THE RISE OF THE SIKHS 269

spirit and a fiery enthusiasm such as the Hindus had not hitherto displayed. The history of the Sikhs illus- trates a phenomenon well known in Asia, where an insurrectionary movement is always particularly dan- gerous if it takes a religious, complexion, and where fanaticism may endure and accumulate under a spiritual leader until it explodes in the world of politics with the force of dynamite. The martyrdom of their first prophet, and their per- secution by the later Moghul emperors, had engendered in the hardy Sikh peasants a fierce hatred of Islam. They had been repressed and broken by the Afghan armies of Ahmad Shah, who routed them with great slaughter in 1761. But in 1762 they defeated and slew his governor at Sirhind; and in 1764 Ahmad Shah was recalled to his western provinces by a revolt in Kan- dahar. He died in 1773, after which date the grasp of his successors on the Pan jab relaxed, and the Sikh con- federation became closer and more vigorous. They were subdivided into misls, or military confederacies, under different chiefs, who fought among themselves and against the Mohammedans, until, by 1785, the Sikhs had mastered the whole country between the Jihlam and the Sutlaj Eivers in the centre of the Panjab, were threatening the Mohammedan princes about Delhi, and had made pillaging excursions eastward across the Ganges into Rohilkhand. To the English in Bengal this revival of Hindu nationality in upper India was exceedingly serviceable and opportune. For, in the first place, their real danger,