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Sikh-Mughal Wars

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The Sikh-Mughal Wars were a series of armed conflicts between the Sikh Panth and the Mughal Empire, rooted in the Mughal execution of the fifth Guru, Arjan, in 1606, and beginning as open warfare under the sixth Guru, Hargobind, in 1621. Hostility recurred under later Gurus, sharpened by the execution of the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in 1675, and by the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh's founding of the Khalsa, a baptized order of soldier-saints, in 1699. After Guru Gobind Singh's death in 1708, the lay commander Banda Singh Bahadur led an armed uprising that seized substantial Mughal territory in Punjab before his capture and execution in 1716.

Facts
Disputed
Victim Group
The Sikh community of the Punjab, including Guru Tegh Bahadur, publicly executed at Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the emperor Aurangzeb for refusing to convert to Islam, though historians differ over how far the wider, decades long conflict itself was a religious persecution as opposed to a political rivalry between the growing temporal power of the Sikh Gurus and Mughal provincial authority. 1
Perpetrator Regime
The Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb and his successors, whose provincial governors and armies fought the Sikh community and its temporal leadership across the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 1
Death Toll
from 700 1
Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts describe roughly 700 to 740 captured Sikh prisoners executed at Delhi in 1716 at a rate of about 100 a day, a toll distinct from the wider losses of the Mughal-Sikh wars as a whole; this atlas records 700 as the low end of the commonly cited range for the Delhi executions specifically.
Death Toll
to 740 2
See death-toll-min. Accounts of the number of Sikh prisoners marched to Delhi after Banda Singh Bahadur's defeat run up to about 740, with roughly the same number reported captured as were later executed.
Death Toll Assessment
The recorded figure, 700 to 740, is scoped to one documented episode, the execution of captured Sikh prisoners at Delhi in 1716 following Banda Singh Bahadur's defeat, not an aggregate for the wider Sikh-Mughal Wars, which J.S. Grewal's history covers across decades of campaigns with no reconciled war-wide death total in the sources consulted. Framing this conflict is itself debated: Sikh historiography reads the Mughal campaigns, and the Delhi executions specifically, as religious persecution aimed at extirpating the Khalsa, while Mughal-court-focused accounts frame the same campaigns primarily as suppression of a rebellious regional power rather than a specifically confessional target; this atlas carries both readings rather than adopting either as settled. 1
Religious Dimension
The Mughal-Sikh conflict is conventionally read, in Sikh tradition and in much of the general historical literature, as a war of religious persecution met by armed religious self-defense: two Sikh Gurus, Arjan in 1606 and Tegh Bahadur in 1675, were executed by Mughal authority, and the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa in 1699 explicitly as a baptized order of soldier-saints pledged to defend the faith. That religious causation has been contested for individual episodes within the conflict since at least the nineteenth century. Guru Tegh Bahadur's execution carries two competing accounts: Sikh tradition, reflected in Guru Gobind Singh's own account in the Bachittar Natak, holds that his father died specifically in defense of the right to religious practice, provoked by the persecution of Kashmiri Pandits under Aurangzeb; the early historian Joseph Davey Cunningham argued instead that Tegh Bahadur had built a rival territorial and revenue base that made him a political threat to Mughal provincial authority independent of doctrine, and that religious framing was applied to what was substantially a contest for power. Modern historians such as J.S. Grewal treat the conflict as carrying real religious and political causes together rather than reducing it to either. 1
Status
Official Recognition
Not formally recognized by any body 1
No international body has made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for a seventeenth and eighteenth century Mughal-Sikh conflict. Historian Satish Chandra and other revisionist scholars note that most detailed Sikh accounts of Guru Tegh Bahadur's execution date only from the late eighteenth century, later than the event itself, which complicates treating the episode as settled history rather than as contested memory.
Recognition Basis
No international body has made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for a seventeenth and eighteenth century Mughal-Sikh conflict. Historian Satish Chandra and other revisionist scholars note that most detailed Sikh accounts of Guru Tegh Bahadur's execution date only from the late eighteenth century, later than the event itself, which complicates treating the episode as settled history rather than as contested memory. 1
The Event
When It Happened
1621 to 1716, rooted in Guru Arjan's execution in 1606 1
Period
1621 to 1716 1
Principal Parties
The Sikh Panth, under Gurus Hargobind, Har Rai, Har Krishan, Tegh Bahadur and Gobind Singh in turn, and after 1708 under the lay military leader Banda Singh Bahadur, against the Mughal Empire under emperors Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah I and Farrukhsiyar and their Punjab provincial administrations. Banda Singh Bahadur's own following, at its height numbering in the tens of thousands, drew Hindu and Muslim peasants alongside Sikhs, united chiefly by opposition to Mughal landholding practice in Punjab. 1
Consequences
What It Settled
Banda Singh Bahadur's capture in December 1715 and execution in Delhi on 9 June 1716, along with hundreds of his captured followers, ended the first sustained phase of organized Sikh armed resistance to Mughal rule. Sikh military and political power revived later in the eighteenth century through the Sikh confederacies known as misls and culminated in the Sikh Empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who had brought most of Punjab under Sikh rule by 1799, after an intervening period of Mughal decline and Afghan invasion. 1
Learn More
From a Guru's Execution to a Rebel's, Ninety Years of War in Punjab

