1The Forty Good Years
These are the best four decades the Punjab gets in this entire book, and the reason they end is written into how they began.
- n July 1799 an eighteen-year-old with one eye rode into Lahore because the citizens had asked him to.
- By 1839 he ruled from the Sutlej to the Khyber and from Multan to Ladakh: the Punjab, Multan, Kashmir,
Ithe Derajat, the hill states, Hazara and Peshawar. He had an army that European officers of Napoleon’s campaigns
had drilled and that British generals privately rated the most formidable in Asia. He had a treaty with the East
India Company that fixed a border and held for thirty years without a shot. He was the only ruler in India the
Company dealt with as an equal.
He was also the only thing holding it together, and he knew it.
Four things to hold on to
- He copied the winning method deliberately. Part Twelve watched de Boigne’s brigades, Perron’s army and an Irish deserter’s four battalions demonstrate that drilled infantry with disciplined artillery beats any quantity of irregular cavalry. Ranjit Singh is the only Indian ruler who watched the same demonstration and rebuilt his army around it in time.
- The state was not a Sikh state in the way people expect. The Maharaja was Sikh; his foreign minister was Muslim, his finance minister and his best general were Hindu, his prime minister was a Dogra Rajput, and his infantry was drilled by Frenchmen and Italians. The army recruited from everybody, including Muslims and Gurkhas and Purbias from the Ganges plain.
- The border with the British was the thing he never crossed. Thirty years of scrupulous treaty observance on the Sutlej is the most underrated achievement in this part — and, read another way, the trap he walked into in 1809.
- And there was no succession. One ruler, no council, no assembly, no institution that could act without him. Part Twelve described a confederacy that dissolved because it had no coercive centre. Part Thirteen describes a state that dissolved because it was nothing but one.
CERTAIN means contemporary evidence. LIKELY means well-attested and generally accepted. STORY
means tradition.
For the first time in this book, most of the evidence is CERTAIN. The Lahore court kept records. The British
Residency kept records. European officers in Sikh service wrote memoirs. Travellers — Burnes, Jacquemont, Osborne,
von Hügel, Moorcroft — came and described what they saw. There are portraits, treaties, muster rolls and photographs
of the men who fought in Part Fourteen.
Which creates the opposite problem to the one this book has had for twelve parts. Instead of too little, there is a
great deal — and a large share of it was written by British officers assessing a potential enemy. Their descriptions of the
Khalsa army are detailed, professional and, as Part Fourteen shows, largely accurate. They are also intelligence reports,
and this part reads them as such.
2Amritsar, 1802 — The Great Gun LIKELY
Three years after Lahore he took the holy city, and with it the largest piece of artillery in the Punjab — a gun that had already changed hands six times.
When: 1802.
Where: Amritsar — the Bhangi stronghold, and the common capital of Part Twelve.
Who: Ranjit Singh against Mai Sukhan, widow of the last effective Bhangi chief, holding the fort of Lohgarh.
The evidence: Court records, Sikh accounts — and the gun, which is still there.
What happened
1. Amritsar was Bhangi property. The misl that had held Lahore until 1799 still held the holy city, the fort
- beside it, and the great gun.
- Ranjit Singh came for it in 1802 with the Kanhaiya and Ahluwalia forces alongside his own — the same alliance that had taken Lahore.
- The resistance was brief. Mai Sukhan held the fort for a short time and gave it up on terms.
- He took the Zamzama. The largest gun in the Punjab, cast at Lahore in 1757, passed to him with the city.
- And then he did something no misl chief had ever done. He became the patron of the Harmandir Sahib — and over the following decades had it faced in marble and its upper storeys covered in gold plate. The building the world now calls the Golden Temple looks the way it does because of him.
Lahore was the capital, the fort, the treasury and the mint. It was where a ruler had to sit.
Amritsar was where legitimacy lived. The Sarbat Khalsa had met there since 1748. Every misl had a bunga beside
the tank. The Akal Takht had been the seat of the community’s collective authority since 1606. Whoever held Lahore
governed the Punjab; whoever was accepted at Amritsar governed the Khalsa.
