Every court has someone the ruler cannot buy. In the Lahore of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a court famous for absorbing rivals through generosity, marriage and flattery, that person was a blue-robed Nihang with a towering turban who held no land, wanted no title, and treated the Maharaja as a Sikh subject to the same discipline as any other. Akali Phula Singh was the sharpest weapon in Ranjit Singh's army and the sharpest check on his conduct, and the Maharaja appears to have understood that he needed both.
Born into the Order
Phula Singh is traditionally said to have been born around 1761, in the Sikh village world of the Malwa, into a family already bound to the Nihang tradition. His father, Ishar Singh, is described as a fighting Sikh of the Shahid misl, the confederacy associated with the Nihang orders that traced their lineage to Baba Deep Singh. When his father died, the boy was taken into the care of Akali Naina Singh, a senior Nihang leader, and raised inside the Buddha Dal.
That upbringing explains almost everything about him. The Nihangs were not simply soldiers. They were an order under vow, holding to the martial discipline instituted by Guru Gobind Singh, refusing property and settled comfort, wearing blue, and regarding themselves as answerable to the Guru and the Khalsa rather than to any state. They lived lightly and fought without hedging. In an age when most Sikh chiefs were busy acquiring estates, the Akalis kept moving.
Phula Singh succeeded to the leadership of his jatha and, in time, was recognised as Jathedar of the Akal Takht at Amritsar, the seat of temporal authority in Sikhism, which stands opposite the Harmandir Sahib. It made him the most senior voice in the Sikh religious order, and he used it.
The Shock Troops
Ranjit Singh's army was a formidable instrument, drilled in part by European officers and equipped with modern artillery. But there were moments in a battle when what was required was not drill. For those moments there were the Akalis.
Phula Singh's Nihangs fought as an irregular vanguard, going in first and going in hard, and contemporary observers on both sides regarded them with something close to dread. They were present at the great campaigns of the Sikh Empire's expansion: the taking of Multan in 1818, one of the hardest sieges of the era, where the Akalis were in the assault on the fortress; the crossing into Kashmir in 1819; and the long, grinding push north-west against the Afghan-held frontier.
Phula Singh accepted no jagir in return. He commanded when he chose to, in the Maharaja's campaigns but not quite as the Maharaja's servant, and this ambiguity was never resolved in Ranjit Singh's favour.
The Summons
The episode by which he is most remembered has nothing to do with a battlefield. Ranjit Singh had taken as a companion a Muslim dancing girl of Lahore named Moran, and had done so publicly, with celebrations that scandalised orthodox Sikh opinion. Complaints reached the Akal Takht.
Phula Singh summoned the Maharaja of the Punjab to appear before it.
What is striking is that Ranjit Singh came. He presented himself at the Akal Takht, in the sight of the sangat, and stood as an ordinary Sikh accused of misconduct. Phula Singh pronounced him guilty and imposed a punishment that included a public flogging, ordering him tied to a tamarind tree in the precinct. Ranjit Singh accepted the sentence. Accounts of what happened next vary in detail: the common tradition holds that when the assembled Sikhs saw their sovereign submit without protest, they asked for the corporal punishment to be remitted, and Phula Singh commuted it to a fine paid in gold to the Golden Temple, along with the Maharaja's admission of fault.
It is worth being clear about why this story is told so often. It is not really about a scandal. It is about a system in which the head of the religious order could compel the head of state to answer, and in which the head of state calculated that his legitimacy depended on obeying. Very few monarchies in any century have managed that.
The two men clashed more than once. Phula Singh is said to have objected loudly to European officers in the Sikh army and to the general drift of the Lahore court toward courtly softness. Ranjit Singh, for his part, kept sending for him whenever the fighting turned serious.
Nowshera
The end came on 14 March 1823, at the battle of Nowshera on the Kabul river, in the campaign against the Yusufzai tribes and the Afghan forces of Azim Khan. The Sikh advance stalled against a strong position on the heights at Pir Sabak, held by ghazi fighters who had no intention of giving ground.
Phula Singh led the Akalis forward. Accounts describe him mounted, going up the slope into concentrated fire, refusing to withdraw. He was killed there, along with a large number of his men, but the charge broke the position and the battle turned. He was in his early sixties.
Ranjit Singh, who had lost his most difficult subordinate, is said to have been shaken by the news. A gurdwara marks the site at Nowshera, in present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, and a shrine at Amritsar commemorates him near the Akal Takht he once presided over.
The Uncomfortable Saint
Akali Phula Singh is not an easy figure to domesticate. He was uncompromising in a way that made him difficult for allies as well as enemies, and admiring accounts do not pretend otherwise. But the Sikh tradition has kept his memory carefully, and the reason is not only the courage at Nowshera.
He represents an idea that the Sikh polity has never entirely let go of: that authority, however great, remains accountable to the community and to the Guru's teaching, and that someone has to be willing to say so out loud to the most powerful man in the room. Phula Singh owned nothing the Maharaja could take away. That was precisely what made him free to speak.