Harking back: Gakhars, Timur and the Sayyids fight over Lahore

That Lahore has been ransacked and destroyed seven times, probably the most vicious was the invasion in 1398 by Timur, or Tamerlane, the founder of the Turk-Mughal Empire. He ransacked Lahore three times, completely destroying it.

Three years earlier the Gakhar leader Sheikha Gakhar and his son Jasrat had captured Lahore and Jasrat became the ruler. Then came Timur on his way to Delhi. The Gakhars decided to confront him. A vicious battle followed in which the Timurid ruler defeated the Gakhar forces. Jasrat escaped back to his home base in the Salt Range to his father Sheikha.

As Timur continued to advance towards Delhi, he left behind him a virtual reign of terror. The Uzbek forces were ordered to kill everyone they confronted. This terror resulted in Punjab being completed confused. It is clear that Timur was not interested in ruling the lands he terrorised, but merely looting anything he could lay his hands on. He preferred gold, fabrics, kitchen utensils and slaves, mostly women and children. These were quickly sent back to his home base for sale in faraway markets.

In the complete void in Lahore the two Gakhars -- Sheikha and his son Jasrat – returned and took over the city. They organised a small army and while they were busy in organising suddenly Timur and his vicious horsemen returned. They captured both the Gakhars, and called all the inhabitants from miles around Lahore to witness the execution of the Gakhars.

Timur stood on the banks of the River Ravi, which then flowed outside the northern walls of the city, and personally cut off the head of Sheikha Gakhar. He then set about cutting up the body of the Gakhar ruler. When it came to Jasrat’s turn suddenly he decided to take him back to Samarkand instead. Jasrat was tied and had to walk all the way to the Uzbek capital.

Once in Samarkand the clever Gakhar managed to escape and made it back to his home base in the Salt Range. There he organised an army of 14,000 horsemen and following the Timurid tactics of speed and vicious killing, started off to capture Lahore. He headed towards Sialkot first, and aligned with Khizr Khan. Then he headed towards Lahore and surrounded it.

The appointed generals of Sayyid Mubarak, the Syed ruler of Delhi and most parts of India, were fighting among themselves. This provided Jasrat Gakhar with an ideal opportunity and within a few hours he captured the fort and the city. For the next few years he was the undisputed ruler of Lahore and the nearby areas of Punjab.

But the Sayyid emperor (1421-34) decided that as Jasrat was collecting and keeping all the taxes in a large tract of Punjab, and keeping it to himself, he on assuming power decided to first tackle this ‘menace’. In July 1421 he moved towards Lahore. On hearing of the advancing ‘royal’ army, Jasrat took his horsemen and crossed the Sutlej in what was a brilliant ‘halting tactic’. Right up and down the river he removed all the boats.

As the monsoons had set in and the rivers were swollen, a 40-day running battle followed, in which every attempt to cross by the ‘royal’ army was beaten back. But this running battle cost the army of Jasrat lost a lot of men, and he decided that he would return once again to the Salt Range. This pattern of attack, capture and then retreat remained the fate of Jasrat Gakhar.

In January 1422 the Sayyid emperor Mubarak Shah returned to Lahore. As the city and the fort had been completely destroyed, and one account in ‘Tarikh-i-Farishta’ (pg 164 text) tells us that “as the emperor entered Lahore city, corpses in an advance stage of decay, mostly skeletons, lay strewn in the streets and lanes”. The savagery of Timur was before him to see.

The ‘Tarikh Mubarak Shahi’ tells us that the emperor was very upset and decided to rebuild Lahore. So the Lahore Fort walls and those of the ancient city were rebuilt in thick mud walls. He also rebuilt the huge fort gates, one of which experts tell me was used by Akbar the Mughal emperor when he again rebuilt the fort.

Mubarak Shah left a force of 2,000 horsemen to guard the newly rebuilt Lahore and returned to Delhi. As soon as he had returned and Lahore again began to return to life, we see that Jasrat Gakhar returned and camped around the shrine of the Sufi saint Hassain Miran Zanjani at Chah Miran. Hassain Zanjani was a Hussaini Syed who came to Lahore to preach Islam much before Ali Hasan Ganj Bakhsh came with Masud Ghazani, son of Mahmud.

This recapture of Lahore by Jasrat got Mubarak Shah to send in a number of armies. He fiercely battled most of them. It goes without saying that he was a tenacious fighter whose aim seem to be focused on capturing and ruling Lahore. After every defeat he would rush to the Salt Range, organise a larger army based on the loot that he had collected, and returned stronger.

We know that he faced over 20 battles and won and captured Lahore nine times. As his first impulse was to loot and quickly send the booty back to the Salt Range base that he maintained, and where people enjoyed the wealth collected. A lot of the times he sent the wealth collected to another stronghold at Talwara in the lower Kashmir slopes. He enjoyed considerable support of the rulers of Jammu.

Soon the emperor Mubarak Shah started to get irritated by the persistent Jasrat Gakhar, and he sent a special large force to hunt him down. But Jasrat seemed to have an excellent intelligence of the movements of the royal armies. If he could attack, damage and withdraw, he would do it without hesitation. Some historians claim that the Gakhar forces damaged the royal army immensely, but could never overcome them.

In the end Jasrat Gakhar invited the Mughal ruler of Kabul, Amir Sheikh, to join forces against Mubarak Shah. The Mughal ruler refused as he had himself enough Mughal intrigue to tackle. In 1428, he again faced the combined forces of Malik Sikander Tufta, the Lahore Governor of the Sayyid Dynasty, who with other forces sent from Delhi defeated Jasrat Gakhar.

It was at this point that we see that the determined Gakhar decided that he just could not defeat the royal armies, and returned to the Salt Range for the next five years. In 1432 we see Jasrat suddenly reappear from Talwara and head for Lahore. On the way he looted every village, but was repelled by the royal army.

Sayyid Mubarak Shah had barely ruled for 13 years, the entire period he fought off threats from Jasrat Gakhar of the Salt Range, Sheikh Ali Mughal of Kabul and Faulad Turkbacha of Bathinda. We know little of the end of Jasrat Gakhar, except that he became part of Punjab’s efforts to oust foreign invaders.