Badass Of the Week

Amusing articles:



If there's one thing I hope this website has taught you about the Sikhs, it should be that they don't really get along with the Mughals. I'm not an expert on Indian history, but it may have something to do with the descendents of Tamerlane rolling into town, conquering the hell out of everything, subjugating the people, and actively trying to exterminate all traces of their religion. The fact that the Mughals had a standing cash bounty on severed Sikh heads probably didn't help diplomatic relations much either.
Well in 1704 the Galactic Mughal Imperial Empire decided that they were going to wipe out Sikhism once and for all. They freaked out, crushed a couple soda cans on their heads, and dispatched the Mughal Darth Vader to surround the city of Amritsar, lay siege to the Guru of the Sikhs, and destroy the entire religion by killing it's head honcho in a ridiculously over-the-top violent manner.
(The fact that there are currently 20 million Sikhs in the world should give you some indication of how successful the Mughals were in their endeavors. It just took them a while to realize that you don't **** with these people unless you want to be on the receiving end of a Macho Man Randy Savage-style top-rope elbow drop to the nutsack.)
Now the afore-mentionedleader of Sikhism was a man named Guru Gobind Singh. Think of this dude kind of like the Sikh Pope (though perhaps the Sikh Buddha would be a more appropriate analogy). There are only ten Gurus in the entire history of Sikhism, so yeah, you can be pretty sure that this guy was a pretty big deal. He was a pretty serious assbeater in his own right, but to make things worse for the Mughals he was also constantly surrounded by a badass bodyguard of fighters known as "warrior-saints". These dudes were kind of like the Apostles, only if Saint Peter went around shooting sword-swinging Centurions in the ***** with RPG launchers and liberated his people from the chains of the Roman Empire. These righteous soldiers were like Sikh Paladins with muskets and totally sweet beards, and they sure as **** weren't going to just let the Mughals waltz into Amritsar and decapitate the Holiest man in their religion. They took up arms, fortified the city, and dared the Mughal Empire to step to them.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/arts-and-society/25929-badass-of-the-week.html
This battle that ensued was completely off the chain. It was like the Alamo with turbans. The Mughals hurled wave after wave of soldiers at the walls of Amritsar, but failed to break through the ranks of the battle-hardened Warrior-Saints and their wide assortment of pointy death-instruments. After several days of increasingly brutal fighting, however, the Mughals slowly began to wear down the town's defenses. Eventually, a small group of shell-shocked, war-weary Sikh soldiers decided they'd had enough. Forty once-stalwart soldiers called it quits, publicly renounced their faith, and peaced out to the nearest place that didn't have ****ed-off Muslims stabbing people in the faces with scimitars every ten seconds.


