The ones who rose.

A childhood built for war

Hari Singh Nalwa was born in 1791 in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan. He lost his father at seven, was initiated into the Khalsa at ten, and by his early teens was already standing in the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire. Punjab in that era did not allow anyone a slow childhood.

The tiger, age thirteen

The story that made his name happened on a hunting trip in 1804. A tiger broke from cover so fast that the thirteen-year-old had no time to draw his sword. He grabbed the animal by the jaw with his bare hands, forced it off balance, and finished the fight with his blade, killing a tiger with almost nothing but his own grip and nerve.

The court gave him two names that outlived him by two centuries: Nalwa, and Baaghmaar, Tiger Killer.

Eight conquests, thirty years

1. 1807Kasur, Afghan rulers expelled, his first taste of independent command.
2. 1813Attock Fort, crossed the Indus for the first time; the empire's reach now stretched past the river.
3. 1818Peshawar, captured, its Afghan governors driven out.
4. 1819Kashmir, brought the entire valley into the Sikh Empire.
5. 1821Hazara, pacified and governed directly; he minted his own coin, the Hari Singh Rupee.
6. 1823Battle of Naushera, crushed Azim Khan's 30,000-strong army on the banks of the Landai River.
7. 1834Peshawar, made permanent Sikh territory, not just a conquest but a holding.
8. 1836Jamrud Fort, built at the very mouth of the Khyber Pass.

The Khyber Pass

For eight hundred years, almost every major invasion of India had poured through the Khyber Pass. Ahmad Shah Durrani alone used it to sack Delhi seven times. No Indian power before Nalwa, not the Mughals, not anyone before them, had ever managed to close it. In 1836 he built Jamrud Fort directly across the pass's mouth and garrisoned it. For the first time in recorded history, the gateway from Afghanistan into India was held by a power that was not Afghan.

Battle of Jamrud, 30 April 1837

Dost Muhammad Khan, ruler of Kabul, could not accept an Afghan gate held by a foreign army, and attacked Jamrud Fort with a massive force. In the fighting, Hari Singh Nalwa was struck by a musket ball and mortally wounded. He gave the order that no one outside the fort was to know.

From his deathbed he kept dictating strategy to his officers. He ordered his own clothes washed and hung visibly on the fort's walls every day, so that from a distance the Afghan army would see them and believe their old enemy was still alive and still in command. He died inside the fort. The Afghan army, never learning the truth, eventually withdrew.

Legacy

Beyond the battlefield, Nalwa built and governed. Over fifty-six forts, gurdwaras, temples, mosques, towns and gardens carry his mark across the regions he administered, including Haripur, the town he founded, which still stands in modern Pakistan. He was a multi-faith administrator in practice as well as principle, building places of worship for every community under his governance, not only his own. India issued a postage stamp in his honour in 2013, for a gate that had stood open for eight centuries before he closed it.