Ranjit Singh understood the difference completely and spent forty years working the second half of it. He endowed the
shrine lavishly. He never convened the Sarbat Khalsa — but he never denied its authority either, and when it was
invoked against him personally, he submitted, which is the story in War Eleven.
And he never put his own name on his coinage. From 1801 to 1839 the money of the Sikh state carried the legend
Banda Singh Bahadur had used at Lohgarh in 1710, crediting everything to Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh. He
called the currency Nanakshahi and himself the servant of the Khalsa, and he ruled as an autocrat. Both of
those are true and he saw no contradiction in them.
- The Bhangis were finished. Thirty years of decline, and a misl held by a widow because there was nobody else.
- He came with allies. Kanhaiya and Ahluwalia troops made it look like a confederacy operation rather than a conquest.
- And he offered terms. Which he did every time. Almost nobody in this part is destroyed; nearly everybody is absorbed.
- Every misl now knew what he was. Lahore could be explained as an invitation; Amritsar could not.
- He had made the Khalsa’s capital his property. A ruler who owns the holy city has to be accepted by it, and that gave the Akalis leverage over him for the rest of his life.
The Zamzama is the single most travelled object in this book, and its ownership history is the history of
the Punjab in miniature.
It was cast at Lahore in 1757, in bronze, for the wazir of Ahmad Shah Abdali. It went south with the
Afghan army and was at Panipat in 1761. Then Abdali could not get it back over the passes and left it in
the Punjab.
After that it changed hands repeatedly among the misls, which is how it acquired the name it is known by
locally — the Bhangian di Top, the Bhangis’ gun — and it was fought over so often that possessing it
became a claim to seniority in itself. It was taken and retaken by chiefs, hill rajas and the Afghans across
four decades.
Ranjit Singh got it in 1802 with Amritsar. He used it at Multan in 1818, where it breached the walls and
where the barrel finally cracked. After that it was retired.
It sits outside the Lahore Museum now. And in 1901 Rudyard Kipling opened Kim with a boy sitting
astride it — “the great green-bronze piece” — and called it, correctly, the fire-breathing dragon, and noted
that whoever held Zamzama held the Punjab.
He was writing fiction and he had the politics exactly right. Between 1757 and 1802 the gun passed
from an Afghan wazir to the Marathas’ battlefield to a dozen Punjabi chiefs and finally to the man
who unified them. You could write the whole of Parts Eleven and Twelve as a list of the people who owned
one piece of bronze.
3Eating the Confederacy, 1801–1821 LIKELY
He absorbed eleven independent states in twenty years, and almost none of it was done by battle.
When: 1801–1821, effectively complete by about 1820.
Where: The whole Punjab north and west of the Sutlej.
Who: Ranjit Singh against the misls of Part Twelve — Bhangi, Nakai, Dallewalia, Faizullapuria, Ramgarhia, Kanhaiya, Ahluwalia and the rest.
The evidence: Court records; the process is documented in detail.
The method
1. He waited for chiefs to die. When a sardar died without a competent heir, the Lahore government took the
- territory and gave the family a pension or a jagir. This was the single most productive technique, and it required nothing but patience.
- He married into them. The Nakai misl came to him through marriage. The Kanhaiya connection was made for him as a child by Sada Kaur.
- He bought them. Chiefs were offered jagirs, commands and rank in the new army in exchange for their independence, and a great many took the offer.
- He used the last one first. Force was applied where the other three had failed — and it is remarkable how rarely it was needed.
- And the chiefs became his officers. The men who had been heads of sovereign states in 1799 were, by 1820, generals, governors and courtiers of the Lahore durbar.
The story that has to be told here is the one that reflects worst on him.
Sada Kaur made Ranjit Singh. Part Twelve set it out: after her husband was killed at Achal in 1782 by his father, she
offered her daughter in marriage to the killer’s son, held the Kanhaiya misl together through his minority, and brought
her army to Lahore in July 1799. For the first two decades of his rise she was his principal ally, his mother-in-law, and by
several accounts the shrewdest political head in the Punjab.
