The Shaheedan misl, the misl of the martyrs, was the Nihang formation. Its first head was Baba Deep Singh Ji of Damdama Sahib and it was continued by Karam Singh and by the Akali Nihang leadership.
It was the smallest of the twelve in territory and the one least interested in holding any. Its function was religious and military at once, guardianship of the shrines and the shock role in battle.
Akali Phula Singh Ji, its most famous later head, commanded the Nihangs under Ranjit Singh Ji, led the assault at Multan in 1818 and at Peshawar, and was killed at Naushera in 1823. He is also the man who summoned the Maharaja to the Akal Takht and had him sentenced to a flogging for a personal offence, which the Maharaja accepted in public.
The Nihang order survives, in blue, with the tall dumalla, at Anandpur and Damdama and in deras across the Malwa. Hola Mohalla at Anandpur is theirs.
Baba Deep Singh Ji was a scholar before he was a soldier. He worked on the Damdami birh with Bhai Mani Singh Ji and ran the taksal at Damdama Sahib, and he was in his seventies when he took a jatha to Amritsar in 1757 after the complex had been destroyed and the sarovar filled in.
The Nihangs kept the older dress, the older weapons and the older rehat when the rest of the Panth moved past them, which makes them both a living order and a standing argument about what the eighteenth century actually looked like. They also kept the horse, the chakkar and the habit of moving as a dal rather than settling anywhere.
He was killed at Naushera in 1823. The misl's institutional descendants are the Nihang dals, which still exist and still hold Hola Mohalla.