1Twelve Governments and No Government
Part Eleven ended with the Punjab in its own hands for the first time in nearly nine centuries. This part is about what its owners did with it, and the honest answer is: they nearly lost it again.
- n 1767 Ahmad Shah Abdali went back across the Indus for the last time, and the pressure came off.
- What was left behind was a political arrangement with no parallel anywhere else in this book. Twelve
Iautonomous states — the misls — each with its own chief, its own army, its own territory and its own
revenue, none of them subordinate to any other, sharing one capital that none of them owned. There was
no king, no council, no permanent government and no way to compel anybody.
It had beaten the finest army in Asia. And within twenty years of the last invasion it was fighting itself.
Four things to hold on to
- The system was genuinely a system, not chaos. The misls collected revenue, kept order, built, endowed, negotiated and made war by agreement. Foreign observers who came to look at it — and several did — described something they had not expected and did not have a word for.
- It came apart because the enemy left. The assembly at Amritsar had bound eleven chiefs together when Abdali was in the country. With nobody coming down the passes, its resolutions stopped mattering, and by the 1780s the misls were fighting each other with the armies they had raised against the Afghans.
- The British are now in the frame. Not in the Punjab — but a Company servant walked through it in disguise in 1783 and wrote the first English account of the Sikhs, an Irish deserter carved out a kingdom on its south-eastern edge, and by 1799 Calcutta was worried enough about Afghan invasions to be conducting diplomacy in Persia about it.
- And it ends with an invitation. In July 1799 the leading citizens of Lahore — Muslims and Hindus among them — wrote to a young chief from one of the smaller misls asking him to come and take the city off the men who were holding it. He was eighteen.
CERTAIN means contemporary evidence. LIKELY means well-attested and generally accepted. STORY
means tradition.
For the first time in this book, the outside evidence becomes plentiful. George Forster, a Company servant,
travelled through the Punjab disguised as a Turkish merchant in 1783 and published an account of it. Major James
Browne compiled a history of the Sikhs for Warren Hastings in the 1780s. Antoine Polier, a Swiss officer in Indian
service, wrote a description for the learned societies of Calcutta. And George Thomas, an Irish sailor turned warlord,
dictated a memoir of thirteen years spent fighting on the Punjab’s edge.
None of these men were friendly, several were gathering intelligence, and all of them are useful for exactly
that reason. Parts Ten and Eleven made the case: the witness with no motive is worth more than the witness with a
good one.
2The Twelve Republics, 1767–1799 CERTAIN
Not a battle. A description of the only government the Punjab has ever produced that had no ruler at all.
- 1767–1799, at its most effective in the 1760s and 1770s.
- The whole Punjab, from the Sutlej to the Indus and into the hills.
- Twelve misls — Bhangi, Ahluwalia, Kanhaiya, Ramgarhia, Sukerchakia, Nakai, Dallewalia, Nishanwalia, Shaheedan, Karorasinghia, Singhpuria, and the Phulkian houses south of the Sutlej.
- Coins, revenue records, the buildings at Amritsar, and four separate European descriptions.
How it worked
1. Each misl held its own territory outright. Districts taken in the campaigns of 1763 and 1764 were divided by
- agreement, and what a misl held it governed — collecting revenue, appointing officials, administering justice and keeping troops.
- The chief was chosen, not born. In principle a sardar led because his men followed him, and a follower could leave one misl for another. In practice leadership became hereditary within a generation, and that drift is a large part of what goes wrong in this part.
- Nobody was anybody’s superior. The word misl means, roughly, an equal or a like — and the equality was real. Jassa Singh Ahluwalia commanded the Dal Khalsa in the field and had no authority whatever over the Bhangi chiefs at Lahore.
- The revenue system was rakhi grown up. Part Ten described protection money paid by villages to bands. By the 1770s it had become an ordinary land revenue — assessed, collected, and generally lighter than what Lahore had charged.
- The common capital was Amritsar, and no one owned it. Each misl built a bunga — a tower and residence — around the tank, so that its chief had a house there for the assemblies. Dozens of them stood round the water: twelve governments with twelve embassies to a shrine. 6. And the assembly still met. The Sarbat Khalsa at Vaisakhi and Diwali, passing gurmatas that bound everybody — for as long as everybody wanted to be bound.
Europeans who encountered this system had genuine trouble describing it, and their difficulty is informative.
George Forster, travelling in disguise in 1783, found a country with no capital, no sovereign and no court, run by chiefs
who consulted at a religious site twice a year — and who nonetheless collected taxes and kept the roads reasonably
safe. He reached for the vocabulary he had and settled on something like a commonwealth or a federal republic. He
also recorded a judgement that turned out to be extremely accurate: that if a leader of ability ever emerged
among them, they would become a formidable power. He wrote that sixteen years before Ranjit Singh took Lahore.
Antoine Polier and Major James Browne produced accounts in the 1780s for Calcutta audiences, and both circled the
same problem — how do you report to a government on a state that has no government?
The honest answer is that the misl confederacy resembled nothing else in eighteenth-century Asia. It was closest, of
all the things in this book, to the armed republics of Part Three — the Yaudheyas and their neighbours, who ran
themselves by assembly, put victory to the nation on their coins, and outlasted five empires.
- It had been forged under fire. Every rule in it existed because something had gone wrong without it between 1716 and 1762.
- Equality removed the reason to defect. No chief had to accept another as overlord, which is what had destroyed every Indian coalition in eleven parts.
- It was cheap and local. Government by men who lived in the district, taking less than the empire had taken.
- And it could not be decapitated. Kill any one chief and eleven others carried on — the lesson of 1606, 1675, 1716 and 1762, built into the constitution.
- Nobody could compel anybody. A gurmata bound a chief who wished to be bound. Under pressure, everybody wished to be. Without it, nobody did.
- Leadership became hereditary. Within a generation the chiefs were sons of chiefs, and the misls were dynasties calling themselves republics.
- Territory made rivals. Fixed districts and fixed revenues gave twelve equal powers something to want from each other.
- And there was no frontier policy at all. Twelve governments cannot defend a pass, and Zaman Shah walked through it three times in the 1790s.
If you want to see the misl system rather than read about it, look at what was built at Amritsar in these
thirty years.
Around the tank, facing the rebuilt shrine, the chiefs put up bungas — a bunga being a tower with
residential rooms, part guesthouse, part fortified lodging, part statement. There were eventually dozens of
them, and every significant misl had one. The Ramgarhia Bunga, with its two tall minarets, is still
standing.
Consider what that arrangement actually is. Twelve independent states, each maintaining a permanent
establishment at a place that none of them governed, so that their heads of state would have somewhere to
stay when they came for the assembly.
They are embassies. To a building.
And the building was not a palace, a fort or a treasury. It was the shrine that had been demolished by
gunpowder twice in five years, and whose tank had been filled with carcasses twice, and which had been
cleared out and refilled both times by people with a price on their heads.
Part Eleven made the point that the Sarbat Khalsa was two dates and a rule. This is the physical form of it:
a capital that consists of a pool of water with twelve guesthouses round it, belonging to a state
that does not exist.
It worked for about twenty years. Then the chiefs started using the bungas to plot against each other, and
by the 1790s the assemblies were being called and not attended.
3Multan, 1772 LIKELY
The oldest door in this book changed hands again — and this time it was opened by people from the Punjab.
When: Taken in 1772; recovered by the Afghans in 1779.
Where: Multan, southern Punjab.
Who: Jhanda Singh and Ganda Singh of the Bhangi misl, against the Afghan governor.
The evidence: Persian and Sikh accounts; the Bhangi occupation is not disputed.