In 1821 he took her territories. The dispute was over the inheritance of her Kanhaiya lands, and the substance of it is
that they were valuable and she was in the way. She was placed in confinement and died in it, around 1832.
There is no version of this that is creditable, and the sources sympathetic to him do not really try. It is the clearest
single instance of what the absorption of the misls actually involved — and of the fact that a state built on one
man’s judgement has no mechanism to tell him when he is being unjust.
His daughter-in-law’s mother is not the only case. The Ahluwalia chief, his ally for twenty-five years, eventually fled
across the Sutlej into British territory. The Ramgarhia lands went the same way as everybody else’s.
- He offered a soft landing. A chief who gave up sovereignty got rank, revenue and a place at court. Very few had the strength to refuse and most had no wish to die for a principle.
- The confederacy had already failed. Part Twelve described the assembly ceasing to bind anybody by the 1790s. There was no body that could have coordinated resistance.
- He was demonstrably better at the job. One government, one army, one currency and a frontier that was actually defended — after fifty years of twelve.
- And he never made it religious. Absorbing a Sikh misl was presented as consolidating the Khalsa, not as conquering it.
- The Sarbat Khalsa. He did not abolish it. He simply never called it, and an institution that is not convened ceases to exist.
- Distributed command. Twelve chiefs who could each act became one court where nobody could act without him.
- The principle of no king, held from 1699 and asserted in the Red Fort in 1783.
- And the men who might have held it together after him were, by 1839, courtiers rather than sovereigns.
It is worth stating plainly what the Punjab exchanged between 1799 and 1820, because both halves are real
and the book has spent two parts setting them up.
What it gave up. Twelve autonomous states, each governed by a chief chosen in principle by his followers,
in a system where nobody was anybody’s subject and the highest authority was an assembly that met twice
a year and bound everyone by resolution. The most unusual political arrangement in these sixteen parts,
and the direct descendant of what was built at Anandpur in 1699.
What it got. A frontier that was defended. A currency. Roads that were policed. Multan, Kashmir, Peshawar
and the hill states brought under one administration. Forty years without an invasion — the first such
stretch in this book since the Kushans in Part Three. And an army that made the British think very
hard for thirty years.
Part Twelve ended by saying that the misl confederacy failed because it had no coercive centre, and that
what solved the problem in the end was a king.
This is the king, and this is the bill.
The honest verdict is that both systems worked and both failed, and they failed at opposite ends of the same
problem. The confederacy could not compel anybody and dissolved when the pressure came off.
The monarchy could compel everybody and dissolved when one man stopped breathing.
Nothing in the Punjab between 1699 and 1849 ever managed to be both durable and free, and Part Fourteen
is what it cost.
4The Sutlej Line, 1806–1809 CERTAIN
A twenty-three-year-old British diplomat came to Lahore, was attacked by religious warriors at Amritsar, and went home with a treaty that fixed the Punjab’s eastern border for thirty-six years.
When: Missions and expeditions 1806–1808; the Treaty of Amritsar, 25 April 1809.
Where: The Sutlej, and the Cis-Sutlej states beyond it.
Who: Charles Metcalfe for the Company, against Ranjit Singh’s ambition to take the Malwa.
The evidence: The treaty text, Company records, and Metcalfe’s own correspondence. CERTAIN throughout.
What happened
1. He wanted the Cis-Sutlej states. Patiala, Nabha, Jind and the rest — Sikh territories east of the Sutlej, created by the division of Sirhind in 1764. He made three expeditions across the river between 1806 and 1808 and took
- tribute.
- The Cis-Sutlej chiefs appealed to the British. Exactly as Part Twelve predicted they would: small states with a large neighbour, making individual arrangements with a stronger outside power.
- The Company sent Charles Metcalfe, aged twenty-three, with an escort of sepoys, to negotiate.
- And at Amritsar in February 1809 something happened that changed the Punjab. During Muharram, Metcalfe’s escort — Muslim sepoys of the Bengal army — was attacked by Akalis. The sepoys formed up, held their ground and drove them off with heavy losses. About a hundred disciplined infantry beat several times their number of the most formidable irregular warriors in India.
