ਸੋ ਕਿਉ ਮੰਦਾ ਆਖੀਐ ਜਿਤੁ ਜੰਮਹਿ ਰਾਜਾਨ॥

Why call her inferior? From her, kings are born. — Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Asa ki Var

In 1499, when Guru Nanak Dev Ji said this, women in most of the world could not own property, inherit, divorce, lead a congregation, or in some places even show their faces. Sati was being practised down the road. This single line — and the five hundred years of Sikh women it set in motion — is one of the most radical sentences in religious history. This post is a deeply-cross-referenced attempt to tell their story properly: not as a “women’s section” appended to Sikh history, but as what it actually is — a load-bearing wall of the Panth. Preachers, poets, regents, prime ministers, generals, martyrs. Women did not merely participate in Sikh history. In several of its most decisive moments, women were Sikh history.

The theology first: why Sikhi could produce warrior queens

Sikh women’s history isn’t a happy accident; it follows from doctrine. The Divine in Gurbani is beyond gender — and addressed through both genders. Vahiguru is father and mother: ਤੂੰ ਮੇਰਾ ਪਿਤਾ ਤੂੰਹੈ ਮੇਰਾ ਮਾਤਾ (You are my father, You are my mother). The soul-bride (suhagan) of Gurbani’s central metaphor makes every seeker — male or female — feminine before the Divine. There is no priesthood to exclude women from, because Sikhi abolished priesthood itself; any Sikh may read Guru Granth Sahib Ji, lead sangat, perform kirtan.

The tenth Guru went further: he deliberately re-installed the degraded feminine Divine at the centre of his court’s literature. In Chandi di Var and the Chandi Charitras, the Guru chose — out of all the myths available to him — the story of Durga: independent, unmarried, powerful, the one the gods themselves ask for help. The Sikh general Mai Bhago comes to mind — could these tales not have inspired her? The sword itself in Sikh idiom is feminine: bhagauti. Ardas begins by remembering her.

And the naming seals it. From 1699, every Khalsa woman is Kaur — prince/heir — not her father’s name, not her husband’s name. In one stroke the Guru cut Sikh women out of the patrilineal property system entirely: a Kaur belongs to no man’s lineage; she is her own sovereign under the Guru.

The Guru period: founders and institution-builders

Bebe Nanaki (1464–1518) was the first person to recognise who her younger brother was — which makes her, in a meaningful sense, the first Sikh. It was she who is said to have arranged the rabab for Bhai Mardana; the entire kirtan tradition passes through her intuition.

Mata Khivi (1506–1582), wife of Guru Angad Dev Ji, built the institution most people meet Sikhi through: langar. She ran it, scaled it, and made it famous for its richness — and she is the only Guru’s wife named with honour inside Guru Granth Sahib Ji: ਬਲਵੰਡ ਖੀਵੀ ਨੇਕ ਜਨ ਜਿਸੁ ਬਹੁਤੀ ਛਾਉ ਪਤ੍ਰਾਲੀ — “Khivi, the noble one, a thick, leafy shade for all” (Ramkali ki Var, ang 967). Think about what langar does socially — emperor and beggar cross-legged in one row — and then note that its perfection is credited to a woman.

Bibi Amro, daughter of Guru Angad Dev Ji, was reciting bani so beautifully that her uncle-in-law Amar Das, then in his sixties, followed the sound — and through her found Guruship. Guru Amar Das Ji later appointed her head of one of the manjis (dioceses) of the early Panth: a woman running religious administration in the 1550s. The third Guru’s reforms read like a women’s-rights charter four centuries early: he condemned sati, discouraged purdah (famously requiring even the queen of Haripur to unveil in sangat), sanctioned widow remarriage, and appointed women as preachers — tradition remembers many of the 146 appointed preachers being women, alongside the 22 manjis.

Bibi Bhani (1535–1598) links three Gurus — daughter of Guru Amar Das Ji, wife of Guru Ram Das Ji, mother of Guru Arjan Dev Ji — and the tradition credits her seva as the channel through which Guruship settled in her line. Mata Ganga, wife of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, sought the blessing of Baba Buddha Ji for her son — Hargobind, the first sword-bearing Guru. At every hinge of the lineage, a woman is holding the door.

The Khalsa: born of a father and a mother

Vaisakhi 1699 is usually told as a story of six men — the Guru and the Panj Piare. But the amrit itself has a mother. When the khande di pahul was being prepared, the Guru’s wife — remembered in different early accounts as Mata Jito Ji or Mata Sahib Kaur — added patase, sugar-drops, to the water: strength would be tempered with sweetness. And permanently, doctrinally, Mata Sahib Kaur (1681–1747) is honoured as the Mother of the Khalsa: every initiated Sikh’s spiritual parentage is recorded as father Guru Gobind Singh, mother Mata Sahib Kaur, birthplace Anandpur. A faith whose every initiate has a named spiritual mother is making a statement.

