Thousands of Sikhs were killed in the marsh and the hills, and the captives were executed at Lahore; the jathas that survived regrouped within months.
01A death and a vow
In the 1740s the Sikhs lived as outlaws in the Punjab, moving in jathas through the forests and coming in secret to bathe at Amritsar. Early in 1746 a body of them clashed near Eminabad with Jaspat Rai, the local faujdar, and he was killed. His brother Lakhpat Rai was diwan to Yahiya Khan, the governor at Lahore. Ratan Singh Bhangu’s Prachin Panth Prakash records that Lakhpat Rai vowed to wipe out the Sikhs. Sikhs living peacefully in Lahore were seized and executed, and orders went out against the Panth and even against reading its scriptures.
02The hunt in the marsh
In May 1746 a large army with guns marched on the Sikhs gathered in the reed marsh of Kahnuwan, near the Ravi. Driven out, the jathas tried to escape north into the hills, but the hill people turned them back, and they were caught between the hills, the flooded river and the army. Many drowned or were cut down. The Sikh historians Hari Ram Gupta and Ganda Singh put the dead at about seven thousand, and some three thousand captives were marched to Lahore and beheaded at the horse market, where Gurdwara Shahid Ganj later stood. Jassa Singh Ahluwalia was among those who broke out.
The Chhota Ghallughara taught the Sikhs to unite their jathas; within two years they formed the Dal Khalsa at Amritsar, the army that would outlast both the Lahore governors and Abdali.