Abdullah Bhatti, called Dulla, was a Rajput of Pindi Bhattian in Sandal Bar who led a revolt against Akbar's revenue settlement in the 1590s. His father and grandfather had been executed before him and their skins stuffed with straw and hung at the Lahore gates.
He raided the imperial treasury caravans and redistributed. The story that fixes him in Punjabi memory is that he rescued two Hindu girls, Sundri and Mundri, who were being taken by force, and gave them away in marriage himself with a dowry of sugar.
He was captured and hanged at Lahore, and buried at Miani Sahib.
The Lohri song, Sundar mundriye, ho, tera kaun vichara, ho, Dulla Bhatti wala, ho, is sung by children across Punjab every January. Most of the people singing it could not say who Dulla Bhatti was.
A sixteenth-century Muslim outlaw who rescued Hindu girls is remembered in a Sikh and Hindu winter festival song. That is what Punjabi folk memory does with a good story.
The Sandal Bar was pastoral country outside the settled revenue circles, and a rising there was as much a refusal to be assessed and counted as it was a rebellion. The answer was to push the settlement outward and garrison the approaches.
Almost nothing about him is in the imperial record. What survives is the song, the qissa versions written long afterward, and a grave. That is the ordinary evidentiary position for every popular hero in this region.
His grave is said to be at Miani Sahib in Lahore. Pindi Bhattian in Hafizabad district carries the family name.