Jassa Singh Ramgarhia was born at Ichogil near Lahore in 1723, of a Tarkhan family, and rose to command one of the strongest misls. He held the Ramgarh fort at Amritsar and territory along the Beas.
He served briefly under the Mughal governor of Jalandhar in the 1750s, which was held against him afterward. In the 1770s a coalition of misls under the Kanhaiyas and the Ahluwalias drove him out and he spent years in exile in the Cis-Sutlej country, raiding across the Jamuna.
He returned in 1783, took part in the Delhi expedition, and recovered his territory. He held Batala, Kalanaur, Sri Hargobindpur and Urmar Tanda until his death in 1803.
He is the one misl leader from an artisan caste who built and kept a first-rank power, and he did it twice, having lost it once.
The Ramgarhia Bunga at Amritsar was built by him and stands beside the sarovar with its two towers.
His artillery and his engineers were the misl's real advantage. The Ramgarhia contingent built and repaired forts for whoever it was allied with, which is what a formation drawn from the building trades had to sell.
He was driven out of his territory by a coalition of the other misls for years and then recovered it, which is the ordinary shape of a misl sardar's career.
The Ramgarhia name became the name of the Tarkhan and artisan communities who identified with him, and it is now a caste designation across the diaspora, with its own gurdwaras in Britain and east Africa.