In the years when a price was on every Sikh head and the Khalsa was living in the wastes, two Sikhs, Bota Singh and Garja Singh, heard travellers say that the Sikhs had been wiped out and that there were none left.
They set up a toll barrier on the Grand Trunk Road near Noordin sarai and levied a fee: an anna for a cart, a paisa for a donkey load. When nobody reported them, Bota Singh wrote a letter to the governor of Lahore announcing that he was collecting toll on the imperial road and demanding acknowledgement.
A detachment of a hundred horse was sent. The two men fought it with staves and were killed.
They collected almost nothing and held the road for a few days. The point was to make the state say out loud that Sikhs still existed.
It is the most deliberate and most economical act of political theatre in Punjab's history and it cost both of them their lives.
The letter is quoted in the Punjabi accounts in the form of a couplet, addressed to the governor by name, and its tone is deliberately insolent. It was written to be answered.
The letter is the point of the story. They wanted the fact of a Sikh presence recorded and acted on, at a time when the community was supposed to have been cleared out of the plain.
A force was sent and both were killed. It is a deliberate provocation carried out by two men and it is remembered as such rather than as a battle.