Bhai Maharaj Singh was a disciple and successor of Baba Bir Singh at Naurangabad. After the annexation of 1849 he organised armed resistance to British rule across the Punjab, moving between villages with a following and planning a general rising.
He was captured near Jalandhar in December 1849. The British officer who took him wrote that he was not an ordinary man, that the people considered him a prophet, and that he had a following the government could not measure.
He was deported without trial to Singapore in 1850 and held at Outram prison. He went blind and developed cancer in confinement. He died there in July 1856.
His shrine at Singapore, at the Silat Road Sikh Temple, is maintained by the Sikh community there and is a pilgrimage site.
He led the first organised resistance to British rule in Punjab and he is not in the standard national account of anti-colonial movements at all.
He led the resistance in the Doaba and the Majha after the First Anglo-Sikh War and was hunted for two years before he was taken near Adampur in 1849.
He was transported to Singapore and held there, where he went blind and died in 1856. His grave became a place of pilgrimage for the Sikh community of that city.
A gurdwara at Singapore commemorates him. He is the first Sikh political prisoner transported overseas, and the connection between his grave and that community is where its institutional life began.