- Ranjit Singh saw the result and drew the conclusion.
- The treaty was signed on 25 April 1809. He accepted the Sutlej as his eastern boundary and gave up all claim beyond it; the Cis-Sutlej states passed under British protection.
The first reading is that he lost. He had wanted a Punjab united from the Jumna to the Indus, and the treaty closed
off half of it permanently. Patiala, Nabha and Jind were Sikh states, ruled by Sikh chiefs, and they went under British
protection because they preferred a distant patron to a near one. He signed because the alternative was a war with the
Company in 1809, which he was not going to win.
The second reading is that he bought thirty years. The treaty removed the one thing that could have destroyed him
early — a British war — and left him free to spend the next three decades taking Multan, Kashmir, the Derajat and
Peshawar, and building an army. He turned east and was blocked; so he turned west, where nobody could block
him, and doubled his kingdom.
Both readings are correct and this book will not choose between them. What is not in doubt is that he observed the
treaty scrupulously for the rest of his life, in circumstances where he was repeatedly provoked, and that the Sutlej
frontier was quiet from 1809 until six years after he died.
And the third thing that came out of 1809 is in the next section: he started building infantry.
- Timing. They came in 1809, when he had held Lahore for ten years and had no regular infantry at all.
- The Cis-Sutlej chiefs invited them. Twelve equal governments, individually negotiable — Part Twelve’s diagnosis, delivered on schedule.
- They offered him something real. Recognition, a fixed border, and no interference west of the river. For a ruler with enemies on three sides that was worth having.
- And they were prepared to fight. Troops were moved up to Ludhiana while the talks went on, which was the point of moving them.
- Half the Sikh population. The Cis-Sutlej states were never his, and in 1846 they were the base from which the British fought him.
- A permanent frontier with a growing power. Every year after 1809, the Company got relatively stronger.
- A garrison at Ludhiana, forty miles from his border, watching him for thirty years and reporting everything.
- And the initiative. After 1809 the eastern question was closed and could only be reopened by the other side, which is exactly what happened in 1845.
The incident at Amritsar in February 1809 lasted perhaps an hour and is the most consequential hour in
this part.
Metcalfe’s escort was about a hundred sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry — Muslims, observing
Muharram, in the Sikh holy city, at a moment of considerable tension. Akalis — the Nihangs, the irregular
religious warriors who were the most feared fighting men in the Punjab and answered to nobody —
attacked them.
The sepoys did what they had been drilled to do. They formed up, they held, they fired by volley, and they
drove off an enemy several times their number.
Ranjit Singh was told about it in detail, and he understood immediately what he had just been
shown.
His own army at that moment was what every Punjabi army in this book had been since Part Ten: superb
light cavalry, in very large numbers, with almost no infantry and poor artillery. It had beaten Ahmad Shah
Abdali by refusing to fight him. Against a hundred men who would stand in a square and shoot in
volleys, the finest horsemen in Asia had just been beaten by the arithmetic.
Part Twelve laid out the same lesson three times — de Boigne’s brigades, Perron’s army, George Thomas’s
four battalions and his own foundry. Everybody in northern India had the opportunity to learn it.
One man acted on it. Within a few years he was raising regular battalions; by 1822 he had Napoleonic
officers drilling them; by 1839 he had roughly thirty thousand regular infantry and the best artillery in
India outside the Company’s.
And in Part Fourteen, at Ferozeshah and Chillianwala, British officers who had seen every army in Asia
wrote home to say they had never been so nearly beaten.
It started with a hundred sepoys in a square, in a city where they should not have been, on a day
when they were attacked for being there.
5Kangra, 1809 — Stopping the Gurkhas LIKELY
He relieved a siege, saved the hill raja who had asked for help, and kept the fortress. It is the template for everything he did in the hills.
When: August 1809, four months after the Treaty of Amritsar.
Where: Kangra fort, in the hills above the Beas.
