Five Thousand Rupees for One Diwali

In 1737 a very old man in Amritsar asked the Mughal governor of Lahore for permission to hold Diwali at the Golden Temple, and offered to pay for it.

Everything that follows turns on that one transaction, so it is worth being clear about what each side was doing.

What was being done to Sikhs

Zakariya Khan became governor of Lahore in 1726 and set out to finish the Sikhs as a community. This was not a stray act of harshness. It was policy, applied for nearly twenty years.

Sikhs were barred from Amritsar. Not from a road or a building, from the shrine at the centre of their own faith. Bathing in the sacred tank was forbidden.

Prices were fixed for Sikh lives. The going rates are recorded: a small sum for information about where a Sikh could be found, more for a severed Sikh head brought in, and more again for a Sikh delivered alive. Plundering a Sikh household was made lawful. Sheltering a Sikh, or knowing where one was and not saying so, was made a capital offence. A police force of some twenty thousand men was raised for the purpose, and it went through the countryside bringing people back in chains.

Families were driven out of the villages and into the forests, the hill country and the desert margins, living rough and moving constantly.

The executions were public and meant to be watched. In 1745, a farmer named Bhai Taru Singh, whose offence was feeding Sikhs in hiding, was brought to Lahore and ordered to cut his hair. He refused, and his scalp was cut from his head. Others were broken on the wheel, or taken apart while alive, in the open market where crowds could see it.