Between 1747 and 1767 Ahmad Shah Durrani invaded India eight times from Kandahar, sacking Delhi in 1757 and plundering Mathura and Vrindavan on the same campaign, and in January 1761 destroying the Maratha army at Panipat in one of the bloodiest battles of the century. Maratha accounts describe tens of thousands killed in the battle and its aftermath, and large numbers of camp followers, chiefly women and children, taken north as slaves. Durrani forces also attacked the Sikh communities of the Punjab in two episodes remembered as the Ghallugharas: the smaller in 1746 and the Vadda Ghallughara of February 1762, in which Sikh tradition records between 10,000 and 30,000 killed, many of them families travelling with the fighting bands, followed by the demolition of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. The evidence is uneven: Persian chronicles written for the Durrani court, Maratha letters written in defeat and Sikh accounts compiled later each have their own purposes, and modern historians treat all of the figures as approximate. By the 1770s the Sikh misls had taken the Punjab and Durrani power had receded.
The Afghan Durrani empire repeatedly invaded the Punjab and the Ganges plain, sacking cities, enslaving captives and attacking Sikh communities
No defensible denominator exists. Eighteenth-century Punjab was not enumerated — the first census of the province came in 1855 — and the size of the Sikh community in the 1760s is unknown, with estimates of the dead in the Vadda Ghallughara of 1762 ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 out of an unrecorded base. Figures for captives taken in the Durrani invasions come from court chronicles and are not reconcilable with any population total.
The range aggregates the Panipat battle and its aftermath, where Maratha and Afghan accounts together suggest tens of thousands of soldiers and camp followers killed, with the sack of Mathura and the Ghallugharas. The figures are chronicle estimates, frequently rhetorical, and modern historians regard the higher end as unverifiable.
Persian, Maratha and Sikh chronicles record massacres of non-combatants, enslavement of captives and the destruction of temples at Mathura and of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar.
India, Afghanistan