Why Multan again
Because it is the door, and it has been the door in every part of this book since 712. Muhammad bin Qasim took
it by cutting its water in Part Five. Mahmud fought over it. Muhammad of Ghor began his Indian
conquests there in Part Six. Timur’s grandson sat outside it for six months in Part Seven. The Langahs
made it an independent country for eighty years. The Arghuns took it from Sindh in the 1520s.
It sits where the road from Sindh, the road from Khurasan and the road up the Punjab meet, and whoever holds it
controls the southern approach to the province. In 1772 it was the last major Afghan possession east of the Indus.
What happened
1. Ahmad Shah Abdali died in 1772, and the Bhangi chiefs moved almost at once.
2. Multan was taken after a campaign in the southern Punjab, and the Bhangi misl held it and the country
- around it.
- It was the high-water mark of the confederacy’s expansion. With Multan, the misls between them held from the Sutlej to the Indus, from the Sindh border to the hills.
- And in 1779 Timur Shah took it back. Abdali’s son came down and recovered Multan, and the Afghans held it for another thirty-nine years.
- It does not return to Punjabi hands until 1818, when Ranjit Singh takes it — which is Part Thirteen.
This is the misl system’s structural weakness in one example, and it is worth being precise.
Multan was taken by one misl and held by one misl. The Bhangis captured it, garrisoned it, and drew its revenue. It
was their property.
So when Timur Shah came down in 1779 with an Afghan army, defending Multan was a Bhangi problem, not a
Punjabi one. The Ahluwalia misl had no obligation to march; the Sukerchakias had their own frontier in the north;
the Kanhaiyas were busy in the hills.
Compare it with 1764. When Sirhind was taken, the whole confederacy came, because the Sarbat Khalsa had passed a
gurmata and everyone was bound. By 1779, gurmatas about somebody else’s city were not being passed, and
would not have been obeyed if they had been.
Twelve equal states can conquer a province between them. They cannot defend a frontier post that belongs to only one
of them — and every frontier post in the Punjab belonged to only one of them.
- Abdali was dead. The Afghan kingdom went into a succession dispute and the eastern provinces were left to themselves.
- The Bhangis were the strongest misl. They held Lahore, Gujrat and Amritsar’s neighbourhood, and could put a real army in the field.
- The countryside was already paying them. Rakhi had spread down the Ravi and the Chenab well before the city fell.
- They held it alone. No other misl had a stake in it.
- Timur Shah came with a state behind him. A kingdom’s army against one misl’s establishment.
- It is a very long way from the Bhangi heartland. Two hundred and fifty miles from Lahore, at the end of a line nobody else was interested in holding.
- And the Bhangi misl was already declining. Jhanda Singh was assassinated in 1774 and the misl never recovered its leadership.
Multan has now appeared in seven parts of this book, and it is worth setting the whole sequence down in
one place because the repetition stops being a coincidence and becomes a fact about geography.
712: an Arab army cuts the water supply and takes it; the sun temple becomes a taxable asset and later a
hostage on the walls. 1006: Mahmud of Ghazni fights over it, blocked on the road by a Hindu king. 1175:
Muhammad of Ghor’s conquest of India begins here. 1397: Timur’s grandson besieges it for six months and
loses his cavalry to the monsoon. 1445–1526: it is an independent country under the Langahs. 1520s: it
falls to the Arghuns of Sindh in the same season Babur takes Lahore. 1772: the Bhangi misl takes it. 1779:
Timur Shah takes it back. 1818: Ranjit Singh takes it, in Part Thirteen. 1848: the murder of two British
officers there starts the war that ends the Sikh empire, in Part Fourteen.
Ten changes of hands in eleven hundred and thirty-six years, and not one of them for a reason that has
anything to do with Multan itself.
It is always taken because of where it is. An army coming from the west that does not want to fight
through the northern passes comes here. An army going down the Indus comes here. An army from Delhi
that wants to control Sindh comes here.
Part Seven called it the city that keeps being the door. Nothing in the seven centuries since has
changed the sentence.
4The Hills — Jammu and Kangra, 1770–1786 LIKELY
The misls turned north into the hill states that had closed their passes against them in 1746 — and one of them killed a chief with his own gun.
When: 1770–1786.
Where: Jammu, and the Kangra hills — the Siwalik states of Parts Eight and Nine.
Who: The Sukerchakia and Kanhaiya misls chiefly, against the hill rajas.
The evidence: Sikh and hill-state accounts; the tribute arrangements are documented.
What happened
1. Charat Singh Sukerchakia was killed at Jammu in 1770 — not by the enemy. His own matchlock burst in
- his hands. He was Ranjit Singh’s grandfather, and one of the ablest commanders of the previous decade.
- His son Mahan Singh took the misl and continued the northern campaigns, sacking Jammu in the 1780s and bringing back a very large amount of money — the plunder of Jammu is one of the things that funded the Sukerchakia rise.
- The Kanhaiya misl went into the Kangra hills. Jai Singh Kanhaiya took the great fort of Kangra in 1783 — the fort that Mahmud of Ghazni emptied in 1009 in Part Five, which had been plundered repeatedly ever since.
- And the hill rajas played the misls against each other, exactly as they had played the Mughals against the Gurus in Part Nine. Sansar Chand Katoch, the young raja of Kangra, allied with the Sukerchakias against the Kanhaiyas and recovered his fort in the mid-1780s.
- Most of the hill states were not annexed. They paid tribute and kept their rajas — the standard arrangement, and it lasts until Ranjit Singh changes it in Part Thirteen.
This country has been decisive in five separate parts of this book and it is worth naming the pattern before it changes.
Part Four: Mihirakula flees into Kashmir and comes back down. Part Five: Trilochanapala fights on from the Siwaliks
for seven years after Nandana. Part Eight: Sikandar Shah Suri is starved out of Mankot. Part Nine: Anandpur, Paonta,
Bhangani and Nadaun — the whole military history of the Gurus after 1635 happens in these foothills. Part Ten: Banda
escapes into them from Lohgarh. Part Eleven: the hill rajas close the passes at Kahnuwan in 1746 and thousands die
because of it.
The rule has been constant: the hills preserve you and the hills imprison you. You cannot be finished there and
you cannot rule from there.
What changes in this part is the direction. For the first time, the power in the plains is strong enough to go up
into the hills and impose terms — not to hide there, not to be destroyed there, but to collect tribute from the rajas
who had spent seven centuries being the refuge or the obstacle.
The hill states never recover from it. Ranjit Singh absorbs them outright between 1809 and 1820, and Sansar Chand —
the ablest of them, and the one who outmanoeuvred the Kanhaiyas here — ends his life as a Sikh tributary.
- Nobody was invading from the west. Between 1767 and 1795 the passes were quiet, and armies raised against the Afghans had nothing to do.
- The hill states were small and divided. The oldest failure in this book, now costing the rajas rather than the plains.
- The plains had the revenue. A misl drawing on the doabs could outspend a hill raja indefinitely.
- And the hills were rich in a specific way. Kangra and Jammu held accumulated temple and treasury wealth of exactly the kind Part Five described.
- It set the misls against each other. Kanhaiya expansion into Kangra was a threat to the Sukerchakias, and both sought hill allies against the other.
- The rajas learned to use the divisions. Sansar Chand recovered his fort by picking a side, not by fighting.
- It pointed the armies away from the frontier. Every campaign in the hills was a campaign not spent watching the Khyber.
- And it produced the war in the next section.
Charat Singh Sukerchakia died at Jammu in 1770 because his own matchlock burst when he fired it.
It is a small death and an unglamorous one, and it is worth a page because of what it says about the armies
of this period.
