Raja Sultan Khan and the Sikh Wars: Pir Badesar, Pothi and Chhachho Pir

Raja Sultan Khan (راجہ سلطان خان), the last Chib ruler of Bhimber in today’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir, fought a series of Sikh wars against the armies of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore at the start of the nineteenth century. The Chib chronicle Tarikh-e-Chibhal, quoted in the 1997 Chib history, describes two expeditions: the first crowned a rival raja, Ikhtiyar Khan, whom Sultan Khan captured; the second was routed at Pir Badesar, at Pothi and in a night disaster at Chhachho Pir, before the raja finally surrendered and spent seven years in Sheikhupura fort.

Bhimber on the eve of the Sikh wars

By the end of the eighteenth century the Chib state of Bhimber was at the height of its power. Raja Sultan Khan had succeeded his father, Raja Suleman Khan, in 1824 Bikrami (about 1767), and when Maharaja Ranjit Dev of Jammu died in 1838 Bikrami (about 1781) he threw off Jammu’s overlordship, as told in How Bhimber Came Under Jammu. Tarikh-e-Chibhal describes his state as reaching east to Barnala and south over much of Kharian and Gujrat, with Naushera, Mirpur and Kotli inside it. The author’s own account (p. 168) takes it north to Naushera and “Rajal” (perhaps Rajouri), east beyond Manawar and south to the outskirts of Gujrat city, with a land revenue of about nine lakh rupees a year. In summer the rajas lived in Qila Amargarh, above the lake now called Baghsar.

Sultan Khan’s paid army was small: only two or three regiments (paltans) drew salaries, and in an emergency his subjects took up arms. He toured the state once or twice a year to hear petitions, and in every fort he kept an official who collected the grain revenue of the district and settled minor cases. The forts mattered. The book names Kangri, Mangla Devi, Dharal, Palal (reading uncertain), Manawar and Padhar, and the Persian chronicle Ibrat Nama, quoted on p. 41, says the forts of the Bhimber raj were so strongly built that they could be climbed only by ladder.

The Chibs had met Sikh armies before. The author records that Sardar Gujar Singh Bhangi of Wazirabad, after taking Gujrat from the Gakhar ruler Raja Sultan Muqarrab Khan, attacked both Chib states, Bhimber and Khari Kariali, and was shamefully defeated by their united army. His son Sahib Singh Bhangi, and after him Mahan Singh Sukarchakia, the father of Ranjit Singh, attacked Bhimber and Mangla again and again and were beaten each time in the hills. But the unity did not last. Raja Bandu (Bando) Khan of Khari Kariali and Raja Sultan Khan took up arms against each other, and Bandu Khan defeated his kinsman and occupied the town of Bhimber and the strip of land west of the Bhimber Nala. The author calls this quarrel the forerunner of the ruin of both states.

Why Lahore marched on Bhimber

Tarikh-e-Chibhal traces the immediate cause to the raja’s own household. Besides his first Rani, Sultan Khan brought into the palace a woman named Hayatu, later styled Hayat Begum, and came to do whatever she asked, to the dismay of his nobles. She disliked the wazir, Sujan Singh, and the commander-in-chief, Burhan Khan. She had the wazir’s kinsman Mehta Rajkor killed at Ghaddala (reading uncertain); when Sujan Singh arrested the killers, she turned the raja against him and had him imprisoned, and Pandit Karam Chand became wazir in his place. Once released, Sujan Singh went to Lahore and laid the whole story before Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Ranjit Singh, the chronicle says, was already looking for an opportunity, because in 1847 Bikrami (about 1790) Sultan Khan had seized some villages belonging to Sahib Singh, the ruler of Gujrat. Bhimber also lay across the road to Kashmir, which the Sikhs would finally conquer in 1819. The maharaja sent Diwan Mohkam Chand, one of the leading men of his government, with a large army to conquer the hill country.

The first expedition: Diwan Mohkam Chand and Raja Ikhtiyar Khan

Diwan Mohkam Chand marched by way of Akhnur to Naushera. Sultan Khan was not ready for a fight and, judging the moment, withdrew towards Rajouri. The Diwan then summoned all the jagirdars of Chibhal to Naushera and, on their advice, chose a member of the royal family, Ikhtiyar Khan, and gave him the raj-tilak with his own hand in the sarai of Naushera.

An omen in the Naushera sarai

As the new raja came out of the sarai with his sardars, a Sikh soldier threw his turban on the ground and cried out a line the chronicle gives as Kita na ja, thapia na ho; ape ap Niranjan ho, a garbled form of a verse of the Japji Sahib: He cannot be installed or made; He Himself is the Immaculate One. Nothing happens by anyone’s doing, the soldier meant; what happens is God’s will. Everyone who heard it was stunned, and each said in his heart that the omen was not good.

