The Destruction of the Harmandir Sahib and Baba Deep Singh's March

The fourth invasion

Ahmad Shah Abdali’s fourth invasion of India reached Delhi in 1757 and withdrew through the Punjab in the spring, leaving his son Timur Shah at Lahore as governor with Jahan Khan in command of his troops.

Sikh bands had spent that campaign doing what the Dal Khalsa had been organised to do — harrying the invading columns, taking back plunder and captives on the road home. The new administration at Lahore went after the thing those bands returned to.

Jahan Khan’s force moved on Amritsar, demolished the Harmandir Sahib with gunpowder, and filled the sarovar — the pool the shrine stands in — with the carcasses of slaughtered cattle.^1,3

The march

Baba Deep Singh was seventy-five, and was not a commander. He had spent his long middle life at Damdama Sahib in the Malwa preparing copies of the Guru Granth Sahib and teaching Gurmukhi, work he had taken up under Bhai Mani Singh, who had been executed at Lahore nineteen years before.

He raised what force he could and marched. The tradition holds that he drew a line across the ground with his sword and asked who would cross it with him, and that the number who did grew as the column moved north.

They met the Afghan force outside Amritsar in November 1757. Deep Singh was mortally wounded in the fighting and died there or at the precinct; the accounts agree on that and disagree on the manner of it, the popular tradition holding that he fought on with his severed head in his hand until he reached the pool.³

What is tradition and what is not

The decapitation account is devotional. Sikh historians treat it as such, and it is worth separating out so that what remains can be taken seriously — because what remains is remarkable enough.²

It reaches us chiefly through the Punjabi chronicle tradition, of which Bhangu’s is the fullest — a source written to establish what the Khalsa was and by what right it held the Punjab, and one that does not distinguish the way a modern historian would between what happened and what the event means.⁴ That is a reason to read it carefully, not a reason to discard it: it is also the only substantial account from inside the community of a century most of whose records were never written down.

An elderly scholar with no troops of his own and no military office raised a force and attacked a professional army over the desecration of a building, and was killed doing it. The band he raised outlived him as one of the twelve misls, the Shahid Misl — the martyrs’ confederacy.

Afterwards

The Harmandir Sahib was rebuilt, destroyed again in 1762 in the year of the greater massacre, and rebuilt again. The pattern of the next decade is that the Afghans could take Amritsar whenever they brought an army to it, and could not hold the Punjab once the army went home.

Eight years after this, the Sikhs took Lahore.