The misls were the best light cavalry in Asia. Qazi Nur Muhammad, watching them in 1765 from the other
side, said so in a poem written to insult them. They could move faster than anybody, live off nothing, and
appear where they were not expected.
What they could not do was make guns. Firearms in the eighteenth-century Punjab were bought,
captured, or made by local smiths working without the metallurgy or the quality control of a state arsenal.
A matchlock that burst in the hands of the head of a misl is a piece of equipment that nobody had tested,
because there was nobody whose job that was.
Hold that fact, because it is the seed of Part Thirteen. Ranjit Singh — this man’s grandson — spent his
reign fixing exactly this problem. He hired European officers, built arsenals at Lahore, cast his own
artillery, and turned the finest irregular cavalry in Asia into a regular army with infantry, guns and a
foundry.
And he did it because he had watched what an army of horsemen could not do. Twelve misls could take a
province. They could not take a fortress, could not stand against artillery, and could not stop a
European-officered brigade — which is what George Thomas demonstrated on their south-
eastern border in the 1790s, and what the British demonstrated to everybody else in India in the
same decade.
The grandfather was killed by a bad gun in 1770. The grandson had two hundred pieces of his own artillery
by the 1830s.
5Delhi, March 1783 LIKELY
The Sikhs took the Red Fort, sat in the hall of audience, negotiated, built seven shrines, and went home. It is the strangest occupation in this book.
When: March 1783; the withdrawal towards the end of the year.
Where: Delhi — the Red Fort and the city.
Who: Baghel Singh Karorasinghia, Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, against the government of Shah Alam II.
The evidence: Persian and Sikh accounts; and seven buildings that are still standing and in daily use.
What happened
1. A very large Sikh force came down the Grand Trunk Road in the early months of 1783 — the figures given
- run to tens of thousands of horse — and there was nothing between it and the capital.
- They entered Delhi in March and occupied the Red Fort. The chiefs went into the Diwan-i-Am, the imperial hall of audience.
- And then they negotiated. Shah Alam II, who was emperor of India in name and of very little in fact, opened talks — mediated, in the accounts, by Begum Samru of Sardhana, one of the most remarkable figures of the period, who had risen from a dancing girl to the ruler of a state with its own European-officered army.
- The terms were unlike any other in this book. Baghel Singh was to remain in Delhi with a body of troops; he was to receive a share of the city’s customs revenue; and he was to be permitted to build shrines at the sites associated with the Gurus.
- He built seven, over the following months — including Sis Ganj where Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed in 1675, Rakab Ganj where his body was cremated, and Bangla Sahib where Guru Har Krishan had died in 1664.
- And then he went home. By the end of 1783 the Sikh force had left Delhi.
It is worth listing what an eighteenth-century army in possession of Delhi would normally have done, because none of
it happened.
They did not sack the city. Nadir Shah had in 1739 and Abdali had in 1757, both within living memory, and both had
stripped it. The city was assessed, not looted.
They did not depose the emperor. Shah Alam II remained on the throne he was already only nominally occupying.
They did not annex anything. No territory changed hands; the arrangement was a revenue share and a building
permit.
And they did not stay. The capital of India was in their hands and they left it within the year.
The reason is the reason this book has been circling since Part Ten. The misls had no state-building project. They
were not a dynasty seeking a throne; they were twelve autonomous chiefs with territories in the Punjab, who had come
down the road because they could. What Baghel Singh actually wanted was the sites — and having secured them, there
was nothing else in Delhi worth the cost of holding it.
- There was no government. Shah Alam II had no treasury and no army; the Marathas who protected him were between commitments.
- They had the road. The Grand Trunk Road from the Punjab to Delhi was in Sikh hands the whole way after 1764.
- They came as one force. This was a gurmata operation with three of the great chiefs in it — one of the last times the confederacy acted together.
- And nothing was defended. The Red Fort was entered, not stormed.
- Delhi is not in the Punjab. Holding it means garrisoning a hostile capital two hundred miles from your own districts.
- The Marathas would have come. Mahadji Scindia was reasserting Maratha control over the emperor at exactly this period and would not have left it alone.
- Twelve equal chiefs could not have divided it. Who governs Delhi is not a question the misl system could answer.
- And the objective had been achieved. They came for the sites.
Two things happened in the Red Fort in March 1783 that between them say everything about what the
misls were.
The first is a refusal. Sikh tradition records that in the Diwan-i-Am, some of the sardars seated Jassa
Singh Ahluwalia on the imperial throne and proclaimed him king — and that Jassa Singh Ramgarhia
objected, on the ground that the Khalsa had no king and was not going to acquire one in somebody else’s
palace. The tradition has Ahluwalia stepping down.
Take the scene as STORY; nobody was taking minutes. But note that a community which could
have remembered its greatest chief being crowned emperor of India chose instead to remember
him being told to get off the chair. That is a deliberate choice about what the thing was for, and it is the
same choice as Banda leaving his name off the coin in Part Ten.
The second is a theft. Jassa Singh Ramgarhia — the man who had just objected to the throne — had a
large stone slab from the fort prised out and carried to Amritsar on carts. It is said to be the slab on
which Mughal emperors sat or were invested. It is in the Ramgarhia Bunga, beside the tank, and you can
see it.
So the same man refused the throne and took the furniture.
That is not a contradiction. It is exactly the point. They would not have a king, and they would take the
emperor’s stone four hundred kilometres up the Grand Trunk Road and put it next to the pool at Amritsar,
where anybody could stand on it.
6Achal, 1782 — The Misls Turn on Each Other LIKELY
A battle between two Sikh armies near Batala killed one man, and the widow’s response created the Sikh empire.
When: 1782.
Where: Achal, near Batala in the Majha country.
Who: Mahan Singh Sukerchakia and Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, against Jai Singh Kanhaiya.
The evidence: Sikh accounts; the marriage that followed is documented.
What happened
1. The Kanhaiya misl had become the strongest in the Punjab. Jai Singh Kanhaiya held a great swathe of the
- Majha and the Kangra hills, and had driven the Ramgarhias out of their territories altogether.
- So the others combined against him. Mahan Singh Sukerchakia — Ranjit Singh’s father — allied with the exiled Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, and they brought Jai Singh to battle at Achal.
- Jai Singh’s only son, Gurbaksh Singh Kanhaiya, was killed in the fighting.
- The Kanhaiya power was broken — not destroyed, but permanently reduced, and the Ramgarhias got their lands back.
- And then Gurbaksh Singh’s widow did something nobody expected.
The widow was Sada Kaur, and she is one of the most consequential people in the history of the Punjab. She is also, in
most accounts of this period, a paragraph.
Her husband had been killed by Mahan Singh Sukerchakia. She had a young daughter, Mehtab Kaur, an ageing father-
in-law, and a misl that had just lost its heir and half its standing.
She proposed a marriage. Her daughter to Ranjit Singh, the son of the man responsible for her husband’s death.
The betrothal was agreed in the mid-1780s and the marriage took place in 1796. Jai Singh Kanhaiya, who had lost his
son, accepted an alliance with the family that killed him — because the alternative was watching the Kanhaiya misl be
dismantled by the Sukerchakias and the Ramgarhias over the following decade.
What Sada Kaur bought with that marriage was the survival of her misl. What she gave Ranjit Singh was the
Kanhaiya army.
When he rode on Lahore in July 1799, aged eighteen, the troops behind him were substantially hers, and she was with
them. She was his mother-in-law, his principal ally and, for the first decade of his rise, his indispensable partner.
He dispossessed her in 1821 and she died in confinement. This book will get to that in Part Thirteen, and it is not a
story that reflects well on him.
- Success creates a coalition against you. The Kanhaiyas had grown too large for the other misls to tolerate, exactly as the misl system was designed to prevent.
