stop and count backwards, because this book has been building to that sentence for eleven parts and it is

worth being exact about the arithmetic.

The last time the land of the five rivers was ruled by a power based in it, and drawing its soldiers

and its legitimacy from its own population, was the Hindu Shahi dynasty — and they lost Kabul in

870 and the Punjab plain within a century and a half. Part Five described their end: the last effective

king murdered by his own unpaid troops in about 1021, and al-Biruni writing that of the whole house not

the slightest remnant remained.

Between then and 1765: Ghaznavids from Ghazna, Ghurids from Ghor, slave sultans from Delhi, Mongol

raids, Tughlaqs, Timur, Sayyids, Lodis, Mughals, Suris, Mughals again, Persians, and Afghans.

Eight hundred and ninety-five years of the Punjab being administered from somewhere else.

And the people who ended it were not a dynasty. They had no royal family, no ancient claim and no foreign

patron. They were, by origin, the peasantry of the doabs, organised by an institution founded in a hill town

in 1699, which had survived a bounty on every head, thirty years in the forests, two ghallugharas and the

demolition of its central shrine twice in five years.

They took the capital, and they put on the coins the names of two men who had been dead for a very long

time, and left their own names off.

The next thirty-four years are what they did with it, and it is not a simple story. The misls fought

each other, the assembly decayed, and by the 1790s the confederacy that had beaten Ahmad Shah Abdali

was tearing itself apart over districts.

And then, in 1799, a one-eyed nineteen-year-old from one of the smaller misls took Lahore.