The forty men who left the siege of Anandpur did not slip away in the night. They wrote it down. They drew up a bedava — a formal disclaimer stating that Guru Gobind Singh was no longer their Guru and they no longer his Sikhs — put their names to it, handed it over, and walked out of the fortress towards the Majha.
That document is the reason the story of Mai Bhago exists, and it is the reason it still has an edge. What she undid was not a lapse of nerve. It was a signature.
Jhabal
She was born at Jhabal Kalan, a village in the Majha country of central Punjab, in what is now Amritsar district. Her family were Sikhs of long standing — the tradition holds that her grandfather had taken the faith in the time of Guru Arjan, and that her father and uncles were among those who received amrit when the Khalsa was constituted at Anandpur in 1699.
Beyond that, the record of her early life is thin, and it is more honest to say so than to fill it in. Most of the biographical colour that circulates — her childhood training in arms, the details of her marriage, her exact age — comes from devotional writing composed long afterwards. What the sources agree on is the family, the village, and the fact that she was a practising Sikh of the Majha in a generation being asked to prove it.
Anandpur, and the Paper
By 1704 Anandpur had been under blockade for months. Imperial forces and the armies of the hill rajas had ringed the town; food had run out; the defenders were eating whatever was left. Guru Gobind Singh's position was that they should hold.
Forty Sikhs from the Majha decided they could not. They drafted the bedava and left.
It is worth being fair to them for a moment, because the tradition rarely is. These were men who had come a long way to fight, had held out through a starvation siege, and reached the end of what they had. Desertion under those conditions is common in every army that has ever existed. What made this different was that they formalised it — and that they then had to go home to villages where everybody would know.
The Confrontation
Word travelled ahead of them into the Majha, and it reached Mai Bhago.
The accounts describe her reaction as shame rather than anger: not that these men had failed, but that her district would be remembered for it. She went to them. In some tellings she went village to village; in others she gathered them together and put the case in front of their families. She is said to have told them that if they would not go back, she would go herself, and that the women of the Majha would take up what the men had put down.
They went back.
She would not let the memory of her people be one of abandonment, and so she turned a retreat into a return.
Khidrana
The Guru had by then left Anandpur, been separated from his family at the flooded Sarsa, lost his two elder sons at Chamkaur, and was moving south-west through the Malwa with an imperial column behind him. The party from the Majha caught up with him near a shallow pool at Khidrana — a dhab, a seasonal water tank, in dry country where water decided where anyone could go.
On 29 December 1705 the pursuing force arrived.
The forty took position in front of the water, in scrub, with the Guru's small party and his archers on rising ground behind them. What followed was not a battle in any formal sense; it was a blocking action fought by a few dozen people against a column, in terrain that made the defenders look more numerous than they were. Tradition holds that they stretched cloth over the bushes to suggest tents and a larger camp, and that the deception held long enough to matter.
It worked well enough. The imperial commander broke off — the water was the object, and with the pool contested and the Guru's archery coming down from the ridge, the pursuit was not worth its cost.
Every one of the forty was killed or mortally wounded. Mai Bhago fought among them and was found alive, badly wounded, on the field.
The Tearing of the Bedava
Guru Gobind Singh came down and walked among the fallen. He found Maha Singh, the leader of the forty, still breathing.
What Maha Singh asked for, in every version of the story, was not water or comfort. He asked the Guru to destroy the paper.
The Guru took out the bedava and tore it up in front of him, and Maha Singh died. The forty were blessed as the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated Ones, and are named to this day in the Sikh ardas, the daily prayer. The place took their name: Khidrana became Muktsar — the pool of liberation — and is now Sri Muktsar Sahib, one of the principal Sikh pilgrimage sites of the Malwa, where Maghi is observed every January in their memory.
The theology of that moment is worth pausing on. The forty were not forgiven because they came back and won. They lost the paper because they came back at all. Sikh tradition has been very clear about what the story means: the door does not close behind you.
After the Battle
Mai Bhago recovered under the Guru's care and did not go home.
She stayed with him, in warrior dress, as one of his personal guard — the sources describe her in bana, armed, riding with the party — through the years that took him south to the Deccan. She was, in the plainest terms, a serving soldier in the Guru's retinue at a point when the Khalsa was a movement in flight.
After Guru Gobind Singh's passing at Nanded in 1708, she went further south and settled at Jinvara, about eleven kilometres from Bidar in what is now Karnataka. She lived there in meditation into old age. Her dwelling is today Gurdwara Tap Asthan Mai Bhago at Janwada, and it is an odd and rather moving thing that the woman most associated with the Majha ended her life fifteen hundred kilometres from it. Relics associated with her, including a spear, are kept at Nanded.
What She Became
Mai Bhago is now everywhere in Sikh institutional life — schools, colleges, an armed forces preparatory institute for women in Punjab, a great many gurdwara halls, and a standard devotional image of a woman on horseback with a spear.
It is worth separating the icon from what she did, because the icon is the less interesting of the two. She is not chiefly remarkable for having fought, though she did. She is remarkable for having gone and got forty men who had signed their names to a document of renunciation and were sitting in their own villages with it, and for having made returning seem more possible than staying.
Everything else in the story follows from a conversation nobody wrote down.