- The Ramgarhias had a grievance and nothing to lose. Six years of exile makes a highly motivated ally.
- And the death of one man decided it. Gurbaksh Singh was the Kanhaiya heir and the misl’s future, and it ended with him.
- The principle. Two Sikh armies fought each other in the Majha, sixteen years after they had beaten Ahmad Shah Abdali together.
- The assembly’s authority. No gurmata could have stopped this and none was attempted.
- The habit of combining. After Achal, alliance between misls means an alliance against another misl.
- And it made a super-misl inevitable. If the strongest can be brought down by a coalition, the winner of the last coalition becomes the strongest — and in 1799 that was the Sukerchakias.
Look at the arithmetic of what Sada Kaur did, because it is one of the coldest and most successful political
calculations in this book.
Her position in 1782: husband dead, no son, a father-in-law past his best, a misl that had just been beaten
by two others and would be picked apart by them within a decade. In the ordinary course of eighteenth-
century Punjab politics, the Kanhaiya territories would have been divided between the Sukerchakias and
the Ramgarhias by about 1795.
Her move: offer her daughter to the killer’s son. Convert the enemy into a family. Trade a claim for revenge
— which was worth nothing, since she had no army to enforce it — for a permanent alliance with the
rising power.
The result: the Kanhaiya misl survived. And when the moment came, the young man she had made her
son-in-law had the horses and the men to take Lahore.
This book has spent twelve parts describing coalitions that failed because nobody could combine — the ten
kings on the Ravi, the Malavas and Kshudrakas, Anandapala’s confederacy, Prithviraj at Tarain, the hill
rajas, the misls themselves. The one alliance in this part that actually holds and produces something
is arranged by a widow with no army, using the only instrument available to a woman in that
society, against the man who had made her one.
Marriage as statecraft is not new — Chandragupta and Seleucus in Part Three, Akbar and the Rajputs in
Part Eight. What is unusual here is who is doing it, and that she was operating from the losing side.
She got twenty-two years out of it, and then he took her lands.
7The Ramgarhia Exile, 1776–1783 LIKELY
One of the twelve misls was driven out of the Punjab entirely by the other eleven’s indifference, spent seven years in exile, and walked back in.
When: Driven out around 1776; returned in 1783.
Where: Out of the Bari Doab into the Malwa and the country towards Hansi and the Jumna.
Who: Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, against the Kanhaiya and Ahluwalia misls.
The evidence: Sikh accounts; his return and restoration are well attested.
What happened
1. The Ramgarhia misl was one of the strongest, holding Batala and a large territory in the Bari Doab. Its
- chief had been a builder and a soldier for thirty years — the man of Part Eleven’s Ram Rauni siege, who took his name from the fort he rebuilt.
- Jai Singh Kanhaiya and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia combined against him around 1776 and drove him out of his territories.
- The other misls did not intervene. This is the point of the section: a founding chief of the confederacy was expelled from the Punjab and nine other governments declined to have a view.
- He spent seven years in the country south and east of the Sutlej, taking service and making alliances with local powers — the same Malwa and Hariana country where George Thomas would later build a kingdom.
- Achal changed everything. In 1782 Mahan Singh Sukerchakia allied with him against the Kanhaiyas, and after the battle he recovered his lands.
- And in 1783 he was in the Red Fort at Delhi, objecting to a coronation and removing a slab.
The expulsion of the Ramgarhias is the clearest single measure of what had happened to the confederacy between 1764
and 1776, and it is worth stating flatly.
In 1764 the misls took the Sirhind province together and divided it by agreement, and the division held. Part
Eleven called that the moment the oldest failure in this book was solved.
Twelve years later, two misls drove a third out of the country and nobody stopped them.
There was no mechanism to stop them. That is the whole trouble. The Sarbat Khalsa could pass a resolution; it had no
army of its own, no officers, no treasury and no way of enforcing anything against a chief who declined to comply. Its
authority had always rested on the fact that every chief needed every other chief, because Ahmad Shah
Abdali was coming back in the autumn.
Take that away and the assembly is a meeting.
This is the central finding of Part Twelve and it should be uncomfortable. The most successful political
institution in these sixteen parts — the one that survived the bounty years, two ghallugharas and nine invasions —
turned out to have been held together by the enemy.
- He was strong and in the way. Ramgarhia territory sat between Kanhaiya ambitions and the hills.
- Two misls against one. The arithmetic that the confederacy’s equality was supposed to prevent, and could not.
- And nobody’s interest was engaged. A quarrel in the Bari Doab was not a threat to a chief in the Malwa.
- Because the winners fell out. Kanhaiya success against the Ramgarhias frightened the Sukerchakias into an alliance with the exile.
- He kept his following. A misl is men, not land, and his men went with him into exile and came back with him.
- He was useful. Seven years of experience in the Malwa and Hariana made him valuable to anybody planning a campaign towards Delhi.
- And the system had no way of making an expulsion permanent any more than it had a way of preventing one.
Jassa Singh Ramgarhia was, by origin, a tarkhan — a carpenter, from a family of artisans. That is what the
name of his misl records, indirectly: he took it from a fort he rebuilt, and rebuilding was his trade before it
was his profession.
His career runs the length of Parts Ten to Twelve. He was in Mughal service as a young man; he changed
sides during the siege of Ram Rauni in 1748 and went into the fort; he rebuilt it afterwards and named
it Ramgarh; he fought Abdali; he held a great territory in the Bari Doab; he was driven out of the Punjab by
his own colleagues and spent seven years in exile; he came back, recovered everything, and in 1783 was
standing in the Diwan-i-Am at Delhi telling the commander-in-chief of the Dal Khalsa that the Khalsa did
not have kings.
He died in 1803, at about eighty, having outlived nearly everybody in this part.
Now the reason he belongs here. Look at what the Khalsa system had made possible. A carpenter’s son
commanded one of the twelve governments of the Punjab, on terms of formal equality with men from every
other background, and nobody in the confederacy thought it was remarkable enough to comment on.
Part Nine described what was done at Anandpur in 1699 — one name for everybody, initiation open to
anyone, caste removed from the qualification for command. This is what that looked like eighty years
later, in practice, as an ordinary fact about who was running the country.
His bunga is still standing at Amritsar, with two minarets, and the Delhi slab inside it.
8Mahadji Scindia and the Maratha Return, 1785–1794 LIKELY
Twenty-four years after Panipat the Marathas were back at Delhi — and this time they brought European officers and did not try to take the Punjab.
When: 1785–1794, the period of Maratha dominance at Delhi.
Where: The country between the Jumna and the Sutlej — the Cis-Sutlej states and Hariana.
Who: Mahadji Scindia, with the brigades of Benoît de Boigne, against the Cis-Sutlej misls.
The evidence: Maratha correspondence, British reports, and Sikh accounts.
What had changed
The Maratha confederacy had been broken at Panipat in 1761 but not destroyed, and by the 1780s it had recovered
enough to be the dominant power in northern India again. Mahadji Scindia — one of the survivors of Panipat —
made himself the protector of the emperor at Delhi and effectively ran the Mughal court.
And he had learned the lesson of 1761. His army was not the old Maratha light cavalry. He hired a Savoyard
officer, Benoît de Boigne, and raised brigades of regular infantry, drilled in European fashion, with disciplined
artillery.
These formations were the most effective troops in India outside the Company’s army, and they changed
what was possible. Cavalry — even the finest in Asia — cannot break a square of trained infantry with guns.
Everybody in northern India worked this out in the 1790s, and the ones who worked it out fastest are in Part
Thirteen.
What happened
1. Scindia’s forces pushed north-west into the country the Cis-Sutlej misls had taken after Sirhind in 1764.
2. There were clashes and there were negotiations, repeatedly, through the later 1780s. Neither side wanted a
- war of conquest. 3. The Sikhs raided; the Marathas garrisoned. A pattern familiar from every frontier in this book.
- And agreements were reached — several times — and did not hold long, because the misls were twelve governments and no single signature bound them.
- Scindia died in 1794 and Maratha attention turned south, where a much larger problem was developing.
This is where the confederacy’s structure stops being an internal inconvenience and becomes a foreign policy disaster.
A treaty requires somebody who can sign it. Scindia’s agents, and later the British, faced the same difficulty every
time: there was no Sikh government. There were twelve chiefs in the Punjab, another dozen smaller ones south of the
Sutlej, and any agreement made with one of them bound one of them.
The Marathas dealt with it by making separate arrangements with individual chiefs, which meant playing them against
each other — and that suited the Marathas perfectly well.
It suited the British even better, and they were watching. The Cis-Sutlej chiefs’ habit of making individual
arrangements with a stronger outside power is exactly how the Sutlej line gets drawn in 1809 in Part Thirteen, and how
the Cis-Sutlej states end up under British protection while the Punjab proper stays independent.
Twelve equal governments is a magnificent way to survive an invasion and a catastrophic way to conduct
diplomacy.
- The emperor was worth having. Legitimacy at Delhi was still worth something, and nobody else was providing it.
- De Boigne’s brigades. Regular infantry and artillery gave them something the Punjab had no answer to.
- And there was no opposing state. The Punjab had twelve governments and the Ganges plain had none at all.
- The Marathas had a bigger enemy. The Company was expanding, and after 1798 the war with Tipu Sultan and then with the Marathas themselves consumed everything.
- The Sikhs had nothing to gain. Territory beyond the Jumna was not defensible and nobody’s misl needed it.
- Neither could deliver a knockout. Cavalry cannot break brigades; brigades cannot catch cavalry.
- And the Cis-Sutlej chiefs preferred ambiguity. Being courted by two powers is more comfortable than belonging to one.
There is something worth noticing about the 1780s and 1790s in northern India that is easy to miss because
it happens gradually and in the wrong uniform.
The European officer becomes the decisive military commodity, and almost none of them are
working for European governments.
Benoît de Boigne was a Savoyard who had served in the Russian army and was captured by the Turks, and
he raised and trained the brigades that made Mahadji Scindia the master of northern India. Begum
Samru of Sardhana — who mediated between the Sikhs and the emperor at Delhi in 1783 — ran a small
state with a European-officered force of her own. Pierre Cuillier-Perron, a French sailor’s son, ended up
commanding Scindia’s northern army. George Thomas, an Irish deserter, is War Eight.
They were mercenaries. They served whoever paid, they changed employers, and several of them ended up
fighting the countrymen they had left.
What they carried was not a flag but a method: infantry drilled to fire in volleys and stand under fire,
artillery served by trained crews, and pay delivered on time so that neither would go home.
That method was going to decide everything. It had already beaten the French in Bengal, it was about to
beat Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam, and within twenty years it would beat the Marathas who had hired it.
And the ruler who understood it best was an eighteen-year-old in the Punjab who had not yet
taken Lahore. By 1822 Ranjit Singh had French and Italian officers of Napoleon’s armies training his
infantry, and it is why Part Fourteen takes two wars and eight battles rather than one afternoon.
9George Thomas, 1798–1801 — The Irish King of Hariana LIKELY
A sailor from Tipperary who deserted his ship built a kingdom on the Punjab’s south-eastern border, cast his own cannon, minted his own coin, and announced that he intended to conquer the Punjab and give it to Britain.
The French-officered Maratha brigades — and Thomas lost to Europeans, not WON BY
to Sikhs
- Independent from about 1798; destroyed in 1801–02.
- Hansi and Hisar in the Hariana country, on the border of the Cis-Sutlej Sikh states.
- George Thomas, against the Sikh chiefs of the Malwa, and finally against Perron’s brigades.
- His own memoir, dictated to William Francklin — an outside account of the misls by a man who fought them.
Who he was
1. He was an Irish sailor who deserted the Royal Navy at Madras in the early 1780s and went inland to sell the
- only skill he had, which was gunnery.
- He served a succession of Indian employers — southern chiefs, then Begum Samru at Sardhana, then a Maratha commander — rising each time.
- In 1798 he set up on his own account in the arid Hariana country between the Jumna and the Sutlej, made Hansi his capital, and governed it.
- And he did it properly. He restored the town, raised revenue, drilled infantry, cast his own artillery in his own foundry, and struck his own coinage.
- He fought the Sikhs repeatedly, raiding into the Cis-Sutlej states and being raided in turn, with mixed results across several campaigns.
- He was destroyed by other Europeans. Perron, commanding Scindia’s northern brigades, sent a French-officered force against him in 1801; he was besieged at Hansi and surrendered on terms at the beginning of 1802. 7. He set out for Calcutta and died on the way, at Berhampore, in August 1802 — and on the journey he dictated his story to a Company officer named William Francklin, who published it.
Thomas is a useful witness for the same reason as Qazi Nur Muhammad in Part Eleven: he fought the Sikhs, he did
not like them, and he was describing them for a foreign government.
What he reports is a country of many chiefs and no ruler; excellent cavalry available in very large numbers; almost no
infantry worth the name; and artillery that was scarce, poorly served and inferior to anything a European-officered
force could put in the field.
He also stated an intention that should be read carefully. He proposed — and told the Company so — that with
British support he could conquer the Punjab, and that he intended to hoist British colours over Lahore.
It was the boast of a man looking for a patron and it came to nothing. But it is the first time in this book that
anybody proposes a British conquest of the Punjab, and it is 1799.
Forty-seven years later, in Part Fourteen, it happens.
- There was no government in Hariana. Between the Marathas at Delhi, the Sikh chiefs to the north and nothing to the west, the country was open.
- He had the method. Drilled infantry and his own guns against irregular cavalry, in country where cavalry had nowhere to hide.
- He paid his men. The one thing that separates an army from a band, and half the powers in this part could not manage it.
- And he governed rather than raided. Hansi was administered, which meant it produced revenue, which meant he could keep paying.
- He had no state behind him. No recruiting ground, no allies, no legitimacy, and nowhere to retreat to.
- He made enemies on every side at once — Sikhs, Marathas, and the Company’s rivals among the French officers.
- And he met his own method coming the other way. Perron’s brigades were what Thomas’s brigade was, only larger.
George Thomas’s kingdom is a curiosity, and his memoir is not.
Read what he actually reported to his English readers about the military situation in the Punjab in 1799,
and read it as the misls should have read it.
The finest irregular cavalry in Asia, in enormous numbers, belonging to a dozen governments
that would not combine. Almost no trained infantry. Artillery that was old, scarce and badly served. No
arsenal, no foundry, no drill, and no fortress that could stand against a properly conducted siege.
And on the other side of the ledger: one Irishman with a few battalions of drilled infantry and guns
he had cast himself had made himself a king in country the Sikh chiefs regarded as theirs, and it
had taken a French-officered army to remove him.
That is not an insult to the misls. Their cavalry had beaten Ahmad Shah Abdali by refusing to fight him. It
is a statement that the thing they were good at had stopped being the thing that decided wars, and that the
change had happened within one generation.
The same demonstration was being given everywhere in India in the same decade. De Boigne’s brigades
made Scindia master of the north. The Company’s sepoys, drilled the same way, were about to
take Seringapatam.
Only one man in the Punjab acted on it. Within a few years of taking Lahore, Ranjit Singh was building
an arsenal, hiring European officers, and turning horsemen into infantry — and he did it because he had
grown up on the border of George Thomas’s kingdom watching what a few battalions and some decent guns
could do.
10Zaman Shah, 1795–1799 LIKELY
Abdali’s grandson came down the road three times and found a province with twelve governments, no army and nobody to negotiate with. It should have been easy.
When: 1795, 1797 and 1798–99.
Where: Down the Grand Trunk Road to Lahore, twice occupying it.
Who: Zaman Shah Durrani, grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali.
The evidence: Afghan, Sikh and — significantly — British records.
What happened
1. He came in 1795 and reached the Punjab before turning back.
2. He came again at the start of 1797, took Lahore, and withdrew within weeks because of trouble at home.
3. He came a third time at the end of 1798, took Lahore again, and this time meant to stay.
4. And the misls did what they had always done. They dispersed, refused battle, harassed his
- communications, cut off his foraging parties, and waited. The method of Part Ten and Part Eleven, applied to a lesser man than Abdali.
- Then his brother rebelled in Afghanistan and Persian pressure developed on his western frontier, and in January 1799 he abandoned the Punjab and went home fast.
- His artillery got stuck. Crossing the Jhelum in flood, a number of his guns went into the river and had to be left.
Zaman Shah’s invasions matter for a reason that has nothing to do with the Punjab, and it is the first appearance in this
book of a pattern that dominates the last four parts.
The British were frightened of him. An Afghan army marching on Delhi, at a moment when the Company was
fighting Tipu Sultan in the south and worrying about French influence, looked like a serious threat to a position that
was not yet secure.
So Calcutta acted at a distance. In 1799 the Company sent Captain John Malcolm on a mission to Persia, with the
explicit object of encouraging the Persian court to threaten Zaman Shah’s western frontier and keep him occupied at
home.
It is a small episode and it is the shape of everything that follows. The British did not fight Zaman Shah. They
arranged for somebody else to distract him, from two thousand kilometres away, using diplomacy and
money.
Part Fourteen is full of this. The Company’s method in the Punjab was never primarily military; it was treaties,
subsidies, residents, boundary lines and the careful management of other people’s succession disputes. The first move
in that long game was made in 1799, in Tehran, about a man who had just left Lahore.
- The old method still worked. Disperse, refuse battle, harass, wait for the season to end.
- He was not his grandfather. Zaman Shah had a divided kingdom behind him and could never stay a full campaigning season.
- The country would not feed him. Foraging parties in a hostile Punjab do not come back.
- And Persia and his brother did the rest.
- The frontier was undefended. He reached Lahore twice in two years without fighting a battle for it.
- Twelve governments could not concentrate. No gurmata was passed, no combined army took the field, and no chief could speak for the province.
- Refusing battle is not a policy when you hold cities. Lahore fell twice because dispersing means abandoning it.
- And the Punjab was living on the invader’s weakness. A stronger Afghan king would have kept it, and everybody in the province knew it.
When Zaman Shah broke off his third invasion in January 1799 and went home, his army crossed the
Jhelum in a hurry and in flood, and a number of his heavy guns were lost in the river.
The tradition — and it is well attested enough to be worth telling — is that a young Sukerchakia chief
named Ranjit Singh, who had been harassing the Afghan columns, had the guns recovered from the
riverbed and sent back to Zaman Shah.
And that in return, or at least soon afterwards, Zaman Shah confirmed him as governor of Lahore — a
city the Afghan king did not hold, in a province he had just abandoned, in favour of a young man who had
not yet taken it.
Treat the causal link as STORY. The recovery of the guns is reported; the exchange is a neat piece of
tradition and the timing is convenient.
But look at the politics, because whether or not it happened exactly like that, the calculation
behind it is real and it is very shrewd.
An eighteen-year-old chief of a middling misl wanted Lahore. Taking it by force was possible; taking it
with a piece of paper from the King of Afghanistan was better, because it converted a raid into a
succession and gave every other misl one fewer argument.
He got the guns out of a river and turned them into a title.
Part Thirteen is forty years of that.
11Lahore, 7 July 1799 CERTAIN
The citizens of Lahore wrote to an eighteen-year-old and asked him to come and take the city off the men who were holding it. He came.
When: 7 July 1799.
Where: Lahore.
Who: Ranjit Singh of the Sukerchakia misl, with Sada Kaur and the Kanhaiya forces, against the three Bhangi sardars.
The evidence: Persian, Sikh and later British accounts; the invitation is documented.
What happened
1. Lahore had been held since 1765 by three Bhangi chiefs governing it between them. By 1799 the
- arrangement had degenerated: the surviving sardars were unpopular, the city was badly administered, and Zaman Shah’s two occupations had shown that nobody was defending it.
- The leading men of the city sent a petition. The signatories named in the accounts include Muslim notables and a Hindu — merchants, officials and religious figures — asking Ranjit Singh to come and take over.
- He came with the Kanhaiya forces. Sada Kaur — his mother-in-law, the widow from Achal in 1782 — brought her misl’s troops and came with the army herself.
- A gate was opened for them. The accounts differ on which; the point is that it was opened.
- The fort held out briefly and surrendered. One of the Bhangi sardars gave it up on terms.
- He was eighteen years old, blind in one eye from childhood smallpox, and could barely read.
This book has a pattern that it has stated as a law, in Part Seven and again in Part Five, and July 1799 is the one time it
runs the other way.
Ambhi invited Alexander in Part Two to settle a score with Porus, and lost his independence. Daulat Khan Lodi
invited Babur in Part Seven to remove Ibrahim Lodi, and died a prisoner while a foreign dynasty took the country for
three centuries. Every invitation in these twelve parts has been extended to an outsider, and every one of them
has ended the same way.
The petition of 1799 went to a man born in Gujranwala, forty miles away.
And notice who signed it. The men who asked a Sikh chief to come and govern Lahore included Muslim notables of
the city — in a province that had spent the previous century in a religious war, thirty-four years after a Sikh
confederacy had taken the city from an Afghan king.
They were not making a statement about religion. They wanted the streets policed and the revenue collected by
somebody competent, and the three men in possession were not doing it.
That is worth holding on to for Part Thirteen, because the state Ranjit Singh built ran on exactly that principle — a Sikh
maharaja with a Muslim foreign minister, a Hindu finance department, European generals and an army recruited from
everybody — and it started with a petition from people who wanted the bins emptied.
- He was asked. Which converted an attack into an arrival.
- He had Sada Kaur’s army. The marriage arranged in 1782 delivered exactly what it had been designed to deliver.
- He had a colourable title. Whatever passed between him and Zaman Shah, he could claim the Afghan king’s confirmation, and nobody could easily contradict it.
- And the Bhangis were finished. The strongest misl of 1770 had been declining for twenty-five years and could not defend its own capital.
- No mechanism existed. The Sarbat Khalsa had not bound anybody for a decade; there was no body that could have forbidden it and no army that could have enforced a prohibition.
- Every other misl had its own quarrel. The Ramgarhias, Kanhaiyas, Ahluwalias and Nakais were all pursuing their own interests, and several were his allies.
- The Bhangis had no friends. Twenty years of misl politics had left them with nobody willing to march for them.
- And a great many people were tired. After a century of war, a young man with an army who promised order was not an unattractive proposition.
Consider the person who rode into Lahore on 7 July 1799, because on paper he is not an obvious candidate
for anything.
He was eighteen. He had lost an eye to smallpox as a small child and his face was marked by it. He could
barely read — his education had been neglected during a chaotic minority, and he remained functionally
illiterate, having documents read to him for the rest of his life.