Snow, desertion and the capture at Chahi

Ikhtiyar Khan went on to Bhimber with Wazir Sujan Singh. Then rain and snow set in, and the cold grew so bitter that several elephants and hundreds of horses and men died. The Sikh soldiers from the plains had had enough and prepared to go home. Sujan Singh begged them to leave five thousand men to hold the country, but the army refused to stay in the hills and marched off without the Diwan’s consent. The chronicler remarks that this habit of soldiers going beyond their officers’ orders was the defect that in the end ruined the Sikh state.

With the Sikhs gone, Ikhtiyar Khan resolved to go up to Naushera. Sujan Singh tried hard to stop him: their hold was not yet secure, he warned, and Sultan Khan was brave and quick to seize an opening. Sultan Khan had indeed heard of the Sikh withdrawal and was already marching south with a large force of Chibhal men. Trusting to his own courage, Ikhtiyar Khan pressed on to Naushera, where Sultan Khan stood ready to fight. Ikhtiyar Khan was captured at Chahi and sent as a prisoner to Rajouri, but Raja Akbar Khan of Rajouri sent him back, and on the way he was killed by Taj Khan Kalotarah at a signal from Sultan Khan. Sujan Singh was held in Rajouri for some months, then got away to Lahore and reported everything to Ranjit Singh.

The second expedition: Pir Badesar, Pothi and Chhachho Pir

Ranjit Singh’s answer was a second army, eight thousand strong, under Diwan Kishan Saha, sent to settle the administration of Chibhal. This time, the chronicle says, the raja had prepared well, and he advanced to meet the Sikhs as soon as Kishan Saha and Sujan Singh entered his territory.

Pir Badesar

The first battle was fought at Pir Badesar, where Sultan Khan inflicted a crushing defeat on the Sikhs. The book’s survey of the Banah Valley (pp. 194–195) describes Pir Badesar as a lofty mountain in the south-east of the valley, named after a Hindu rishi who once lived there, from whose summit much of Mirpur, Jhelum, Kharian and Gujrat can be seen. It now lies on the Indian-administered side of the Line of Control. The author calls it “that famous historic place” where the last Raja of Bhimber crushed the army of Ranjit Singh.

Pothi

The Sikhs were beaten a second time at the village (mauza) of Pothi. Two separate passages of the book (pp. 41 and 147) single out these two battles, Pir Badesar and Pothi, as the occasions on which Raja Sultan Khan defeated the Sikh army despite his limited resources.

Night at Chhachho Pir

From Pothi the Sikh army fell back and halted at Chowki Bandi, near Samahni. Sultan Khan blocked the roads by felling chil pines and forced the army onto a path that ended at a great ravine. At night, when the Sikhs had camped there, the raja’s men fell on them from behind; many Sikh soldiers went over the precipice and died, the rest were wounded, and only a few survived. The place, the chronicle says, is called Chhachho Pir. Sultan Khan captured Diwan Kishan Saha and Wazir Sujan Singh, kept them with him for a few days, and then sent both to Sardar Ram Singh, an official of Prince Kharak Singh, who was stationed at Akhnur.

Some historians, the chronicle adds (p. 133), tell the night battle differently. In their version Sultan Khan did not refuse passage to a Sikh army on its way to conquer Kashmir, but deliberately led it onto a road that ended at a precipice. At night he tied torches to the horns of goats, drove them towards the camp and had one or two guns fired. In the darkness the Sikhs believed a great army was upon them and fled in panic over the cliff, and many were drowned. When the news reached Ranjit Singh, it is said, he signalled to Gulab Singh to take revenge.

Sardar Ram Singh and the surrender

Sardar Ram Singh sent Kishan Saha back to Lahore and promised Sujan Singh that once Sultan Khan’s country was conquered he would be made its officer. Then Ram Singh himself advanced into Chibhal with a large army. For several months Sikh columns patrolled the hills, and there were a number of small skirmishes. Worn out at last, Sultan Khan gave himself up to Ram Singh at Pindi Rawal, as the chronicle calls Rawalpindi.

Ram Singh placed him under guard and sent him to the fort of Sheikhupura, where he was held for seven years, while Sujan Singh governed Chibhal on behalf of the Sikh government. When unrest broke out in Kashmir and Poonch and Ranjit Singh sent an army there, Sultan Khan was released on the recommendation of some officers, so that he could help with the administration of Poonch. His later life, and his death at Jammu, are told in Raja Sultan Khan: The Last Ruler of Bhimber.

