Battle of Shujabad (1780)
battle of Shujabad in 1780, Sikh Misls vs Afghans
The Battle of Shujabad took place in February 1780, during the Afghan–Sikh Wars. The Afghans were led by Muzaffar Khan and Timur Shah Durrani, while the Sikhs were led by Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and other Sikh chiefs.
Background
Early in January 1780, Timur Shah Durrani laid siege to Multan. Though the Sikhs were fewer in number, Timur Shah believed his resources were not enough, and as a result, dispatched a small force to Bahawalpur, while leaving the majority of his force at Multan.
Battle
Muzaffar Khan left Bahawalpur and met the Sikh force at Shujabad, where the battle was fought on 8 February 1780. A dust storm raged during the battle, causing low visibility. During the clash, Muzaffar Khan's forces took a Sikh drummer prisoner. Khan spared the drummer on the assurance that he would beat the drum to lure the Sikhs into an ambush. While Sikh forces were drawn to the drumming, Muzaffar Khan arranged his forces into two columns, where one soldier would hold an enemy down so the other could kill him. The Sikhs lost thousands of men to the trap, forcing them to retreat to Lahore.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117100831. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1780.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Shujabad (1780)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.