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Sikh Panth's relationship with Mughal authority began peacefully enough: the first Guru, Nanak, preached in the same period the Mughal Empire was founded, and early Mughal emperors showed little interest in the small religious community developing in Punjab. That changed as the Panth grew in numbers, wealth and organization, and began to look, to a suspicious provincial administration, less like a devotional movement and more like a rival center of authority. In 1606 the Mughal emperor Jahangir had the fifth Guru, Arjan, tortured and executed, ostensibly for supporting a rebel prince.

Arjan's son and successor, Guru Hargobind, responded by arming the Panth and fortifying its headquarters at Amritsar, and fought the first outright battles against Mughal forces from 1621 onward. Sporadic conflict continued through the following decades and worsened sharply under the emperor Aurangzeb, whose reign saw the execution of the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Delhi in 1675. The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, responded in 1699 by founding the Khalsa, a baptized brotherhood of Sikh soldier-saints bound by a shared code and appearance, and fought a series of battles against both Mughal forces and neighboring hill states until his own death in 1708.

The following year, the ascetic turned general Banda Singh Bahadur took up armed rebellion in Guru Gobind Singh's name, seizing Mughal territory across Punjab and executing the provincial governor responsible for Guru Tegh Bahadur's death. Mughal forces eventually surrounded and captured Banda Singh Bahadur's stronghold in December 1715; he and hundreds of his followers were tortured and executed in Delhi the following June.

Faith Defended or Power Contested, Historians Divide Over a Guru's Death

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Why did the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb have the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, executed in Delhi in 1675? The question has been argued over for more than three centuries, and it matters for how the whole Mughal-Sikh conflict gets read, as religious persecution or as a more ordinary contest for territory and power that happened to run along religious lines.

The traditional account, which Guru Gobind Singh himself set down in the Bachittar Natak not long after his father's death, holds that Tegh Bahadur died specifically defending the right to religious practice: he had traveled north to protest the forced conversion of Kashmiri Pandits under Aurangzeb's rule and offered himself in their place. This reading treats the execution as continuous with the earlier killing of Guru Arjan in 1606, part of a settled Mughal pattern of religious intolerance toward a growing rival faith.

Joseph Davey Cunningham, an East India Company officer who wrote the first serious English-language history of the Sikhs in 1849, offered a different account. Cunningham argued that Tegh Bahadur had built up an independent territorial and revenue base in his years leading the Panth, levying contributions and sheltering fugitives from Mughal authority in ways that made him a political threat regardless of doctrine, and that Mughal action against him is better read as a provincial power struggle than a holy war.

Modern historians, including J.S. Grewal in the standard academic history of the Sikhs, generally decline to choose between the two accounts outright, treating Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom as carrying real religious and real political weight at once, each reinforcing rather than canceling the other.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Islam, Religions

The Mughal Empire's ruling dynasty and state administration were Islamic; several of the conflict's flashpoints, including both Gurus' executions, are read in the traditional and much of the general literature as acts of religious enforcement by that Islamic state authority against the Sikh faith.

Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)J. S. Grewal
Punjab, Regions

The conflict was fought almost entirely within Punjab, the Mughal province that was the Sikh Panth's own homeland and the territory Banda Singh Bahadur's uprising briefly seized from Mughal control.

Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)J. S. Grewal

Belongs to Tradition

Sikhism, Religions
Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)J. S. Grewal

Conducted By

Sikhism, Religions

The Sikh Panth, under its Gurus and then under Banda Singh Bahadur, conducted the armed resistance to Mughal authority that the war names.

Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)J. S. Grewal
Sources
1. J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)
J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source
2. Joseph Davey Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs, from the Origin of the Nation to the Battles of the Sutlej (1849)
Joseph Davey Cunningham, John Murray, London, 1849
Open Questions (1 open question)
What Was the Total Death Toll of the Mughal-Sikh Wars?

J.S. Grewal's standard modern history of the Sikhs, and other accessible surveys of the conflict, record casualty figures for individual battles and massacres, tens of thousands at the Battle of Bhilowal, thousands at Chhota Ghallughara, hundreds at the siege of Gurdaspur, but none totals them into a single figure for the roughly ninety year conflict, and no comprehensive scholarly count was located. A figure is never invented to fill that gap.

What would resolve this A scholarly synthesis totaling documented losses across the conflict's 1621 to 1715 span, or a demographic study of Punjab's population comparable to the census based methods used for other early modern wars. No such synthesis was located across the standard modern histories of the conflict.
Military and demographic history of Mughal India and early Sikh Punjab.J. S. Grewal, J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)
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