Ahmad Shah Durrani's Forces Massacre Sikhs at the Vadda Ghallughara

Fifty two years after Banda Singh Bahadur captured Sirhind and proclaimed the first Sikh state in 1710, already recorded here, and thirty seven years before the Sikh Empire rose in Punjab under Ranjit Singh in 1799, also recorded here, the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani turned a punitive campaign against the Sikhs into the deadliest single episode of pre modern Sikh history. On 5 February 1762, Durrani's cavalry, joined by the forces of the Malerkotla state, caught a column of Sikh families, fighters, elders and children escorting noncombatants away from the Malwa region toward safety near the villages of Kup and Rahira, close to present day Malerkotla. Along a stretch of road running roughly forty five kilometres toward Barnala, Durrani's forces killed an estimated ten to thirty thousand Sikhs, a toll later Sikh tradition named the Vadda Ghallughara, the Great Holocaust, to distinguish it from a smaller massacre a dozen years earlier. Durrani followed the killing by razing the Sikhs' holiest shrine, the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, and packing its sacred pool with debris. The massacre did not extinguish the movement it was meant to end. Within months the scattered Sikh misls, the confederated bands Durrani had hoped to break for good, regrouped, rebuilt the Harmandir Sahib, and resumed the campaigns that within four decades let Ranjit Singh unite the misls into the Sikh Empire already recorded on this map. Historians of the Punjab treat the Vadda Ghallughara as the clearest test of the young Khalsa's capacity to survive catastrophic loss and re form, the darkest point between Banda Singh Bahadur's first state and Ranjit Singh's empire.