Bibi Sharan Kaur

The account, which is held in the Sikh tradition and is not documented in any contemporary source, is that after the fighting at Chamkaur a woman named Bibi Sharan Kaur came to the field at night to cremate the Sikh dead, including Sahibzada Ajit Singh Ji and Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Ji, whose bodies had been left where they fell.

She was found by imperial soldiers and killed, and thrown on the pyre she had lit.

There is no early source for it. It appears in later devotional literature and is widely told.

It is included here with that caution stated, because it is part of what people in Punjab know about Chamkaur, and because the pattern of women who acted at the edges of these events and were not recorded is itself the point.

Mai Bhago Ji is documented. Mata Gujri Ji is documented. Almost every other woman in the eighteenth-century accounts is not, and the absence is not evidence that they were not there.

The account is that she went onto the field at Chamkaur after the battle to cremate the dead, including the elder Sahibzade, and was killed doing it.

She appears in some traditional accounts and not in others, and she is one of the several women in the Sikh record whose historicity is argued.

The argument is worth stating plainly rather than deciding. What is certain is that the cremations at Chamkaur happened and that somebody carried them out.

What we don't know

  • Whether Bibi Sharan Kaur existed. No contemporary source names her.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Later Sikh devotional literature on Chamkaur.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.