Mai Bhago is the figure Sikh women's organisations reach for most, and the historical record on her is thinner than the devotional one — she appears in eighteenth-century chronicles rather than contemporary documents, and details vary. What is consistently told is this: forty Sikhs from Majha, starved out of the siege of Anandpur, signed a bedava disclaiming the Guru and went home, where the women of their villages refused to accept them and Bhag Kaur led them back to fight at Khidrana in 1705. She survived, and later lived at Nanded as part of the Guru's guard; a gurdwara at Jhabal and her preserved weapon at Nanded are tied to her. She is now the name on Punjab's armed-forces preparatory institute for girls and on countless diaspora women's collectives, and she carries an unusual weight precisely because the tradition names so few women.