Well there was one badass chick that wasn't going to stand for that weak sauce ********. Mai Bhago was a tough-*** babe from a town near Amritsar who had spent most of her adult life training in the fine arts of awesomeness and studying about badassitude, and she wasn't about to just sit around and let a bunch of ex-Sikh warrior-saints slack off in the facial destruction department - especially when they could be out there dishing out chokeslams and shooting arrows into peoples' eyes with enough velocity to puncture plexiglass. Almost immediately upon hearing that there was a group of guys heading towards town who had "gotten bored of fighting the Mughals" and decided they "didn't feel like" slicing peoples' necks in half anymore, she go super-****ed off and rode out to meet them.
Mai Bhago came across this sad, disgraceful group of ex-Sikhs not long after she left her town. As soon as she saw this sorry lot moping around mumbling **** like, "Game over man - game over!", she jumped off her horse, confidently strode up to the closest guy, and then, out of nowhere, she hauled off and open-hand pimp-slapped the dude in the face really really fucking hard. While the rest of the astonished group stood around with their mouths hanging open, she looked each of them in the eye, one by one. Then, in a tone of voice that only thinly veiled her seething rage, she said something to the effect of, "If you're going to act like *******, then I'm going to fucking treat you like *******." Then she spit, kneed another dude in the junk, and told everybody they needed to sack up and start conducting themselves like the fucking badass Sikh warriors that they were.
Through a delicate, subtle mix of taunting, insults, and hardcore professional wrestling-style pump-up speeches, Mai Bhago made these jerks realize that they had a job to do, and they just needed to pop a couple Zoloft and fucking get out there and do it. The Guru was badass and all, but he wasn't exactly going to flash-fry the entire Mughal army by firing a matching set of Proton Torpedoes into the exhaust port of the Taj Mahal while screaming overhead at Mach 2 - he needed his warrior-saints at his side; not to bail out on him right when he was in the middle of what could potentially have been his last stand.
After getting slapped around verbally, physically, and emotionally by our take-no-********, fresh-to-death heroine, the forty ex-Sikhs realized that they needed to snap out of it and get back to the business of violently lacerating the tracheas of their much-hated enemies. Of course, Mai Bhago wasn't the sort of hardcore warrior-chick who was just going to be happy to go back to town knowing that she'd done her good deed for the day - no, she fucking put on her wargear, grabbed a sword and a musket, and rode out there at the head of this company of Sikh hardasses to cause a little estrogen-fueled havoc of her own. She was going to show these guys how it was done.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929
Well without forty of his toughest hombres, the Guru's situation in Amritsar eventually became untenable. He (and what little was left of his bodyguard) withdrew from the town, and decided to make a mad, desperate dash for safety. The entire Mughal Army pursued them across India for a couple days, harassing them at every turn, and **** was looking pretty fucking bleak for Guru Gobind Singh and the proponents of Sikhism.
It was at this point that the Guru saw Mai Bhago riding up at the head of a small battalion of re-devoted tough-as-**** Sikh warriors.


Mai Bhago led her men out past the Guru, and right into the face of the entire fucking Mughal Army. At the Battle of Mukhtsar in 1704, she and her warriors charged into the enemy lines, hacking, slashing, and popping peoples' heads off with muskets at point-blank range. Even the Guru got in on the action, sending a golden shower of auric-tipped arrows down on the enemy from a sniper's nest on a nearby hill. Mai Bhago herself was credited with taking down something like a half-dozen dudes herself in the exceedingly ****** fighting that ensued. Like I said, this chick meant business.
I came across several conflicting reports of how the battle transpired, ranging from "The Mughals got tired and ran away" to "God came down and smote the entire Imperial army", but the outcome is always the same - the Mughals were driven from the battlefield, the Guru lived to fight another day, and every member of the Sikh contingent was killed in action. Well, every Sikh except Mai Bhago. When Guru Gobind Singh went down to survey the epic carnage, he found her lying on top of a heaping pile of dead Mughals, barely clinging to life. The Guru forgave the forty Sikhs for their moment of weakness, and was so pumped up about how hardcore Mai Bhago was that he gave her a healing potion, restored all of her Hit Points, and brought her into his service as one of his personal bodyguards. She spent the rest of her life traveling with the Guru, serving as a warrior-saint of the Sikh Religion, and the Sikh Joan of Arc is now revered among her people as a holy warrior who offered disgraced warriors a chance at redemption and fought bravely in the defense of her people.
To this day, the Sikhs still celebrate the anniversary of the battle.



Links:


Sikh-History.com

Sikh Forum Post


Sources:

Gandhi, Surjit Singh. History of the Sikh Gurus. Atlantic, 2007.

Holm, Jean, and Bowker, John. Women in Religion. Continuum, 2000.

Ralhan, O.B. The Great Gurus of the Sikhs. Anmol, 1997.

 
Do share your immediate thoughts or reactions on this issue? We value your views! Login Now! or Sign Up Today! to share your views with us.. Gurfateh!

