ABD USSAMAD KHAN (d. 1737), governor of Lahore from 1713 to 1726, a descendant of the Naqashbandi saint `Abdulla Ahrar, a great grandson of Khwaja Baki of Baghdad, was born at Agra when his father, Khwaja `Abd ul-Karim Ansari, had come out with his family from Samarkand on a tour of India during the reign of Emperor Aurangzib. When Samad Khan was two years old, his parents returned to Samarkand where he passed the early years of his life and where he attained the office of Shaikh ul Islam. Soon thereafter he came to India obtaining appointment at the court of Aurangzeb. He served for many years in the Deccan without attracting much notice.
AZIZ UDDIN, FAQIR (1780-1845), physician, diplomat, and foreign minister at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was the eldest son of Ghulam Mohy udDin, a leading physician of Lahore. Of his two brothers, Nur udDin held charge of the city of Lahore and had been governor of Gujrat, and Imam udDin was qilahdar (garrison commander) of the Fort of Gobindgarh. The family claims its descent from Ansari Arab immigrants from Bukhara, in Central Asia, who settled in Lahore as hakims or physicians. Hakim is the original title by which `Aziz udDin was known, the prefix Faqir appearing for the first time in the official British correspondence only after 1826.
DOST MUHAMMAD KHAN. AMIR (1791-1863), ruler of Kabul and Qandahar, was the son of Painda Khan (executed 1799), the Barakzai chief. Dost Muhammad`s first engagement with the Sikhs was at Attock, the Afghan citadel, which had fallen into the hands of the Sikhs in June 1813. In the conflict which lasted three months, Dost Muhammad Khan, who himself led the attack in the battle of Haidru, 8 km from Attock, was badly mauled by the Sikh force commanded by Diwan Mohkam Chand. As a result of the fighting among the members of the Durrani and Barakzai families, Dost Muhammad finally established himself in 1823 in Kabul, Kashmir having been lost to the Sikhs in 1819.
IMAM UDDIN, FAQIR (d. 1847), second son of Ghulam Mohly udDTn and younger brother of Faqir `Azi/ udDin, foreign minister to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was Qiladar or garrison commander of the Gobindgarh Fort at Amritsar, where the bulk of the Sikh crown jewels was kept in deposit. Capable and scholarly. Imam udDin was entrusted with multifarious duties by the Maharaja. He virtually acted as the chief treasurer of the kingdom, authorizing payments on behalf of the Darbar and carrying out commercial transactions through casli and hund is for the purchase of grain.
SULAHI KHAN, a Mughal courtier, was befriended by Baba Prithi Chand with a view to securing official patronage for his claim to succession to the spiritual title to which his father, Guru Ram Das, had nominated his youngest son, Arjan. Prithi Chand, eldest of three brothers, had founded a new village, Kotlia Guru, in the Malva region, where he invited Sulahi Khan to visit him. Sulahi Khan came, and the two of them hatched a plot aiming to finish up the Guru.