Battle of Manupur

Who: Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani) of Afghanistan, against the Mughal army under the Wazir Qamar-ud-Din and, after Qamar-ud-Din fell, his son Mu'in-ul-Mulk, known as Mir Mannu.

What: Abdali's first invasion of India took Lahore after a minor engagement in January 1748. On 11 March the armies met at Manupur, near Sirhind. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Abdali was vastly outnumbered and short of artillery. Ganda Singh writes that an Afghan cannonball struck Qamar-ud-Din while he was at prayer, and that his son Mir Mannu hid the death and kept the army fighting. A spark then set off captured rocket carts among the Durrani ranks, and thousands of rockets went off among Abdali's own troops. The Afghans fell back step by step toward Sirhind, slipped away in the dark, and crossed the Sutlej at Ludhiana on the road to Lahore. Mir Mannu became governor of Punjab in April 1748 and held the post until he died on 4 November 1753 after a fall from his horse.

Where: Manupur, near Sirhind.

Why it mattered: For the Sikhs the battle brought Mir Mannu to power, and the Encyclopaedia calls him a worse enemy of the Sikhs than his predecessors. When the Sikhs gathered at Amritsar for Diwali in October 1748 he ordered Adina Beg to blockade Ram Rauni, the mud fort the Sarbat Khalsa had resolved on 30 March 1747 to build and the Sikhs built near Ramsar in April 1748, where about 500 Sikhs sheltered (Persian sources say 900). The siege lasted three or four months and ended through the intervention of his minister, Diwan Kaura Mall, who was sympathetic to the Sikhs. Sikhs captured by his men were executed at the Nakhas market in Lahore, where Gurdwara Shaheed Ganj now stands. Kaura Mall was killed in March 1752 fighting the Afghans at Lahore. Meanwhile the Sikhs organised their own defence. On Baisakhi, 29 March 1748, eighteen days after the battle, the jathas gathered at Amritsar, and at Nawab Kapur Singh's urging a gurmata merged the 65 bands into 11 misls, a single Dal Khalsa under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia.