By the late 1740s the Khalsa's fighting strength in the Punjab existed as roughly sixty-five separate bands, jathas, each operating under its own leader with little formal coordination between them, harassing Mughal authority piecemeal rather than as a unified force. Nawab Kapur Singh, one of the most respected Sikh military leaders of the period, judged this fragmentation a weakness the Sikhs could not afford, and at the Baisakhi gathering of 1748 he pressed the case for consolidation directly to the assembled bands.
The gurmata that resulted merged the sixty-five jathas into eleven misls, larger confederated units each retaining its own commander, territory and banner but now bound together as a single combined force, the Dal Khalsa, under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia's overall command. The number eleven was not arbitrary administrative tidiness; it preserved real regional and factional loyalties that a single unified command would have simply erased, while still giving the Khalsa the coordinated strength a single unwieldy army, or sixty-five uncoordinated ones, could not match. It became the structure that carried Sikh military and political power through the second half of the eighteenth century, until Ranjit Singh eventually folded the misls into his own kingdom.