Lohgarh as capital and the first Sikh seal and coins

Who: Banda Singh Bahadur and the Khalsa army; on the other side the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah and the imperial force sent to crush them.

What: After taking Sadhaura and Sirhind in 1710, Banda made the old fort of Mukhlisgarh his headquarters and renamed it Lohgarh, the Steel or Iron Fort. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he assumed the style of royalty, began a new calendar counted from the capture of Sirhind, and abolished the zamindari system, giving the tillers ownership of the land.

His seal carried the names of the Gurus and the words deg (the kettle of the Guru's langar, charity) and tegh (the sword, victory). Its couplet read Deg o tegh o fateh o nusrat be-dirang, yaft az Nanak Guru Gobind Singh: kettle, sword, victory and unfailing help, received from Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh.

His coin was Persian in script and named the Gurus, not Banda. One side reads sikka zad bar har do alam, tegh-i-Nanak wahab ast, fateh Gobind Singh shah-i-shahan, fazl sachcha sahib ast: the coin is struck in the two worlds, the sword of Nanak is its bestower, victory is Gobind Singh's, king of kings, by the grace of the True Master. The other side speaks of security and peace for the world and the walled city of the blessed throne. Two rare surviving silver rupees are dated year 2 and year 3 of his reign, which fall in 1711 and 1712.

Bahadur Shah came north and a massive imperial force laid siege to the fort. On the night of 10 December 1710 Banda cut through the cordon and escaped towards the higher Sivaliks.

Where: Mukhlisgarh, built under Shah Jahan by a minor chief, Mukhlis Khan, on the lower slopes of the Sivalik foothills near Sadhaura, now in Yamunanagar district, Haryana. It is not the Lohgarh fort Guru Hargobind built at Amritsar.

Why it mattered: The seal and coin declared sovereignty in the Gurus' names. The same couplet was struck on the Gobindshahi coin at Lahore in 1765, the Nanakshahi coins of Amritsar from 1777 carried an inscription closely resembling that on Banda's coin, and Ranjit Singh's coins later bore the Gobindshahi inscription. Sources differ on timing: the Encyclopaedia places the move after Sirhind, while Hari Ram Gupta dates Banda's arrival at the fort to early February 1710. The historian Surinder Singh notes that the coins name no city and argues Lohgarh may never have been formally declared the capital.