Who: Ranjit Singh against Amar Singh Thapa's Gurkhas, on behalf of Sansar Chand Katoch.
The evidence: Sikh, hill-state and Gurkha accounts; the outcome is not disputed.
What happened
1. The Gurkhas were expanding west. The kingdom of Nepal had been pushing along the Himalaya for a
- generation, and by 1806 Amar Singh Thapa’s forces were in the Kangra hills.
- Sansar Chand Katoch was beaten and besieged. The ablest of the hill rajas — the man who had outmanoeuvred the Kanhaiyas in Part Twelve — was shut up in Kangra fort for something like four years while his country was occupied.
- He asked Lahore for help and Ranjit Singh named his price: the fort.
- The relief campaign worked. In August 1809 the Gurkhas were driven back east of the Sutlej and Kangra was relieved.
- And Ranjit Singh garrisoned the fort himself. Sansar Chand got his country back, without his fortress, as a tributary.
- Gurkha expansion west of the Sutlej stopped permanently. Five years later the British fought them for the same reason, and the war of 1814–16 fixed Nepal’s western border where Ranjit Singh had already fixed it.
This fortress has now appeared in three widely separated parts, and always for the same reason.
Part Five, 1009: Mahmud of Ghazni marched straight from his victory at Waihind into the Kangra hills and emptied
the temple treasury at Nagarkot — the richest single haul of his career, because generations of families across northern
India had deposited their valuables in the safest place they knew.
Part Twelve, 1783: Jai Singh Kanhaiya took the fort, and Sansar Chand got it back by allying with the Sukerchakias
against him.
Part Thirteen, 1809: Ranjit Singh takes it as the price of a rescue.
The reason is the same in every century. Kangra sits at the mouth of the hill country above the Punjab plain —
defensible, rich, and controlling the approach to a dozen small states behind it. Whoever holds it holds the hills,
and whoever holds the hills has a secure northern flank.
After 1809 it is Sikh, and it stays Sikh until 1846, when it goes to the British with everything else north of the Sutlej.
- Somebody asked him. Same as Lahore in 1799 — an invitation converts an annexation into a rescue.
- He named the price in advance. No pretence, no later dispute: the fort was the fee.
- The Gurkhas were at the end of a very long line. Nepal to Kangra is an enormous distance along a mountain chain.
- And the hill states could not combine. Twelve parts of this book and the rule has not once been broken.
- They had been playing outsiders against each other for six centuries — Mughals against Gurus, misl against misl — and the technique requires two comparable outsiders. After 1809 there was only one.
- Sansar Chand paid the standard price of being rescued. His fort in 1809, his independence over the following decade.
- Their military value had gone. Hill forts are formidable against cavalry and negotiable against siege artillery, and Lahore now had siege artillery.
Sansar Chand Katoch is one of the more interesting losers in this book and his career is a complete
education in what happens to a small state between large ones.
He inherited Kangra as a boy with his ancestral fort in somebody else’s hands. He got it back in the 1780s by
allying with the Sukerchakias against the Kanhaiyas — playing two Sikh misls against each other, and
winning. For twenty years afterwards he was the strongest ruler in the hills, patronised the finest school of
miniature painting in India, and dominated his neighbours.
Then he overreached against the Gurkhas, was beaten, and spent four years besieged in the fort he had
spent his life recovering.
So he did what had worked before: he called in a bigger neighbour. And this time the bigger neighbour
did not go home.
He lived until 1823, a tributary of Lahore, with his country intact, his court intact, his painters still working
— and his fortress garrisoned by somebody else’s troops.
The technique that had saved him in 1785 destroyed him in 1809, and nothing about the
technique had changed. What had changed is that the Punjab now had one government instead of
twelve, so there was no second power to balance the first.
Every small state on the edge of this book learns the same lesson eventually. Playing your neighbours off
against each other is a strategy that works exactly as long as you have more than one neighbour.
6Attock, 1813 — The First Afghan Defeat LIKELY
Eight hundred years of Afghan armies coming down that road, and this is the first time one of them was beaten in a pitched battle on the Indus.