His father Mahan Singh had died when he was about ten, leaving him the chief of the Sukerchakia misl
— which was not one of the great ones. The Bhangis were larger, the Kanhaiyas had been stronger, the
Ahluwalias had the prestige, and the Ramgarhias had the reputation. His inheritance was a middling
territory around Gujranwala.
What he had instead was an alliance made for him when he was a small boy by a woman whose husband
his father had killed, and an instinct for the difference between force and legitimacy that most rulers in
this book never develop at all.
He did not storm Lahore. He was invited, arrived with his mother-in-law’s cavalry, accepted a
surrender on terms, and could show a piece of paper from the King of Afghanistan. Every element
of that was chosen.
Two years later, on Vaisakhi 1801, he had himself proclaimed Maharaja — a title no Sikh had ever taken, in
a tradition that had made a constitutional principle out of not having kings, in the city where the Bhangis
had governed by committee.
And on his coins, from first to last, he put the names of the Gurus and never his own.
He ruled for forty years. Part Thirteen is what he did with them.
12The Assembly That Stopped Meeting LIKELY
Not a battle. The failure of the most successful political institution in this book, and why it failed.
- Effective through the 1760s; decaying through the 1770s and 1780s; over by the 1790s.
- Amritsar — or rather, increasingly, not at Amritsar.
- The Sarbat Khalsa, and the twelve chiefs who stopped attending it.
- The absence of recorded gurmatas after the 1780s, and the wars in Wars Five and Six.
How it decayed
1. 1748–1767: it works. Gurmatas allocate commands, divide conquered territory, decide whether to accept an
- Afghan king’s terms, and bind twelve equal chiefs — because Abdali is coming back and every chief needs every other chief.
- 1767: the pressure stops. Abdali crosses the Indus for the last time.
- 1772: territory becomes property. Multan is taken by one misl and is that misl’s business. The habit of common enterprise starts to look like an option rather than a necessity.
- 1776: a founding chief is expelled and nobody intervenes. The assembly’s authority is tested and found not to exist.
- 1782: two Sikh armies fight a pitched battle at Achal. No gurmata is passed against it because there is no point.
- 1783: the last great combined operation — Delhi — and even that is three chiefs rather than twelve.
- 1790s: the assemblies are called and not attended. Zaman Shah invades three times and no combined army takes the field.
Part Eleven claimed that the Sarbat Khalsa had solved the oldest problem in this book — the Indian coalition that
cannot agree on a commander. Twelve parts of failures, from the ten kings on the Ravi to Prithviraj at Tarain, and here
at last was a working federal system.
Part Twelve has to withdraw half of that claim.
The system did not solve the problem. It suspended it, for as long as an external threat made cooperation
cheaper than defection. The gurmata bound a chief who wished to be bound, and between 1748 and 1767 every chief
wished to be, because the alternative was Ahmad Shah Abdali.
Take the enemy away and the arithmetic reverses. A chief who complies gains nothing; a chief who defects gains a
district. And there is no army, no treasury, no court and no officer of the confederacy to make him pay for it.
This is not a Punjabi failing and it is not unique to the misls. It is the standing weakness of every confederacy in
history that has no central coercive power, and the same decades that saw the Sarbat Khalsa stop binding anybody
saw thirteen states on the other side of the world discover the identical problem and write a constitution about it.
The misls did not write one. What they got instead was a maharaja.
- A single ruler with a standing army. Which is what every other state in this book had always had, and which the Khalsa had deliberately refused for a century.
- Coercion. Ranjit Singh absorbed the misls one at a time — by marriage, by treaty, by purchase and by force — and by 1820 there was one government in the Punjab.
- And it worked, militarily. No confederacy could have built the army of Part Thirteen, and no confederacy could have held the Punjab for forty years.
- The assembly. Ranjit Singh did not convene the Sarbat Khalsa. The institution that had governed the Khalsa since 1748 simply stopped.
- The principle of no king. Held from 1699 to 1801, asserted in the Red Fort in 1783, and abandoned on a Vaisakhi in Lahore.
- The distributed command. One ruler is one point of failure — and Part Fourteen begins with his death.
- The chiefs. Sada Kaur, who made him, was dispossessed in 1821 and died in confinement.
Here is the argument of this part in one paragraph, and it should be read twice.
The Khalsa was at its most united when it was being hunted, at its most disciplined when it had
nothing, and at its most effective when it was losing.
The bounty years produced the Dal Khalsa. The Ghallugharas produced the Diwali assembly of 1762. Nine
Afghan invasions produced the conquest of the province. Every institution described in Parts Ten and
Eleven was built under a pressure that would have destroyed anything less well designed.
Then in 1767 the pressure stopped, and within twenty years the same men were fighting each other over
Batala.
This is not a story about the Punjab. It is one of the most reliable findings in the whole of political
history and it turns up in these sixteen parts again and again. Yashodharman’s coalition beat
Mihirakula in Part Four and dissolved the moment it won. The Greek kingdoms of Part Three could not be
beaten by anybody and spent sixty years destroying each other. The Afghan nobility of Part Seven was
consultative and effective under Bahlul Lodi and tore itself apart the moment it had no enemy.
Solidarity is easiest to sustain against something. The misls had an unusually good system for it, and it
worked for nineteen years, and then it did not have a job to do.
And the thing that came next held the Punjab for forty years, built the last independent army in India, and
collapsed inside ten years of one man’s death — which is Parts Thirteen and Fourteen, and which is the
other half of the same lesson.
131799 — The Year the Map Changed CERTAIN
Two months apart, the last independent power in the south was destroyed and the last independent power in the north was founded. Everything in the final four parts of this book is in that sentence.
- 4 May 1799 at Seringapatam; 7 July 1799 at Lahore.
- Mysore, and the Punjab — three thousand kilometres apart.
- The East India Company, and Ranjit Singh.
- Both events are documented in detail from several directions.
The two events
1. On 4 May 1799, Seringapatam was stormed and Tipu Sultan was killed in the breach. Mysore had been
- the most formidable Indian opponent the Company had faced — with a modern army, French officers, rocket artillery and a ruler who understood exactly what he was fighting. It took four wars and thirty years, and it ended in a morning.
- On 7 July 1799, Ranjit Singh entered Lahore.
- With Mysore gone, the Company’s only serious rivals were the Marathas — and the Marathas were destroyed in two wars over the following twenty years, at Assaye in 1803 and finally in 1818.
- Which left one independent power of any size in India, and it was in the Punjab.
It is worth setting out what the last four parts of this history are going to be about, because 1799 is where the shape of it
is fixed.
Part Thirteen: forty years in which Ranjit Singh builds a state and an army from Peshawar to the Sutlej — the only
power in India that the Company treats as an equal and signs a border treaty with rather than a subsidiary alliance.
Part Fourteen: what happens to that state ten years after he dies.
And Parts Fifteen and Sixteen: what a province does when it has been annexed.
The reason the Punjab is last is geography, and this book has been explaining it since Part One. It is the furthest thing
from Calcutta. The Company came in by sea, took Bengal in the 1760s, worked up the Ganges, dealt with Mysore and
the Marathas, and reached the Sutlej in 1809 — by which time there was a real state on the other side of it.
Forty years of independence, bought by one man’s ability and by two thousand kilometres of distance.
- Drilled infantry and disciplined artillery, paid on time out of the revenues of Bengal — the method Part Twelve has watched arrive with de Boigne, Perron and George Thomas.
- Sea power and money. Reinforcement, credit and supply that no Indian state could match.
- One decision-making body. Against a subcontinent of rulers who could not combine — the failure this book has documented in every part since the first.
- And they made treaties as instruments of conquest. Subsidiary alliances turned allies into dependants without a battle being fought.
- Distance. The single largest factor, and the least glamorous.
- One ruler who understood the method and copied it. Ranjit Singh built the only Indian army of the period that could stand against the Company’s, and he did it deliberately.
- And he never fought them. Forty years of scrupulous treaty observance on the Sutlej line, which is the most underrated achievement in Part Thirteen.
- Then he died, and it took the British nine years.
On 4 May 1799, a British storming party went through a breach at Seringapatam and Tipu Sultan died
fighting in a gateway with his own troops. He had been the most dangerous enemy the Company had, and
he was the last ruler in southern India with the capacity to be one.
Sixty-four days later, on 7 July, an eighteen-year-old rode into Lahore.
Neither man had heard of the other’s day. News between Mysore and the Punjab took months and there
was no reason for anybody to connect them.
But between those two dates the map of India was set for the next half-century. One power had
removed its last southern rival; another had just been founded at the opposite corner of the subcontinent,
and it would be the only thing left on the board.
And there is one more thing about 1799 worth ending on, because this book has been keeping track of it for
twelve parts.
George Thomas, in Hariana that same year, was telling the Company that with a little support he
could conquer the Punjab and hoist British colours over Lahore.
He was a deserter with four battalions and a foundry, and it was the boast of a man looking for a patron,
and it came to nothing at all.
It was also, precisely, the plan. It took forty-seven years, two wars, and a Punjabi army that fought
better than anything the British met in India — and in 1849 the colours went up over Lahore.
That is Part Fourteen. Part Thirteen is the forty years in between, and they are the best years this province
has in the whole of this book.
14The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Thirteen
1. A confederacy without an enemy dissolves. The Sarbat Khalsa bound twelve equal chiefs for nineteen years
- and stopped binding anybody within a decade of the last Afghan invasion. Part Eleven credited the misls with solving the oldest failure in this book; Part Twelve has to withdraw half of that. The problem was suspended, not solved — and what solved it in the end was a king.
- The invitation pattern is broken, once. Ambhi invited Alexander; Daulat Khan invited Babur; both lost everything. In 1799 the notables of Lahore invited a man born forty miles away, and it produced the only independent Punjabi state in eight hundred and ninety-five years. The lesson is not about invitations. It is about whether the person you invite has somewhere else to go home to.
- The military commodity has changed and the Punjab has noticed late. De Boigne’s brigades, Perron’s army and George Thomas’s four battalions all demonstrated the same thing: drilled infantry with disciplined artillery beats any quantity of irregular cavalry. Part Thirteen is the story of one ruler doing something about it, and Part Fourteen is what happens when it is nearly enough.
- The women in this part are decisive and are usually a footnote. Sada Kaur made the alliance that created the Sikh empire, brought the army that took Lahore, and was dispossessed by the man she made. Begum Samru mediated between the Sikhs and the emperor of India. Watch for what happens to both of them, and to Jind Kaur in Part Fourteen.
- And the last independent power in India is now the Punjab. Mysore fell in May 1799; the Marathas fall in 1803 and 1818. After that there is one thing left on the map, and everything in the final four parts of this book is about the fifty years it takes to remove it.
Ranjit Singh, 1799–1839. Forty years, and the best of them in this whole book. Amritsar taken from the Bhangis in
1805 and the misls absorbed one by one; the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809, which fixes the Sutlej as the border with the
British and holds for thirty years; Kangra in 1809, Attock in 1813, Multan in 1818 — the door of Part Five’s book
finally shut from the Indian side — Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar, which no Indian power had held since the
Shahis lost it in 870. The Fauj-i-Khas drilled by Napoleon’s veterans; Hari Singh Nalwa on the frontier; the Khalsa army
that becomes the only force in Asia the Company privately admits it is not sure it can beat. And at the end, Jamrud in
1837, and a court that knows exactly what is coming when the Maharaja dies.
15Words Used in This Part
One of the twelve autonomous divisions of the Dal Khalsa, each with its own chief, army, territory and revenue. The word means, roughly, an equal or a like.
A chief. The head of a misl, in principle chosen by his followers and in practice hereditary within a generation.
A tower and residence built by a misl beside the tank at Amritsar, so that its chief had a house there for the assemblies. Dozens stood around the water; the Ramgarhia Bunga survives.
“Protection” — the share of the harvest paid by a village to a misl. By the 1770s it had become ordinary land revenue.
The general assembly at Amritsar at Vaisakhi and Diwali. Binding while the Afghans were coming; a meeting afterwards.
A binding resolution of the assembly. The last great one is the Delhi expedition of 1783.
The Sikh territories south and east of the Sutlej — Patiala, Nabha, Jind and the rest — divided after Sirhind in 1764, courted by the Marathas and later placed under British protection.
The house from which the Cis-Sutlej states of Patiala, Nabha and Jind descend.
The hall of public audience at the Red Fort in Delhi, occupied by the Sikh chiefs in March 1783.
Farzana, ruler of Sardhana — a woman who rose from a dancing girl to command a state with its own European-officered army, and who mediated between the Sikhs and Shah Alam II in 1783.
The Company’s principal instrument of expansion: a ruler accepts British troops, pays for them, and surrenders his foreign policy. Conquest by treaty.
Regular infantry drilled in European fashion with disciplined artillery, raised for Indian rulers by foreign officers — de Boigne for Scindia, Perron after him. The decisive military development of this period.
“The special army” — the regular corps Ranjit Singh built with European officers after 1822. It belongs to Part Thirteen and begins as an answer to the brigades in this one.
Sources used for this part
- George Forster, A Journey from Bengal to England — an eyewitness account of the Punjab in 1783 by a Company servant
- travelling in disguise, and the first substantial English description of the Sikhs
- Major James Browne, India Tracts (1788), containing the history of the Sikhs compiled for Warren Hastings
- Antoine Polier's account of the Sikhs, written for Calcutta in the 1780s
- William Francklin, Military Memoirs of Mr George Thomas (1803) — dictated by Thomas himself
- Persian histories of the later eighteenth century, and Sikh accounts including the Prachin Panth Prakash tradition
- Maratha correspondence and Company records for Mahadji Scindia, de Boigne and Zaman Shah
- The coins of the Sikh mints at Lahore and Amritsar, and the bungas and the Delhi slab at Amritsar
- Hari Ram Gupta on the misl period; Ganda Singh’s documentary collections; standard modern histories of the Sikh confederacy and of Ranjit Singh’s rise
The open questions here include: the exact list of the twelve misls, which varies between authorities; the date and
circumstances of Jassa Singh Ramgarhia’s expulsion and return; the year Sansar Chand recovered Kangra fort; whether
Zaman Shah actually conferred the governorship of Lahore on Ranjit Singh or whether the connection with the
recovered guns is a later tidy-up; and the identity of the signatories to the Lahore petition of 1799, which different
accounts give differently.
Two things about method.
First, this part is harder on the misls than the previous two were. Parts Ten and Eleven described an institution
that survived what should have destroyed it. Part Twelve describes the same institution failing at the first period of
peace it had ever known — a founding chief expelled with nobody objecting, two Sikh armies fighting a battle at Achal,
and an Afghan king walking into Lahore twice while twelve governments watched. That is what the evidence shows,
and a history that only records a community’s best decades is not a history.
Second, the European sources in this part were gathering intelligence. Forster travelled in disguise; Browne wrote
for Warren Hastings; Thomas was looking for a British patron and told his readers what he thought would interest
them. They are valuable precisely because they were assessing the Punjab as a target, and their assessments —
abundant cavalry, no infantry, poor artillery, no central government — were accurate, and were acted on in Part
Fourteen.