In 1794, near the tiny hamlet of Mardanpur in Ambala, the armies of two emerging powers were facing each other for the first and last time. On one side were the Marathas, valiant warriors from the Deccan, with an army of 15,000 men fighting under their general, Apa Khande Rao Scindia, the man who had brought Mughal Delhi to its knees. On the other side stood a confederation of petty Sikh chiefs, all of whom had replaced the Mughal nobility that once ruled East Punjab, and were fighting under the banner of their largest chiefdom, Patiala, founded by Ala Singh. With an army half the size of the Marathas, the anxious Patiala alliance was worried about their impending defeat. Their confidence dwindled every hour as more and more of their men began to fall in the face of a much-better trained and equipped Maratha army. Sensing an imminent Maratha victory, the Sikh chiefs began to cautiously retreat along with their soldiers. As they began abandoning their positions to move towards their camp, they were met by a rath (bullock-drawn canopied chariot) emerging from amongst the countless Punjabi soldiers. The rath, a closed Punjabi bullock cart, would have been covered completely with an expensive and heavily decorated curtain, with a succession of small bells jingling on all its sides.
As the rath stopped near the sweating chiefs, Bibi Sahib Kaur, the female chief minister of Patiala, emerged from inside the curtain. The pearl on her large nose ring would have glittered as she unsheathed a lustrous sword: the former a symbol of her domesticity and the other signifying the political power she wielded. She sighted the countless retreating soldiers and their chiefs in disdain, and her taunts, in the chaste Punjabi of the Malwa plains of Punjab, are remembered by chroniclers. She cried out, “Oh, brave soldiers of Patiala! If you abandon your positions now, humiliation will chase you for eternity. Before leaving, I had promised myself that I would never abandon the battlefield at any cost. And if you run away from the battlefield leaving a woman behind you, how would you return to your homes with your pride intact?”
The speech had an electrifying effect and the Punjabi soldiers, though outnumbered by the Marathas, returned to continue fighting until dusk, when to their relief, an evening gong was sounded, announcing the cessation of the “workday”.
That night, there must have been an uneasy lull in the Patiala camp. The chiefs would have argued amongst themselves about their disastrous decision to enter the war in the first place. But their pride was paramount. If the tribute were to be paid once, the Marathas would return with more demands. For the judicious and brave Bibi Sahib, who compensated for her chiefdom’s imbecile raja, who was also her own younger brother, the refusal to give any tribute to the bullying Marathas was important to uphold the sovereignty of Patiala. It was, after all, owing to Bibi Sahib’s refusal to bow down to the demands of Apa Khande Rao, that this conflict had been instigated with the Marathas. When the troops had been leaving Patiala for the battlefield in Mardanpur, the raja sat nervously in his court while his brave sister, whose rank and marital status meant she was expected to live in seclusion, set out towards the battle camp, determined to win.
That night at the Patiala camp in Mardanpur, Bibi Sahib would have been a witness to the countless funeral pyres and freshly dug graves of her loyal soldiers, all of whom had dropped the plough and picked up the sword. The woman’s place in war did not lie on the battlefield but in its aftermath. They were grief-stricken widows and mourning mothers, beating their chests and singing Punjabi elegies, keening over the fact that they could not even participate in the last rites of their men, giving them neither closure nor any hope for the future.
In a world where widow remarriage was almost a taboo, the widows of these soldiers went through a life of misery and poverty. For Jat women, whose husbands dominated the armies of Sikh chiefdoms like Patiala, a curious version of widow remarriage called karewa existed, though the will of women was almost never consulted. Under karewa, a widowed Jat woman was brought into the company of the elders of her and her husband’s family, and made to sit with the unmarried younger brother or cousin of her deceased husband. Without any marriage vows or ceremonies, the man was ordered to wrap the widow’s body and head with a sheet of coarse cotton (chaddar) and declare that he would take her into his protection. In this act witnessed and approved by the elders, the widow and her brother-in-law were declared as man and wife, giving them permission to cohabitate and grow a family. Any previous children from the widow were legally declared to be the offspring of their stepfather and named as his legal heirs. Financially, the institution of karewa ensured that land, wealth and property remained within the same family, but on a microscopic level, it hinted at the oft-repeated misogynistic idea in Punjabi folklore that young, single women had uncontrolled sexual urges, much more than men, and were a threat to the society they dwelt in. It was, hence, important to bind them in the chains of marriage, so as to prevent their ruin The appearance of women on the battlefield was rare. It was generally accepted that women had no role in conflict zones, except on rare occasions, when they were heads of state, which in itself was uncommon.
In these cases, these women of rank were accompanied by their own retinue of female servants: the personal attendants, cooks and female slaves called golee in Punjabi. Notwithstanding the fact that they were leading a martial expedition and arming themselves according to the virtues of chivalry and bravery – perceived as masculine – they still adhered to the societal laws meant for the women of their position. Bibi Sahib, as a 23-year-old married woman and a daughter of the House of Patiala, respected the decorum of her class and clan. She would have worn her veil in the presence of elders and stuck to the patriarchal and patrilineal customary laws of her clan of Sidhu Jats, all the while trying to hatch a plot to outsmart the stronger Marathas.
Later that night, Bibi Sahib summoned the allied chiefs into her camp and revealed a daring plan: attack the Maratha camp when their soldiers, weary after a long day of battle, would be snoring away! The chiefs were reluctant. The plan was risky and unconvincing, to say the least. But the lady’s suggestion soon turned into a stern order, for as chief minister of the largest chiefdom of the alliance, she was entitled to veto power. The Punjabi soldiers were not fully persuaded when they left their camp that night, but they were about to amaze themselves. As they launched their surprise attack on the half-asleep Marathas, the latter were bewildered and terrified, thinking that more reinforcements had arrived from Patiala overnight. Before the break of dawn, the Maratha army abandoned their positions at Mardanpur and retreated back towards Delhi.
Excerpted with permission from The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab, Harleen Singh, Penguin Viking.