The war in Khari Kariali, 1808–1810

Bhimber’s western neighbour, the Chib state of Khari Kariali with its fortress at Mangla, faced the Sikhs at the same time. According to the author (pp. 169–170), Raja Bandu Khan died, and his son Raja Baha-ul-Haq died childless in 1809. Raja Umar Khan of Mangla and Raja Sher Jang Khan of Pothi then held out against Sikh forces under Faqir Aziz-ud-Din (printed Izaz-ud-Din), Sawan Singh Pattiwala and Ganda Singh Safi at Jo’iyan (reading uncertain), Samal, Farida and Mangla. Umar Khan died during the siege of Mangla fort, which lasted about three months. His eldest son, Raja Akbar Ali Khan, asked for peace, and an agreement signed at Gujrat in 1810 gave up more than half the state and ordered the forts of Pothi, Samal and Jo’iyan demolished.

Within six months Akbar Ali Khan too died childless, and Ranjit Singh took the whole state. After deducting a quarter as nazrana, he granted the family jagirs worth 10,000 rupees a year: 4,000 to Akbar Ali Khan’s ten-year-old brother, Raja Amir Khan, 3,000 to Raja Sher Jang Khan of Pothi and 3,000 to Raja Azimullah Khan of Kasgumah. In the same way, the author adds, Raja Sultan Khan’s family received a cash pension of 10,000 rupees a year, still paid to his descendants in Jhelum when the book was written.

How the accounts differ

The book contains two versions of Sultan Khan’s war with the Sikhs, and this site’s earlier articles follow a third, the History of the Panjab Hill States by Hutchison and Vogel. They agree on the shape of the story but not on its details.

How the Chibs remember the Sikh wars

For the Chibs, Sultan Khan’s stand is more than military history. In late 1947, during the fighting in the Banah Valley, Khan Inayatullah Khan, the chief jagirdar of Khui Ratta, was summoned before Brigade Commander Sher Ahmad Khan of Pallandri and charged, among other things, with supporting the Dogra Raj because he was a hereditary jagirdar. The book (pp. 233–236) records his reply. His jagir, he said, dated from the Mughal emperors, long before the Dogras existed; and pointing to the Pir Badlimar (reading uncertain) range in front of them, he reminded the commander that his ancestor Raja Sultan Khan had routed a Sikh army many times larger than his own on those very hills.

Sultan Khan, he argued, had beaten the Sikhs twice single-handed and then called on the Muslim tribes of Poonch, Rajouri, Mirpur and Kotli for help that never came. Had they answered, Bhimber, the gateway of Kashmir, would not have fallen; Sikh and then Dogra rule would not have followed; and Pakistan, at least as far as Kashmir is concerned, might have been born a century and a half earlier. The book says the brigade commander apologised and asked for his help, and Khan Inayatullah Khan went on to raise the Banah Battalion in January 1948; his story is told in Subedar Khan Inayatullah Khan.

The same conviction runs through the book’s portrait of his younger son, Raja Abdul Rauf Khan, a retired police inspector of Kotli district, who holds that if the other Muslim tribes had stood by Sultan Khan the history of Jammu and Kashmir would have been entirely different (p. 251). The author closes that passage with a Persian half-line: how many a longing has turned to dust. It is history as remembered in Chibhal, but it shows how strongly the memory of Sultan Khan’s resistance still shapes the way the Chib Rajputs see their place in the story of Kashmir.

Timeline of Raja Sultan Khan’s Sikh wars

• Later 18th century Gujar Singh Bhangi, Sahib Singh Bhangi and Mahan Singh Sukarchakia are beaten back by the two Chib states.
• 1838 Bk (c. 1781) Ranjit Dev of Jammu dies; Sultan Khan becomes independent.
• 1847 Bk (c. 1790) Sultan Khan seizes villages of Sahib Singh, ruler of Gujrat.
• Before 1808 Raja Bandu Khan of Khari Kariali defeats Sultan Khan and occupies Bhimber town.
• 1808 Diwan Mohkam Chand’s expedition against Bhimber, according to the book.
• 1808–1810 Sikh attacks on Khari Kariali; siege of Mangla; peace signed at Gujrat in 1810.
• 1810 and 1812 First Sikh attack and the Battle of Bhimber, according to Hutchison and Vogel.
• After the second expedition Sultan Khan surrenders at Rawalpindi and is held for seven years in Sheikhupura fort.
• 1819 The Sikhs conquer Kashmir; Hutchison and Vogel say Sultan Khan was released to join the campaign.

Frequently asked questions

Continue reading

• Raja Sultan KhanThe last ruler of Bhimber, from every source
• The Battle of Bhimber (1812)The colonial record and the Chib chronicle
• The End of Chib RuleGulab Singh, the Dogras and the fall of Bhimber
• Mangla FortSeat of the Chibs of Khari Kariali
• Subedar Khan Inayatullah KhanThe jagirdar who freed the Banah Valley
• The Rajas of BhimberEvery Chib ruler from Chib Chand to Sultan Khan