Mai Bhago, born Bhag Kaur in a Punjabi village, lived through one of the most tested periods of the early Sikh community, the prolonged Mughal and hill-state siege of Guru Gobind Singh's fortress at Anandpur in the early 1700s. Conditions inside the siege grew desperate enough that a group of Sikh soldiers, worn down by hunger and hardship, signed a written declaration renouncing their allegiance to the Guru and left to return to their homes and families, a defection Sikh tradition remembers with real shame precisely because it came from men who had taken the Guru's initiation.
Bhag Kaur, encountering these men on their way home, is remembered as having confronted them directly, shaming their abandonment of the Guru in terms sharp enough to turn them around, and then leading them herself back toward the Guru's forces rather than simply sending them. That return culminated at the Battle of Muktsar in 1705, where the returning band, fighting under Bhag Kaur's leadership, engaged the pursuing Mughal forces and were all killed in the fighting; Guru Gobind Singh, arriving to find their sacrifice, personally blessed the fallen and revoked the document of renunciation they had signed, and they are remembered in Sikh tradition ever since as the Chali Mukte, the Forty Liberated Ones.