Khalsa women took the same amrit, kept the same kakars, bore the kirpan, and trained. The Prem Sumarag Granth — an early rahitnama laying out the ideal Khalsa society — postulates near-total parity in several domains: women receive pahul, are educated, and widows may remarry with honour, positions astonishing for its era (scholars date the text anywhere from the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth; its gender provisions are radical on any of those datings).

The warriors

Mai Bhago — Mata Bhag Kaur (Battle of Khidrana/Muktsar, 1705). When forty Majha Sikhs deserted the besieged Guru at Anandpur and came home, their wives, mothers — and Mai Bhago — refused them entry. She shamed them, armed them, and led them back herself. In the battle at the pool of Khidrana she fought at their head against a Mughal force many times larger; the forty fell and were blessed as the Chali Mukte; she — the only survivor of the forty-one — recovered and served as Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s personal bodyguard, and later settled in the south near Nanded. She is the first woman known to have led troops in battle in Punjab, and she remains the archetype: the Sikh woman not as protected, but as protector. The SGPC’s women’s colleges, Nihang dals’ women’s jathas, and half the Panth’s daughters carry her name.

Bibi Harsharan Kaur (Chamkaur, December 1704). Sixteen years old, she crossed enemy pickets at night to cremate the shaheeds of Chamkaur — including Sahibzada Ajit Singh and Sahibzada Jujhar Singh — and was killed at the pyre she lit. The last shaheed of Chamkaur was a teenage girl doing seva.

Mata Gujri Ji (1624–1704) belongs to both this list and every other. Wife of the ninth shaheed Guru, mother of the tenth, she managed the Guru’s household and treasury during his years of campaigns. Captured with her youngest grandsons after the Sarsa crossing, she spent the last nights of her life in Sirhind’s freezing Thanda Burj, telling two small boys — eight and five — the sakhis of their grandfather’s shaheedi. They walked into the Nawab’s court and refused conversion with a firmness that stunned the darbar; when they were bricked alive, she passed the same day. Sikh mothers have been measured against Mata Gujri ever since: the transmission of Sikhi itself — the reason a persecuted, hunted community kept producing unbreakable children — ran through women like her.

Bibi Anup Kaur (d. 1705). Captured by the Nawab of Malerkotla’s forces in the chaos after Anandpur’s evacuation, she was pressured to convert and marry; tradition records that she chose death by her own kirpan over dishonour, and that her defiance shamed the court that held her. Her story circulated through the eighteenth century as the standard the Panth’s daughters set for themselves: a Kaur cannot be possessed.

The Singhniyan of Mir Mannu’s jail (1748–1753). When governor Mir Mannu’s forces could not catch the Singhs in the jungles, they seized their families. In the Lahore jail, Sikh women were worked at heavy grindstones, starved, and finally subjected to the cruellest coercion in our history: their infants were killed and returned to them as garlands. More than three hundred children by traditional accounts. Not one woman converted. The Ardas remembers them daily — jinna singhniyan ne sava-sava mann de pisne peese… dharam nahi haareya.

The stateswomen and generals

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — between the fall of the Mughals and the rise of the British — were the great age of Sikh women in power, and it is scandalous how few Sikhs know these names.

Mata Sundri Ji (d. 1747) effectively led the entire Panth for nearly forty years after Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s ascension in 1708 — longer than any Guru held the gaddi except perhaps the first and sixth. From Delhi she issued hukamnamas to sangats, adjudicated disputes, exposed and excommunicated impostor claimants to Guruship (Banda’s later schism, and the pretender Gulab Rai), and commissioned Bhai Mani Singh to Amritsar to manage Harmandir Sahib and re-compile the Granth after the wars. In the most fragile decades the Panth ever passed through — ghallugharas, bounties, no state, no centre — its steadying hand was a widowed woman in the imperial capital. Mata Sahib Kaur likewise issued hukamnamas; several survive.

Rani Sada Kaur (1762–1832), chief of the Kanhaiya Misl after her husband’s death, commanded roughly 8,000 cavalry in her own name — Afghan generals of the era rated her among the finest commanders they faced. She was the architect of her son-in-law Ranjit Singh’s rise: she planned and rode in the 1799 campaign that took Lahore, the act that founded the Sikh Empire. Punjabi tradition is blunt about it: no Sada Kaur, no Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Bibi Sahib Kaur (1771–1801) of Patiala was recalled by her brother Raja Sahib Singh in 1793 and made prime minister of the state — at twenty-two. She repaired forts, built new ones at Ratian and Raj Garh, restructured the army, and then led it. At Mardanpur near Ambala in 1794, facing a much larger Maratha force under Anta Rao and Lachhman Rao, the Sikh line wavered — until Sahib Kaur got down from her rath, drew her sword, and called on the men to hold; the next morning’s charge broke the Maratha camp. In 1796 she led a force into the hills to relieve Nahan; in 1798 she forced the adventurer George Thomas to withdraw. Dead at thirty, having out-generalled two empires’ worth of soldiery. Her contemporary Rani Rajinder Kaur of Patiala (1739–1791) was likewise celebrated — Persian chroniclers of the age wrote that she possessed “all the virtues men pretend to have.”

