The Rise and Fall of Banda Singh Bahadur | Part 3 of 3

Here's part 1 and 2 of this series.

The Mughals offered freedom to Banda’s men if they converted to Islam, but no one submitted. Thousands witnessed their executions, including two Englishman at the Mughal court, John Surman and Edward Stephenson. They noted that the Sikh soldiers, who were tortured and then beheaded, accepted their fate with a stunning serenity:

“Some days ago, they entered the city laden with fetters, [Banda’s] whole attendants which were left alive being about seven hundred and eighty…besides about two thousand heads stuck upon poles, being those who died by the sword in battle… for the rest there are a hundred each day beheaded. It is not a little remarkable with what patience they undergo their fate, and to the last, it has not been found that one apostatized from this new formed religion.”

After all of Banda’s men had been executed, the Mughals tortured Banda for the next three months, hoping to extract the location of Banda’s legendary hoard of looted treasure. Banda never succumbed.

Before he was executed, the Mughals forced Banda to watch as they butchered his four-year-old son. Banda remained unmoved. Finally, the thwarted Mughals asked Banda why he was accepting his fate with such equanimity, with no trace of his famed aggression. In response, Banda offered a deathbed confession: he had become obsessed with personal glory and power, letting his victories feed his pride and meting out brutal punishment beyond justification. He had betrayed Guru Gobind and the fundamental principles of Sikhism.

And then Banda met his end—the Mughals gouged out his eyes, cut off his hands and feet, and peeled off his skin with smoldering iron pincers. His beheading was a final act of mercy.

Banda Singh had a remarkable journey: from hermit to warrior to conqueror to martyr. In seven short years, he exposed cracks in the foundation of the once indestructible Mughal Empire, leading the farmers and peasants to stunning victories and the brief glow of freedom. The Mughal’s outlying vassals took note of Banda’s heroics and established their own kingdoms while the Mughal Empire slowly collapsed from within. By the 1730s, the Mughal Empire had become a shell of its former self, its glory fading into the history books.

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After our tour of the museum, where we marveled at the weapons on display and the letters and diaries that chronicle Banda’s exploits, my father and I strolled the grounds of Fateh Burj. Beneath a clear blue sky among the manicured lawns and colorful gardens, the serenity belied the bloodshed it memorialized. We walked around the mounds modeled after the same hills that Banda had used as fortifications to protect his troops during the Battle of Sirhind. I paused in front of his statue, where he was crouched low for eternity, one hand resting on his sword, the other on his shield. Outgunned in every way, Banda and his rebels could have fled, and no one would have accused them of being cowards. But they stood together, knowing that death was the likely outcome—instead, they emerged victorious.

The Battle of Sirhind was the wellspring of a Sikh nation. In the two hundred years before the Battle of Sirhind, Sikhism was focused on forging a new identity shaped by the ten Sikh Gurus. Survival was the name of the game; independence seemed improbable, if not impossible. Banda showed the Sikhs that they could not only survive but thrive by overcoming Mughal oppression and become their own masters. Banda gave the Sikhs a brief taste of freedom, and when the Mughal Empire declined in the 1740s, leaving a vacancy in Punjab, the Sikh Misls raced to fill it.

Many see Banda as a Sikh hero, but he also has his detractors. Some Sikh historians focus on the fact that Banda betrayed Guru Gobind’s mission and the Sikh faith by freeing Punjab for his own glory, behaving as though he were the next Guru when Guru Gobind was the last. He persecuted Muslims in astonishing numbers when the battle had already been won, which was no different than what the Mughals had done to the Sikhs. Ultimately, the Sikh codes of bearing arms for the oppressed, treating all as equals, and living righteously in the name of God were all broken beneath Banda’s banner. Most Muslim historians, who tend to gloss over the centuries of oppressive Mughal rule that preceded Banda's reign of terror, consider Banda nothing more than a bloodthirsty savage whose cruel fate was well deserved.

Ultimately, Banda’s rise and fall shouldn’t be simplified as purely heroic or purely evil. Nothing Banda did was ever simple. He was a flawed man full of contradictions—from hero to tyrant, from exalted to dishonored, from righteous to barbaric—but if he hadn't acted, Punjab may have never experienced its all too brief moment of independence, however crooked and bloody the road to freedom may have been.

As we drove away from Fateh Burj, leaving Banda and his complicated, devastating, inspiring legacy behind us, I gazed across the plains and readied myself for our next stop—Anandpur Sahib, where Guru Gobind laid the foundation of the Khalsa, the saint soldier, which would transform Sikhism forever.