__________________
Randip Singh

Those who renounce meat, and hold their noses when sitting near it, devour men at night.
They practice hypocrisy, and make a show before other people, but they do not understand anything about meditation or spiritual wisdom.
Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji Page 1289
Fools Who Wrangle Over Flesh

Everybody who knows me knows that I got my nickname from this lady because, as a newborn I threw up on this guy who was afraid to hold me. I never threw up on him again because he never dared act like a coward around me again. BTW, 18 years later, he became my husband and we had a son and lived happily ever after until 3 November 1984 in Delhi. But that's another story,

This lady has always been my inspiration and I must admit this is the most fun retelling I have ever heard of her story. This shows me that we really need to dust off these wonderful old stories and tell them like we mean them. Although, honestly, I could easily live with a few fewer "****"s. Must be my age. After all, I'm culturally a child of the 1960s and our language would make the author of this blush furiously, especially at my colourful description of the Mughals being beaten into doing things anatomically impossible. Ah, but that was when I was young. Now I'm an aging Sikh hippie of gramma age with my own war stories to tell.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929

You can check them out at my blog, The Road To Khalistan., Our Stories From 1984. OK, that's a cheap plug; I'm shameless. I want readers. I want the true story of what happened in the Delhi Pogrom of 1984 to be known and since I was there (as a participant on the side of the Good Guys) and can write in English, it seems up to me to tell it. Our stories are not as exciting as Mai Bhago, although I did get rescued by Guru Gobind Singh in Amritsar. Honest. And there were real heroics in Delhi.

Anyway, Mai Bhago's spirit lives on in the widows of Delhi who have never given up and through all their hardships have managed, by VaheGuru's kirpaa, to remain in chardi kala. Courage in battle is one thing, a good thing; the courage to carry on and not give up when everything has been taken from you - violently, brutally - is something miraculous.

No, not me, I had a safe home and a loving family half-way round the world to return to. Please do not forget ever theDelhi Widows, our beloved sdisters.

Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929
Chardi kala!

Mai (not Bhago)

Yes agree. Article could do with less expletif's, but for a new generation, it may be written in a way they connect.

Also please share your stories here on 1984. As someone who lost someone there (despite him bravely taking on a mob), I would love to read them here, as would other readers. Maybe one a week under a specific thread?

You can check them out at my blog, The Road To Khalistan., Our Stories From 1984. OK, that's a cheap plug; I'm shameless. I want readers. I want the true story of what happened in the Delhi Pogrom of 1984 to be known and since I was there (as a participant on the side of the Good Guys) and can write in English, it seems up to me to tell it. Our stories are not as exciting as Mai Bhago, although I did get rescued by Guru Gobind Singh in Amritsar. Honest. And there were real heroics in Delhi.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929

Mai jee,
Probably your this link has been blocked by Indian authorties. I checked this just now. I can's access this link from India. Will be highly obliged if you can put some of those stories directly on SPN.
Regards and Guru Fateh
Hardip Singh

Hardip ji

An amazing possibility that it would be blocked from India. Utterly amazing and if that is a widespread truth then we can see for ourselves what the victims contend with on a daily basis. I am going to have someone else in India check this for me. If that makes 2 people, then let's come up with a strategy.

They see the word Khalistan and all hell breaks lose. They still don't understand that Khalistani's make up less than 0.1 % of all Sikhs.

Narayanjot Kaur says:

Let me check my sitemeter. Usually about 33% of my readers are from "India."

What an exciting possiblity! Little Mai catching the notice of the government of The World's Largest Democracy! It must be tested. These tales of ours from 1984 are also in two other blogs online, although one of those contains links to the Khaliblog.

All of my autobiographical posts are in The unringed Bell, The Unringed Bell. Unless they've blocked ALL my blogs, you should be able to get in there easily.


And BTW, I am one of that 0.1% who is Khalistani. Proudly and openly. I'm sure the GOI wouldn't much care for me.

Chardi kala.

Mai
Mai

Just let me get home tonight and I will have a couple of people check it out. One is a family friend who is also a lawyer in the Dehli high court. He will give me the scoop.

I checked my Sitemeter. About 23% of my readers are from India, so it must be some other ptoblem. I also checked the link in my post above and it works fine. So we have a mystery. Mysteries must be solved.

I first told a bit about what happened to us in 1984 here in SPN. It was shortly after a major/massive stroke (I lost all my Punjabi) and my mind was confused and unclear, and I still managed to write it up.

If the administrators want me to I would be willing - honoured - to post these blogposts here.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=25929

I just came online and need to get to my tasks - I'm involved in a myriad of things. Be back later.

Chardi kala!

Mai