Nor were these two exceptional; the misl period is full of women running states. Mai Desan, widow of Charat Singh Sukerchakia, administered the Sukerchakia misl as regent — the very misl Ranjit Singh inherited — managing diplomacy and campaigns for a decade. Mai Sukhan, widow of Gulab Singh Bhangi, commanded the defence of Amritsar against Ranjit Singh himself in 1805 before capitulating on terms. Rani Fatteh Kaur and other widowed sardarnis routinely held forts, collected revenue, and negotiated as sovereigns in their own right. British and Persian observers of eighteenth-century Punjab noted, with some bafflement, that Sikh women could not be assumed to surrender a fort merely because their husbands were dead. The pattern held for a simple reason: nothing in Sikh doctrine told these women they couldn’t. Their scripture called the Divine their mother; their initiation rite was open to them; their name, Kaur, was a title of sovereignty. When power fell to them, they picked it up as an inheritance, not a transgression.

Maharani Jind Kaur (1817–1863), “Rani Jindan,” regent of the Sikh Empire for her son Duleep Singh, was the woman the British feared more than the Khalsa army — their own correspondence called her “the only man in the Punjab.” She defied the Company through two Anglo-Sikh wars, was separated from her ten-year-old son, imprisoned, and escaped Chunar fort disguised as a pilgrim, taunting her captors in a note that she had escaped by “magic.” She reached her son at last in 1861, blind and broken in body, and in two years rekindled in the anglicised, Christianised Duleep the memory of who he was; he returned to Sikhi after her death. The empire took her kingdom; it never took her.

The unbroken thread into the modern age

The pattern — women as the Panth’s transmission and its steel — continues straight through the colonial and modern periods. Gulab Kaur (c. 1890–1941) gave up her passage to America to work for the Ghadar Party, smuggling weapons and press materials under the cover of a press-reporter’s credentials, doing prachar aboard ships and in villages, and serving prison time for sedition. Mata Kishan Kaur Kaonke (1856–1952) rode at the head of Akali jathas during the Gurdwara Reform Movement, was jailed by the British in her sixties, and is remembered as the first woman granted the honour of leading a jatha into the Guru’s darbar during the morchas. In the World Wars, while 83,000 turbaned Sikhs died in Allied service, Sikh women held the farms, the langars, and the families of Punjab together — an unglamorous pehra without which no army serves.

There is also the pehra that never makes the history books. Through the ghallugharas, through 1947 — when Sikh women bore the partition’s most terrible choices and losses, and then rebuilt families from nothing on both sides of a new border — through migration to Britain, East Africa, and North America, the actual transmission mechanism of Sikhi has been overwhelmingly female: the mother teaching Japji to a child, the grandmother’s sakhis, the bibi running the gurdwara langar that anchors a fledgling diaspora community. Institutions preserve religions; but someone must carry a religion the twenty years between institutions, and in Sikh history that someone has usually been a woman. The eighteenth century proved it under fire: the Mughals understood perfectly that to end the Sikhs you had to break the mothers — that is what Mir Mannu’s jail was — and the mothers did not break.

And the doctrinal spine held: the Sikh Rehat Maryada (1945) explicitly provides that women may perform all religious services — read Guru Granth Sahib Ji, do kirtan, serve as one of the Panj Piare’s equals in sangat life — and the ongoing panthic conversations about full parity in every seva (including at Harmandir Sahib) are being argued from Sikh principles, not against them. The tradition’s own texts are the reformers’ best weapons: so kiu manda aakhiye is a hard verse to argue with.

What women built, in summary

Step back and look at the architecture. The first believer: a woman (Bebe Nanaki). The institution of langar: perfected by a woman (Mata Khivi). Early religious administration: included women (Bibi Amro and the manji/preacher appointments). The amrit of 1699: sweetened by a mother’s hand, and every Khalsa initiate since given a mother’s name (Mata Sahib Kaur). The transmission of Sikhi under genocide: grandmothers and mothers (Mata Gujri, the Singhniyan of the jail). The Panth’s longest single period of central leadership: a woman (Mata Sundri, ~40 years). The founding of the Sikh Empire: planned and led by a woman (Sada Kaur). Its most tenacious defender against the British: a woman (Jind Kaur). Its battlefield legend: a woman who led men who had failed back to their Guru (Mai Bhago).

This is not a parallel history. It is the history. ਧੰਨ ਗੁਰੂ ਕੇ ਸਿੰਘ, ਧੰਨ ਗੁਰੂ ਕੀਆਂ ਸਿੰਘਣੀਆਂ।

Sources and further reading