Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani)

Ahmad Khan Abdali was born around 1722 in Herat or Multan, an Afghan of the Sadozai clan, and served as a commander in the army of Nadir Shah of Persia. When Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1747, the Afghan chiefs chose Ahmad as their king at Kandahar, and he took the title Durr-i-Durran, 'pearl of pearls'. He founded the Durrani empire, the beginning of modern Afghanistan.

He invaded India eight or nine times between 1748 and 1767, plundering Lahore, Delhi and Mathura. In 1761 he crushed the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat, one of the bloodiest battles of the eighteenth century. But he could never defeat the Sikhs, who harassed his armies, raided his baggage and freed his captives.

In February 1762 he caught the Sikh families near Kup and Rahira and killed perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people in a single day, the Vadda Ghallughara. Two months later he blew up the Harmandir Sahib with gunpowder and filled the pool with rubble and the bodies of cows; a flying brick is said to have struck him on the nose and left a wound that never healed. Within a year the Sikhs were back in Amritsar. He died in 1772 at Toba Maruf. In Afghanistan he is the father of the nation; in the Punjab he is remembered as the destroyer.