JAN MUHAMMAD CHATTHA (d. 1798), son of Ghulam Muhammad Chattha, fled to Kabul on the eve of the conquest of the tort of Manchar in 1790 by Mahari Singh Sukkarchakkia. He accompanied Shah Zaman to India in 1797 and recovered his possessions on the River Chenab in Gujranwala district

JODH SINGH WAZLRABADIA (d. 1809), son of Gurbakhsh Singh, was a powerful eighteenth century Sikh chief. He possessed the parganahs;of Wazirabad, Karial, Mitranvali and Talvandi Musa Khan, comprising about 500 villages. Jodh Singh and Maharaja Ranjit Singh`s father, Mahari Singh, were great friends, and both often joined hands together

KAURA MALL, DIWAN, MAHARAJA BAHADUR (d. 1752), a Sahajdhari Sikh and trusted officer under the Mughals in the eighteenth century Punjab, was the son of Valid Ram, an Arora of the Chuggh clan, originally from a village near Shorkot in Jhang district, now in Pakistan. Little is known about the

KISHAN KANVAR, DIWAN, son of Diwan Hakim Rai, served the Sikh rulers of Lahore in various capacities. He had been the playmate and associate of Prince Nau Nihal Singh who bestowed upon him the title of dlwdn and showed him several other favours. In 1837, Prince Nau Nihal Singh,

LANGAH, BHAI, a well known figure in early Sikh history, was originally a follower of Sultan Sakhi Sarwar. Son of Abu ulKhair, a Dhillon Jatt with a Muslim name, belonging to the village of Jhabal, in the present Amritsar district of the Punjab, he was one of the three

MANI SINGH JANAM SAKHI, also known as CYAN RATNAVALI and traditionally attributed to Bhai Mani Singh, a famous Sikh of the early eighteenth century martyred by the Mughal governor of Lahore, Zakariya Khan, in 1737, is a collection of 225 anecdotes related to the life of Guru Nanak and some

MUHKAM CHAND, DIWAN (1750-1814), a renowned Sikh army general of the early years of Maharaja Ranjit Singh`s reign, was born around AD 1750. Son of a small shopkeeper, Baisakhi Mall Khatri, of Kunjah, a village in Gujrat district, now in Pakistan, he trained as an accountant and served as a

NUR UDDIN, FAQIR (d. 1852), third son of Ghulam Mohy udDin and the youngest brother of Faqir `Aziz udDin, was one of the prominent Muslim courtiers serving the Sikh sovereign Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his successors. In 1801, when Ranjit Singh assumed the title of Maharaja, Nur udDin was

QUTB UDDIN (d. 1832), younger brother of Nizam udDin, the Afghan chief of Kasur, succeeded to the gaddi of Kasur on the latter`s death in 1802. He began fortifying Kasur in an endeavour to overthrow the authority of Ranjit Singh whose tributary he was. Ranjit Singh led an expedition

RANJIT SINGH (1780-1839), Maharaja of the Punjab, popularly called Sheri Punjab, i.e. the Lion of the Punjab, was the most colourful, the most powerful and yet the most endearing figure in the history of the Sikhs. He ruled over a domain extending from the Khaibar Pass in the west

SEHRA SAHIB, GURDWARA, on top of a hillock near Basi or Basantgarh village, one kilometre south of Guru ka Lahore in Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, is dedicated to Guru Gobind Singh, who halted here for a short time on his way to Guru ka Lahore for his marriage in

SIKH COINS or NUMISMATICS. Sikh coins like coins anywhere else were both a commercial necessity and a symbol of sovereignty. Coin, derived from the Latin cuneus, a wedge, through Old French coing and cuigne, "is properly the term for a wedge  shaped die used for stamping money,