The Sarbat Khalsa of 1748

By the late 1740s the Khalsa's fighting strength in the Punjab existed as roughly sixty-five separate bands, jathas, each operating under its own leader with little formal coordination between them, harassing Mughal authority piecemeal rather than as a unified force. Nawab Kapur Singh, one of the most respected Sikh military leaders of the period, judged this fragmentation a weakness the Sikhs could not afford, and at the Baisakhi gathering of 1748 he pressed the case for consolidation directly to the assembled bands.

The gurmata that resulted merged the sixty-five jathas into eleven misls, larger confederated units each retaining its own commander, territory and banner but now bound together as a single combined force, the Dal Khalsa, under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia's overall command. The number eleven was not arbitrary administrative tidiness; it preserved real regional and factional loyalties that a single unified command would have simply erased, while still giving the Khalsa the coordinated strength a single unwieldy army, or sixty-five uncoordinated ones, could not match. It became the structure that carried Sikh military and political power through the second half of the eighteenth century, until Ranjit Singh eventually folded the misls into his own kingdom.

A Sarbat Khalsa is not, by itself, a resolution; it is the assembly that can pass one. What makes a decision reached there binding on the wider community is the gurmata, a resolution taken specifically in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib at the Akal Takht, understood as carrying the sanction of the scripture itself rather than resting on the authority of whoever proposed it. The 1748 reorganization into misls was adopted this way, which is part of why it held: Nawab Kapur Singh could propose consolidation, but it became binding on all sixty-five previously independent bands only once it passed as a gurmata before the assembled Khalsa.

This is also why the 1748 gathering belongs on the same page as gatherings from very different centuries carrying the same name. The institution the Sarbat Khalsa names, a general assembly whose gurmata binds the whole community, is older and more durable than any single occasion it produces; the eighteenth century misl system was one strong exercise of that institution at the height of its authority, called when the Khalsa most needed a coordinated answer to Mughal pressure and delivered one that held for decades.