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ON THE SIKHS.
the city was in the possession of the Sikhs, to consult on measures in which the community was interested, and to concert military operations whether offensive or defensive. It does not clearly appear of whom these councils were at first composed, but no doubt they were of a popular character, and every one who, through his hereditary landed property, or his inAuence in a village, or his reputation as a bold and fortunate leader, could command the following of a band of armed adherents, however few in number, was admissible to the conclave, and had a voice in its deliberations.
After making head for some years against the generals of Aurangzeb and the hill Rájás, whose enmity Guru Govind provoked by his indiscriminate ravages as much as by his religious tenets, he was reduced to great distress, and after the loss of his friends and his children became a solitary fugitive almost bereft of reason. Much obscurity hangs over the close of his career; but it seems probable that he was expelled from the Panjab by the Lieutenants of the Emperor and led the life of a mendicant wanderer: he is said to have been killed in the Dekhan in 1708.
Guru Govind was the last of the religious teachers, or Gurus, of the Sikhs; but the temporal command of his followers was assumed, after his death, by Banda, a bairágí, or religious mendicant, who inflicted a ferocious vengeance for the discomfiture and the death of his friend and teacher. The Siklis rallied under Banda's guidance, defeated the Mohammedan governor
