Execution of Banda Singh Bahadur

The siege of Gurdas Nangal

The empire’s answer to Sirhind was total. Through 1715 imperial armies pressed Banda’s shrinking force into the fortified haveli of Gurdas Nangal near Gurdaspur and simply waited. The siege ran eight months. The chronicles record the garrison eating boiled leaves, tree bark and the flesh of their horses.^3,5 In December 1715 the position fell and Banda was taken alive with several hundred companions.

The procession

The prisoners were marched to Delhi in a procession staged for effect: Banda in an iron cage on an elephant, his followers on camels, and the severed heads of the dead carried on pikes.^2,5 The point was demonstration, not transport.

What two Englishmen saw

This is the unusual part of the record. John Surman and Edward Stephenson were East India Company men in Delhi on a trade mission — they had come to secure a farman from the emperor Farrukhsiyar granting the Company trading rights in Bengal — and they were in the city while the executions were happening. On 10 March 1716 they wrote to Robert Hedges at Fort William describing them.¹

Their letter is not a Sikh account and carries no devotional purpose. They record that the prisoners were being beheaded in batches of roughly a hundred a day; that each was offered his life in exchange for accepting Islam; and that they went to their deaths without taking it. What struck the two merchants enough to put in a business letter was the composure — men competing to be killed first.¹

Banda himself was executed on 9 June 1716, after the mass executions had run for months, with extreme torture. His young son was killed in front of him first.^3,6

What is disputed. The precise numbers are not fixed. Contemporary reports put the prisoners at seven hundred-odd and the daily executions at around a hundred; the totals in later Sikh sources run higher. The date of Banda’s own death is given as 9 June in most accounts, with some variation.

Persecution, and what survived it

The state followed the executions with standing orders for the extermination of the Sikhs and a price on Sikh heads.⁴ The community moved into the hills, the Lakhi jungle and the desert margins, and the next three decades were the worst it has known — the period the misl era opens onto, containing both the smaller massacre of 1746 and the Vadda Ghallughara of 1762.

The institutions held anyway. Bands regrouped and eventually formalised as misls; the community continued to assemble at the Akal Takht to decide by gurmata. Banda’s six years had proved that Sikh rule was possible. The fifty that followed proved it could not be stamped out — and by 1765 the Khalsa held Lahore.