Baba Bir Singh had been a soldier in Ranjit Singh Ji's army and left it to establish a dera at Naurangabad in Amritsar district, where he ran a langar on a very large scale and gave shelter to anyone who came.
In the chaos at Lahore after 1839, when the court was destroying itself, men on the losing side of each round came to him. By 1844 several thousand armed men were camped at his dera, including Attar Singh Sandhanwalia and Kashmira Singh, a son of Ranjit Singh Ji.
In May 1844 a Lahore force under Hira Singh Dogra attacked the dera. Baba Bir Singh forbade his people to return fire, on the ground that the men attacking were Sikhs. They stood and were shot with artillery. He was killed with several hundred others.
It is one of the very few large-scale acts of deliberate non-resistance in Punjab's history and it is barely known.
A gurdwara stands at Naurangabad. The episode is a marker of how far the Lahore court had gone by 1844, five years before the annexation.
He kept a dera at Naurangabad with a large following and a langar that fed thousands, and men from the disbanded and unpaid army gathered there in the 1840s.
The Lahore court regarded the gathering as a threat and a force was sent. He forbade his followers to return fire and was killed in the attack in 1844.
The episode is remembered as the killing of a man who would not let his own people defend him. It is also a picture of what the Lahore court had become in the years after Ranjit Singh Ji.