Chhota Ghallughara

Who: The Mughal government at Lahore under Governor Yahiya Khan and his revenue minister Lakhpat Rai, against the Sikhs of the Majha, men, women and children.

What: Early in 1746 a roving Sikh band killed Jaspat Rai, the faujdar of Eminabad. His brother Lakhpat Rai, a diwan at Lahore, vowed to wipe out the Sikh Panth. With the governor's agreement he raised the Lahore troops, called in reinforcements from Multan, Bahawalpur and Jalandhar, roused the hill chiefs and called for a jihad. On 10 March 1746 he had the Sikhs of Lahore rounded up and executed, ignoring the pleas of a group of Hindu nobles led by Diwan Kaura Mall and of his own guru. He then led a large force, mostly cavalry with cannon, to Kahnuwan, a swampy forest about 15 km south of Gurdaspur where the Sikhs were gathered, and searched it systematically. The Sikhs, outnumbered and ill-equipped, broke out toward the hills across the Ravi, but the hill people opposed them as hard as the pursuers did, and they lost heavily around Pathol and Kathua. The survivors recrossed the Ravi and went on over the Beas and the Sutlej to the Lakki Jungle in Malwa. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism counts 7,000 Sikhs killed and 3,000 captured in the fighting of 1 and 2 May. The captives were beheaded in batches at the Nakhas, the horse market outside Lahore's Delhi Gate, where the Shahidganj memorial now stands. Lakhpat Rai also ordered Sikh places of worship destroyed and the holy books burnt, decreed death for anyone who uttered the word guru, and ordered gur, jaggery, renamed rori.

Where: The Kahnuwan forest in Gurdaspur district, the hill country across the Ravi toward Basohli, and Lahore.

Why it mattered: In Sikh usage Ghallughara means carnage, and Chhota means small: the name sets this killing apart from the Vadda Ghallughara of 5 February 1762, sixteen years later. Lakhpat Rai's boast that the Panth was finished proved false. About six months later the Sikhs regrouped near Amritsar, and on 30 March 1747 the Sarbat Khalsa at Amritsar adopted a gurmata to build a permanent stronghold, the fort Ram Rauni. The Encyclopaedia's separate Ram Rauni entry says the Sikhs set to building it at the Baisakhi gathering of 1748, and that it was built in April 1748 near Ramsar: the resolve came in 1747 and the building in 1748.