In the middle of the eighteenth century the Punjab was one of the least governable places on earth. Mughal authority in Lahore was collapsing without quite falling; Afghan armies under Ahmad Shah Abdali came down through the passes again and again, taking what they wanted and leaving ruin behind; and the Sikhs, who had a price on their heads and no fixed capital, lived largely in the forests and river marshes between raids. That a coherent Sikh power emerged from those decades at all is remarkable. That so much of the credit belongs to one man, born in a village near Lahore in 1718, is more remarkable still.
The Boy in Delhi
Jassa Singh was born on 3 May 1718 at Ahlu, a village near Lahore from which his family took the name Ahluwalia. His father, Badar Singh, died when the boy was young, and his mother, a woman of considerable determination, took him to Delhi to the household of Mata Sundari, the widow of Guru Gobind Singh.
It is hard to overstate what that upbringing meant. Mata Sundari was, in the decades after the tenth Guru's death, the moral centre of a scattered and persecuted community, the person to whom Sikhs across northern India looked for guidance. The child grew up in the presence of that authority, hearing gurbani and learning to sing it. Accounts describe him as a fine kirtan singer, a detail that sits oddly beside the later portrait of an armoured commander until you understand that in Sikh life the two were never separate roles.
When he was still young, Mata Sundari placed him under the care of Nawab Kapur Singh, the leading Sikh figure of the age and the organiser of the Dal Khalsa, the Sikh fighting force. Kapur Singh trained him, trusted him, and in time named him his successor.
From Bands to an Army
The Sikh response to persecution had been to fragment deliberately: small mobile bands, or jathas, that could dissolve into the countryside and re-form elsewhere. It kept them alive, but it could not take a city. Over the 1740s these bands were reorganised into larger confederacies known as the misls, each with its own territory and chief. Jassa Singh led the Ahluwalia misl.
The decisive step came in 1748. At a Sarbat Khalsa, the general assembly of the Sikh community convened at Amritsar, the misls agreed to place their combined forces under a single supreme command, and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia was chosen to hold it. The misl system remained loose and often quarrelsome, and his authority was moral and elective rather than absolute. But when the Dal Khalsa moved as one body, it moved behind him.
Sultan-ul-Qaum
Two episodes fixed his reputation. The first came during one of Ahmad Shah Abdali's invasions, when the retreating Afghan army was carrying off a large number of captive women from the plains of Hindustan. Jassa Singh's forces pursued the column, struck it, and freed the prisoners, escorting them back to their families. In a period when the Sikhs were officially outlaws, the act did more for their standing among ordinary Punjabis than any battle could have.
The second was Lahore. In 1761, in the confusion following Abdali's defeat of the Marathas at Panipat, the Dal Khalsa entered Lahore itself. Jassa Singh was proclaimed there, and coins were struck in the name of the Gurus rather than in his own, a distinction he seems to have insisted upon. It was around this period that the Sikh community conferred on him the title by which he is still known: Sultan-ul-Qaum, King of the Nation. He never converted it into a dynasty.
The Great Massacre
The following year brought the worst day in eighteenth-century Sikh memory. In February 1762, near Kup in the Malerkotla region, Abdali's army caught the Sikh fighting force encumbered by its families and baggage train. The slaughter that followed is remembered as the Vadda Ghallughara, the Great Massacre; contemporary estimates of the dead vary widely and no reliable figure exists, but the losses were catastrophic and included large numbers of non-combatants.
Jassa Singh fought through the day covering the withdrawal and was said afterwards to be carrying more than twenty wounds. He survived. So, against all expectation, did the movement. Within months the Sikhs were raiding again, and by 1764 the Dal Khalsa was strong enough to storm Sirhind, kill its governor Zain Khan, and settle a very old account. Abdali came back repeatedly and could never hold what he took. Slowly, the Punjab passed to the misls.
What He Left
Jassa Singh Ahluwalia died on 20 October 1783 at Amritsar, in his mid-sixties, and was cremated near the Golden Temple complex he had spent much of his life defending and rebuilding. He had taken part in the restoration of the Harmandir Sahib after Afghan armies desecrated it, an act that mattered to Sikhs far more than any territorial gain.
He left no empire in the formal sense. What he left was a template. The misls he helped weld together held the Punjab for a generation, and it was from that inheritance, and from the same city of Lahore, that Maharaja Ranjit Singh built a unified Sikh kingdom at the turn of the next century. The Ahluwalia family itself went on to rule the state of Kapurthala.
His title is the thing worth pausing on. Sultan-ul-Qaum was not self-awarded and not hereditary. It was given by an assembly of equals to the man they trusted to lead them, in a tradition that had spent eighty years insisting sovereignty belonged to the Khalsa as a body and not to any individual. He accepted the responsibility and, as far as the record shows, declined the crown that usually comes with it.