In May and June 1746 Lakhpat Rai, diwan of Lahore, mounted a campaign of extermination against the Sikhs after his brother was killed by a Sikh party. He drove a force into the Kahnuwan marshes of Gurdaspur district and across the Beas into the hills.
The Sikh body, moving with families and non-combatants, was pinned between the pursuing army and the river. About seven thousand were killed and about three thousand taken and executed at Lahore at the horse market, the Nakhas, which is called Shahidganj for that reason.
It is called the small holocaust, Chhota Ghallughara, only because a larger one followed sixteen years later.
Lakhpat Rai also ordered the Gurmukhi script suppressed and the word gur banned in the sense of jaggery, which is the kind of detail that survives in the Punjabi accounts and is absent from the official ones.
The site in the Kahnuwan chhamb has a memorial. It is a marsh in the middle of farmland and it is not on any tourist route.
The chhamb is a shallow seasonal marsh, impassable in some seasons and open in others, and the timing of the drive was chosen for the season. The ground itself is a large part of why the figure is what it is.
The estimate usually given is around seven thousand killed and three thousand taken and executed at Lahore, and like the later figures it is not a count.
The survivors went into the hills and across the Sutlej and were back in the plain within a year, which is the pattern the whole period follows.