Battle of Attock

01The fort on the Indus

Attock, Akbar’s fort above the Indus crossing, had been held for the Afghans by Jahandad Khan. In 1813 he handed it to Ranjit Singh, and the Kabul wazir Fateh Khan came to take it back. The two armies faced each other through weeks of summer heat near Haidaru. On 13 July, with the Afghans short of water, Mokham Chand attacked. The Sikh guns broke the Afghan charges, and when Dost Muhammad’s men had spent themselves, the Sikh cavalry drove the whole Afghan army off the field. Fateh Khan fled to Kabul.

02The turn of the tide

For seventy years, from Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali onwards, armies from Kabul had come down through Attock to plunder the Punjab and Hindustan. After 1813 the flow ran the other way. Ranjit Singh’s armies went on to take Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819 and Peshawar in the 1820s and 1830s, and Hari Singh Nalwa’s fort at Jamrud came to stand at the mouth of the Khyber.

Person · 1780–1839 CE; Maharaja 1801–1839Maharaja Ranjit SinghA misl chief’s son who lost an eye to smallpox as a child, Ranjit Singh took Lahore in 1799 and made one kingdom out of the Punjab, Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar. He covered the Harmandir Sahib in gilded copper and held the Khyber against the Afghans for forty years.Read →