When: 13 July 1813.
Where: Haidru, near Attock on the Indus — the crossing Timur bridged in 1398 and Akbar fortified in the 1580s.
Who: Diwan Mokham Chand for Ranjit Singh, against Fateh Khan Barakzai and Dost Muhammad Khan.
The evidence: Sikh and Afghan accounts; the result is not disputed by either.
How it came about
1. Ranjit Singh and the Afghan wazir agreed to take Kashmir together in 1812–13, and to split it. It was a bad idea and both of them knew it.
2. Fateh Khan double-crossed him, took Kashmir and kept it.
3. So Ranjit Singh took Attock instead — the fort commanding the Indus crossing — by inducing its Afghan
- governor to hand it over.
- Fateh Khan came back to recover it with an army, his brother Dost Muhammad Khan commanding the cavalry.
- They met at Haidru on 13 July 1813. The Afghan attack came in hard and the Sikh line bent; Mokham Chand held his reserve and committed it at the right moment; the Afghans broke.
- Ranjit Singh was not present. He had left the field command to his general and stayed back — a habit that separates him from almost every commander in this book.
Count what had happened on this frontier before it.
Part Five, 1001: Jayapala destroyed at Peshawar. 1008: Anandapala’s confederacy dissolved at Waihind. 1014: Nandana
stormed. Part Six, 1191–1192: Tarain. Part Seven, 1398: Timur crossing the Indus unopposed. Part Ten and Eleven:
nine Afghan invasions in twenty years, in which the Punjab’s answer was always to disperse and never to fight.
In eight hundred years, no army raised in the Punjab had beaten an army from beyond the passes in a
pitched battle. The method had always been avoidance, and Part Eleven made the case that avoidance was correct.
At Haidru in July 1813 a Punjabi army stood in the open against an Afghan army and won.
It is not a large battle by the standards of this book. What it demonstrates is that the arithmetic on this frontier
had changed for the first time since the Shahis — and it changed because of infantry, artillery and a commander
who kept a reserve, which is exactly what the Punjab had lacked since 870.
Everything after this — Multan, Kashmir, Nowshera, Peshawar, Jamrud — follows from the discovery that they could
now do this.
- Artillery. Mokham Chand had guns, served properly, and the Afghans did not have an answer to them.
- A reserve, held and committed late. The move that has won battles in every part of this book since Tarain in 1192.
- The commander was not the king. Ranjit Singh’s absence meant the army did not have its single point of failure on the field — and this book has counted seven armies destroyed by that mistake.
- And they held the fort. Attock in Sikh hands meant the Afghans had to attack, on ground of the defender’s choosing.
- They attacked to recover a position rather than to fight a battle. Which meant fighting when and where the other side preferred.
- Their strength was cavalry. Against guns and steady infantry, in open ground, that had stopped being enough — the lesson of the whole period.
- The Barakzai brothers had a kingdom coming apart behind them. Afghan politics after 1810 was a permanent succession crisis.
- And they had underestimated him. Everybody did, until about 1818.
The same summer that Attock was won, Ranjit Singh acquired the most famous object in this book.
Shah Shuja Durrani — grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the king who had been deposed in Kabul —
turned up as a refugee in the Punjab in 1813 with his family and very little else. His wife, Wafa Begum, had
already been at Lahore, and in exchange for the rescue of her husband she had promised Ranjit Singh the
family’s greatest possession.
It was the Koh-i-Noor.
The diamond’s route to that room is the route of this whole book. It came out of the Deccan; it was in
Mughal hands by the seventeenth century and set in the Peacock Throne; Nadir Shah took it from Delhi
in 1739 in Part Ten; it passed to Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1747 and down the Durrani line to Shuja.
Shuja did not want to give it up and there was a good deal of pressure applied before he did, in June 1813.
The story that has attached itself to the handover has Ranjit Singh asking him what the stone was worth,
and Shuja replying that its value is good fortune, since whoever has held it has been superior to his
enemies. Treat the quotation as STORY; the extortion is documented.
