Nawab Kapur Singh Ji divided the Khalsa fighting men in about 1734 into the Budha Dal, those over forty, and the Taruna Dal, those under.
The Budha Dal's role was to hold the shrines, look after the historic places and train the young. The Taruna Dal campaigned. It was a functional division and it worked, and it was the structure on which the Dal Khalsa was built in 1748.
Both survive as Nihang formations. The Budha Dal, based at Raqba and elsewhere in the Malwa, describes itself as the ninety-sixth crore Budha Dal and traces an unbroken line of jathedars from the eighteenth century.
The Taruna Dal exists in several branches. The Bidhi Chand dal at Sur Singh, which keeps horses, is a related formation with its own lineage.
They march at Hola Mohalla, keep their own rehat and their own vocabulary, and answer to their own jathedars rather than to the SGPC.
They are the only continuously existing eighteenth-century Sikh military institutions and there is no proper written history of either.
The Dal Khalsa was divided into two: the Budha Dal of the older men, holding the shrines and the territory, and the Taruna Dal of the young, which did the fighting.
The division is attributed to Nawab Kapur Singh Ji and it was an administrative solution to a force that had grown beyond what one command could handle.
Both survive as Nihang orders. The Budha Dal is the senior and holds Damdama Sahib, and the dals still camp at Anandpur at Hola Mohalla as they did.