Wazir Khan swung his scimitar. Banda Singh parried. The two men—the Nawab who had killed children, and the hermit who had become a warrior—stood face to face.
Banda Singh traveled north. He was not a general; he knew nothing of cavalry formations or artillery. But he had something more potent: the Guru’s hukam (order) and the silent rage of a subjugated people. He started with a few hundred outlaws, outcasts, and orphans who had lost everything to the Mughal tax collectors. He trained them in the hills of the Shivalik, teaching them guerilla warfare. He did not wear a king’s robes. He wore a simple blue tunic and a seli (woolen cord), the mark of a mendicant. chaar sahibzaade: rise of banda singh bahadur
The air over Anandpur Sahib was thick with smoke and the wails of widows. The year was 1705. Young Banda Singh, then known as Lachhman Dev, a humble Bairagi recluse, felt the chill of betrayal seep into his bones. He had come to seek the blessings of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, only to witness the aftermath of the terrible siege. The Guru’s mother, Mata Gujri, and his two younger Sahibzaade —Zorawar Singh, just nine, and Fateh Singh, only six—had been martyred. Their bodies, bricked alive by the tyrannical Nawab of Sirhind, Wazir Khan, had become a testament to a cruelty that defied comprehension. Wazir Khan swung his scimitar
And so, the story of Banda Singh Bahadur is not an end. It is the beginning of the long, bloody, glorious dawn of the Sikh Empire—a dawn paid for by the blood of the four princes and the hermit who became their thunderbolt. Banda Singh traveled north