Ranjit Singh wore it on his arm for the rest of his life. Visitors describe it. Shah Shuja escaped to British
territory, and twenty-six years later the Tripartite Treaty of 1838 put him back on the throne of
Kabul with British and Sikh help — where he was murdered in 1842.
And in 1849, in Part Fourteen, the diamond was taken from the Lahore treasury as part of the terms of
annexation, and sent to London.
It has been in the possession of a Punjabi ruler for exactly thirty-six years out of the last five
hundred, and those thirty-six are in this part.
7Multan, 1818 LIKELY
The oldest door in this book was shut, from the Indian side, for the first time in eleven hundred years — and the man who lost it deserves better than he usually gets.
When: Besieged from the spring of 1818; the fort stormed on 2 June 1818.
Where: Multan.
Who: Misr Diwan Chand commanding, with Kharak Singh nominally in charge, against Nawab Muzaffar Khan.
The evidence: Sikh and Persian accounts, which agree on the length and the defence.
What happened
1. Multan had been attacked from Lahore repeatedly since 1802 and had always bought its way out with
- tribute. In 1818 Ranjit Singh sent an army to finish it.
- Muzaffar Khan refused terms and shut himself in the fort with his sons and his garrison.
- The siege lasted months. The walls were massive and the defence was competent.
- The Zamzama broke the wall. The great gun of War One was brought down from Lahore and used against the fortifications — and cracked doing it. It never fired again.
- The assault went in on 2 June 1818. Akali Sadhu Singh led a storming party through the breach.
- Muzaffar Khan and several of his sons were killed fighting in the breach. The accounts on the Sikh side describe his defence with respect, which is not always the case in this book.
Multan has appeared in seven parts of this book and Part Twelve listed its changes of hands. Here is what 1818 actually
means.
From 712 to 1818 — one thousand one hundred and six years — Multan was, with brief interruptions, held
by powers coming from the west. Arabs, Ismailis, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Timurids, the Langahs, the Arghuns of Sindh,
the Mughals, the Afghans. The Bhangi misl held it for seven years in the 1770s and lost it again.
In June 1818 it passed to a government at Lahore, and it never went back.
Combined with Attock in 1813 and Kashmir the following year, it meant that for the first time since the Hindu Shahis,
the whole of the Indus frontier — north, centre and south — was held by a power based in the Punjab.
That is what this part is for. Parts Five to Eleven are a single long story about a province that could not hold its own
doors. Between 1813 and 1834, all of them are shut.
- Siege artillery. Multan’s walls had defeated everybody for a thousand years and were built for a world before heavy guns were common.
- Patience. Months rather than a rush, which is the answer to every fortress in this book.
- No relief was possible. The Afghan kingdom was in a succession war and could not send an army.
- And Lahore could afford it. A siege is an accounting exercise, and one government with a revenue can sustain what twelve chiefs could not.
- He held out for years before this. Repeated attacks since 1802, paid off, negotiated, survived.
- He refused terms at the end when accepting them would have saved his life and his family.
- He died in the breach with his sons. The Sikh accounts say so without qualification.
- And he is the last independent ruler of Multan in this book, in a city that had been a country twice.
There is a neatness to the fall of Multan that is worth pausing on, and it belongs to a gun.
The Zamzama was cast at Lahore in 1757 for the wazir of Ahmad Shah Abdali, went to Panipat in 1761 with
the Afghan army that destroyed the Marathas, and was left behind in the Punjab because the Afghans could
not get it home. It was fought over by the misls for forty years, and its possession became a claim to
seniority among them. Ranjit Singh took it with Amritsar in 1802. In 1818 it was hauled two hundred and
fifty miles south and turned on the walls of Multan — the last major Afghan possession east of the Indus. It
breached the wall, and in doing so it cracked, and it never fired again.
A gun made for an Afghan king’s minister, used to close the door that Afghan armies had been
coming through for eleven hundred years, and destroyed by the effort. It is the kind of detail that
would be too tidy in fiction. It is also true, and the gun is still there, cracked, on a traffic island in Lahore,
with a boy sitting on it in the first paragraph of a famous novel.
