The Forty Liberated Ones
Forty Sikhs from Majha who renounced the Guru during the Anandpur siege, then came back and died defending him at Khidrana. He tore up their letter of desertion.
During the siege of Anandpur in 1704, forty Sikhs from the Majha, starving and exhausted, wrote a disclaimer saying they were no longer the Guru's Sikhs, and went home. There Mai Bhago and the women of their villages shamed them, and they rode back under Mahan Singh of Patti to find the Guru.
They found him in the Malwa desert with a Mughal army behind him. At the pool of Khidrana, in the spring of 1705, they spread their sheets on the bushes to look like tents and turned to fight. They held off the Mughal force until it was too exhausted to continue, and almost all of them were killed.
Going among the bodies, the Guru blessed each by name. Mahan Singh, still alive, asked him to tear up the disclaimer, and the Guru did so as he died. The Guru called them the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated, and renamed the place Muktsar, the pool of liberation. They are remembered in every Ardas, and the Maghi mela at Muktsar is held in their honour.
Battles
Connected
Shamed forty deserters into returning to the Guru, led them into battle at Muktsar and survived to serve as one of his bodyguards.
Tenth Guru, warrior and poet. Created the Khalsa in 1699, fought a long war with the Mughals and hill rajas, lost his four sons and mother, and named the Guru Granth Sahib as the final Guru.