The Afghan Century and the Rise of the Misls

Between the founding of the Khalsa in 1699 and Ranjit Singh's capture of Lahore in 1799 lies a century in which the Mughal order in Punjab collapsed, foreign armies crossed the province almost annually, and a loose federation of Sikh war-bands took the country the empire had let go. It is the century in which Punjab became, for the first time in many hundreds of years, a place governed by people from Punjab. It was also one of the most destructive centuries in its history, and both facts belong to the same story.

Causes

Mughal authority in Punjab had been failing since Nader Shah's invasion of 1739 stripped Delhi of its treasury and its prestige. Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded the Afghan state at Kandahar in 1747, invaded the subcontinent repeatedly between 1748 and 1767 — the count is usually given as eight or nine depending on how the campaigns are divided. Punjab was the road each time. Lahore changed hands repeatedly, and after the death of the governor Adina Beg in 1758 the Subah of Lahore effectively ceased to function as a Mughal province.

Who paid for it

These campaigns fell on everyone living along the route. Muslim, Hindu and Sikh Punjabis alike lost harvests, towns and lives to armies moving in both directions, year after year, for two decades. This should be stated first, because the century is habitually told as a two-sided contest between Afghans and Sikhs — and most Punjabis were neither.

1762 — the Vaḍḍā Ghallūghārā

In February 1762, near Kup by Malerkotla, Durrani's forces caught a Sikh column encumbered with its families and killed a large number of them. It is remembered in Sikh tradition as the Vaḍḍā Ghallūghārā, the “great massacre” — the second such event so named, after a smaller one in 1746.

In the same period Durrani destroyed the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar and filled its pool. It was rebuilt.

The misls

Misl is variously derived from an Arabic or Persian word meaning “like” or “equal,” or read as “file” or “register”; the etymology is debated. There were twelve, each under its own sardar, coordinating loosely as the Dal Khalsa and taking collective decisions at Amritsar in the Sarbat Khalsa assembly, usually at Vaisakhi and Diwali. They were not a state. They were a workable substitute for one in a countryside that had none.

1765

The Sikhs occupied Lahore and struck coin bearing a legend in the name of the Gurus rather than of any living ruler — usually rendered deg tegh fateh: the cauldron, the sword, and victory. The obligation to feed, the power to protect, and the success that follows from holding both. Whatever else the misls were, this is the moment an indigenous sovereignty reappears in Punjab.

Aftermath

Durrani's last campaigns achieved nothing lasting; his successors could not hold the province. The misls turned on each other, which is the condition Ranjit Singh of the Sukerchakia misl exploited from 1799, when he took Lahore at the age of about twenty, and then abolished by absorbing his rivals into a single state.

Long-term impact

Everything on this site's timeline from 1799 to 1849 begins here: the Sikh Empire, its army, the administrative apparatus the British inherited at annexation, and the land settlements that shaped rural Punjab into the colonial period. The Sikh institutional forms that emerged in this century — the Sarbat Khalsa, the authority of Amritsar, the idea of collective rather than dynastic sovereignty — remain live in Sikh political thought.

Modern place-names

Kup and Malerkotla — Punjab, India. Amritsar — Punjab, India. Lahore — Punjab, Pakistan. Gujranwala, seat of the Sukerchakia misl — Punjab, Pakistan. Kandahar — Afghanistan.