Abdali caught the Sikh column on the march and killed many thousands, most of them non-combatants; the Khalsa’s fighting core survived and was back in the field within months.
01Abdali’s forced march
After Panipat the Sikh misls grew strong in the Punjab, besieging Abdali’s governors and taking his towns. In his sixth invasion, early in 1762, Abdali learnt that a great Sikh gathering, fighting men with their women, children and old people, was moving through the Malerkotla country towards the safety of the dry lands near Barnala. He rode from Lahore with his best horse, crossing the Sutlej and covering the distance in about two days, and joined Zain Khan, the governor of Sirhind, and the Malerkotla troops. At dawn on 5 February 1762 they caught the column near the villages of Kup and Rahira.
02A moving wall
The Sikh fighters threw a ring around the families and kept them moving south-west, turning to charge whenever the Afghans broke in. Ratan Singh Bhangu, whose Prachin Panth Prakash keeps the memory of that day, writes of Jassa Singh Ahluwalia taking more than twenty wounds and Charat Singh holding the rear. The ring broke in places and the killing among the families was terrible. No count was kept; historians put the dead at many thousands, with estimates from about ten to thirty thousand. Two months later Abdali blew up the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. The Sikhs fought him again at Amritsar that October, took Sirhind in January 1764, and rebuilt the Harmandir.
The Vadda Ghallughara is the darkest day in Sikh history and also its proof of survival: within three years of it the Khalsa ruled Lahore and the Punjab plains.