“No honourable son of Punjab will ever sell the soil of Punjab”.
Dulla always helped poor
Abdullah Bhatti Shaheed who gave a tough time to Jalal ud din Muhammad Akber was hanged for challenging the Mughal role in 1599. He led a rebellion against the Mughal emperor Akbar and is a popular folk hero in Punjab because of his Robin Hood-like acts of kindness to the people. Dulla and his bandits regularly looted the tributes and taxes sent to the Emperor and redistributed them among the poor. Some people say that the Lohri custom of giving money or sweets to the children who go singing from door to door is in honor of Dulla Bhatti’s acts of generosity. The deeds of Bhatti are recounted in folklore and took the form of social banditry.
Bhatti’s class war took the form of social banditry, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. He also opposed the abduction and selling of girls into slavery, arranging marriages for them and also providing their dowries. His efforts may have influenced Akbar’s decision to pacify Guru Arjan Dev and through Dev’s influence the people of Bari Do-Aab, by exempting the area from the requirement to provide land revenues.
Great Rajput Rai Abdullah Bhatti aka Dulla, a Muslim zamindar, rescued a Hindu girl, when she was being forcibly taken away by Mughals, found a Hindu boy, and married her off hurriedly without a priest in his fort at Rakh, between Gujranwala and Sialkot. Gave her ‘ser’ of sugar as ‘shagun’. Since he did not know the mantras, he sang this as the girl and the boy took ‘phere’….. Dulla Bhatti took in the girl after she had been raped by a Mughal soldier, disgraced and abandoned. Dulla Bhatti took the girl to his fortress hideaway and arranged for her to be married to a young Hindu man. Dulla himself gave the girl away in place of her father and officiated the wedding ceremony.
