Chhota Ghallughara, the Massacre in the Kahnuwan Marshes

The Kahnuwan chhamb is a stretch of marshland near the Beas in what is now Gurdaspur district — reed beds, standing water, mud that gives way underfoot, the kind of country that swallows sound. For most of its history it has been unremarkable. For a few days in the spring of 1746 it was the place where the Sikhs of Punjab were driven when there was nowhere else left to go, and the killing that happened there gave the Punjabi language one of its heaviest phrases: Chhota Ghallughara, the lesser massacre. It is called lesser only because a greater one would follow sixteen years later.

A Persecuted Generation

By the 1740s the Sikhs of Punjab had been living under proscription for the better part of two decades. Following the execution of Banda Singh Bahadur in 1716, successive Mughal governors at Lahore had treated Sikh identity itself as a crime. Prices were placed on the heads of Sikhs. Access to Amritsar was restricted. Many withdrew into the forests, the hill country and the sandy tracts along the rivers, moving in small armed bands, coming together only for the twice-yearly assemblies at Amritsar and dispersing again.

This was not a settled community with towns to defend. It was a mobile population that had learned to live at the edge of the map. That mobility was its protection — and, in 1746, its trap.

The Killing of Jaspat Rai

The immediate cause was personal. Early in 1746 a roving band of Sikhs came into conflict near Eminabad, north of Lahore, with the local faujdar, Jaspat Rai, and in the encounter he was killed. His brother, Lakhpat Rai, was Diwan — chief revenue minister — at Lahore under the governor Yahiya Khan, and a man with the authority of the province behind him.

Lakhpat Rai's response was not a punitive expedition against a particular band. It was a declared campaign against the existence of the Sikh people, and the chroniclers record him swearing an oath of extermination in the most absolute terms available to him. He began at home. In March 1746 the Sikhs living in Lahore itself were rounded up and put to death. Then he moved into the countryside with a substantial force, supported by the state's artillery and by contingents raised from the surrounding chieftaincies, and with orders issued to villages across the province forbidding shelter, food or water to any Sikh.

Driven to the Marsh

The Sikh bands, warned of what was coming, fell back the way they always had — eastward and northward, toward the rivers and the forest cover of the Riarki country between the Ravi and the Beas. This time the pursuit did not slacken. Lakhpat Rai's columns pressed them steadily out of one refuge after another, burning cover as they went, until the surviving groups were forced into the Kahnuwan marshes.

It was a hopeless position. The marsh gave no firm ground for a stand, no forage, no clean water, and only one practical direction of escape — across the Beas toward the hills. Behind and around them the Mughal force closed in with guns. The main action is generally dated to the first days of May 1746. Groups attempted to break out and cross the river; some got through, many did not, and those caught in the water or on the flats had almost no chance.

The commonly cited figures are around seven thousand killed in the marshes and some three thousand taken prisoner, with wider estimates for the whole campaign of that year reaching ten thousand or more across Punjab. As with all such numbers from the period, they come from chronicles rather than counts and should be read as orders of magnitude rather than tallies.

The Nakhas at Lahore

The prisoners were marched to Lahore. There they were paraded through the streets and executed in batches at the Nakhas, the horse market outside the Delhi Gate. The ground where it happened came to be known as Shahidganj, the treasury of martyrs, and it remains a place of Sikh remembrance in the city.

What the chronicles emphasise about those executions is not the manner of them but the refusal. Prisoners were offered their lives in exchange for renouncing their faith, and the accounts uniformly record that the offer was declined. Whether every such account is literal history or partly the shaping of memory, the insistence on that detail tells you what the community took from the episode: that the campaign was aimed at belief, and that belief was what it failed to touch.

What Lakhpat Rai Did Not Achieve

Within two years the calculation in Punjab changed completely. Yahiya Khan was overthrown in a factional struggle at Lahore. Lakhpat Rai fell from power and was handed over to the Sikhs, who by then were strong enough to make such a demand. Ahmad Shah Durrani launched the first of his invasions from the north-west in 1748, and Mughal authority in the province began its final unravelling.

In that same year, 1748, the Sikhs meeting at Amritsar reorganised their scattered bands into the confederacy of the misls under a single standard. It is difficult to read that decision without reference to Kahnuwan. The lesson of 1746 was that dispersed bands could be hunted piecemeal into a swamp; the answer was a structure that could concentrate when it had to and disperse when it chose, and that answer carried the Sikhs through the far worse catastrophe of 1762 and on to the government of Punjab.

Remembering the Lesser Massacre

A memorial now stands at Kahnuwan, and the district authorities maintain the site. The commemorations are quiet ones, held annually, and they sit within a longer sequence that runs through the Punjab timeline — 1746, then 1762, then the century of Sikh power that followed.

There is a hard symmetry in the naming. Chhota and vadda, lesser and greater, are words of scale, and it takes a particular history for a community to need both. What the marshes at Kahnuwan hold is the memory of a generation that was hunted across its own province and did not disband, and of the reorganisation that grew directly out of the worst days it had ever had.