The book provides a fascinating account of the life and death of an extraordinary man, killed at the age of seventy-five fighting the troops of Ahmed Shah Shah Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan. Based on many years of research spent examining a wide range of Persian, Punjabi and English sources alongside genealogical records, oral traditions and a thorough battlefield study, this work tends to eschew hagiography to ground all research on this spiritual-cum-military leader whose life story interweaves through the turbulence of 18th-century Punjab, often referred to as the ‘heroic century’. This account promises to be more memorable for its stylistic panache and the generous representation of vaars in the original Gurmukhi script alongside their English trans-creation in rousing rhyme.