8Kashmir, 1819 LIKELY
The valley that Mahmud of Ghazni failed to take twice, and that had beaten every army sent at it for eight hundred years, was taken at the second attempt.
When: A failed attempt in 1814; the conquest in July 1819.
Where: The Kashmir valley; the decisive action at Shopian.
Who: Misr Diwan Chand and Kharak Singh, against the Afghan governor Jabbar Khan.
The evidence: Sikh, Kashmiri and Afghan accounts; and European travellers who arrived shortly afterwards.
What happened
1. The first attempt in 1814 failed badly. Ranjit Singh went himself; the columns were divided; the rains came;
- disease and the passes did the rest. It was his worst military failure.
- He waited five years and did it properly. A single strong column, a competent commander, and a start early enough in the season.
- The Afghan governor met them at Shopian in July 1819 and was beaten.
- The valley was annexed. It had been under Afghan rule since 1752 and Mughal rule before that.
- And it was not governed well. This needs saying: Sikh administration in Kashmir was extractive, several of its governors were harsh, and the valley’s own accounts of the period are not favourable. Some of the governors were good and some were not, and the record is mixed at best.
- In 1846 it was sold. The British, having beaten the Sikhs in Part Fourteen, transferred Kashmir to Gulab Singh Dogra — Ranjit Singh’s own vassal — for a cash payment, creating the state whose disputed status has outlived everything else in this book.
Part Five made a point about Kashmir that is worth cashing in here. Mahmud of Ghazni attacked the fortress of
Lohkot twice, in 1015 and 1021, and failed both times. He took Multan, Nagarkot, Nandana, Thanesar, Mathura,
Kanauj and Somnath. Kashmir is the only place within his reach that he attacked and did not get.
The reason is the same reason Ranjit Singh’s first attempt failed in 1814. A valley behind mountains, reachable
through a handful of passes, in a climate that ruins an army from the plains, at the end of a supply line that
runs over the passes.
What made 1819 different was not courage. It was logistics and timing — one column instead of three, moving early
enough in the season, with the supply arrangements made in advance by a government that had a revenue department.
That is the whole difference between this part and the eleven before it. Punjab in 1819 had a state, and a state can
plan a campaign in a way that a confederacy cannot.
- He learned from 1814. Divided columns and a late start had failed; a single column starting early succeeded.
- Delegated command. He did not go himself the second time, which is a startling thing for a ruler of that period to do about a prize of that size.
- The Afghans were weaker. Kabul was in a succession crisis and the governor could not be reinforced.
- And Attock and Multan had already been taken. The approaches were secure before the campaign started.
- A province that was hard to hold and expensive to garrison.
- A reputation for extraction. The Kashmiri record of Sikh rule is not a happy one, and this book is not going to pretend otherwise.
- And it created the Dogra connection. Gulab Singh’s rise begins with Kashmir and ends with him buying it from the British over the ruins of the state that had employed him.
Twenty-seven years after Misr Diwan Chand took Kashmir for Lahore, it was sold.
In March 1846, in the settlement that followed the First Anglo-Sikh War, the British transferred the valley
and the surrounding hill territory to Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu, for a payment of seventy-five lakhs of
rupees. He had been a soldier of Ranjit Singh’s — a Dogra Rajput who rose in Sikh service, was made Raja of
Jammu, and whose family became the most powerful faction at the Lahore court after the Maharaja’s
death.
His conduct during the war that produced the sale is one of the ugliest questions in Part
Fourteen, and this book will deal with it there rather than here.
What belongs here is the shape of the transaction. A province conquered by a Punjabi army in 1819
was transferred by a British government in 1846 to a servant of the state that had conquered it,
for money, as part of the price of that state’s defeat.
The Dogra dynasty ruled Jammu and Kashmir from 1846 until 1947. What happened in October 1947, and
every year since, descends directly from that transfer.
Of everything in these sixteen parts, this is the one whose consequences are still being paid. Taxila
is a ruin, Sirhind is a mound, the Zamzama is on a traffic island — and the sale of Kashmir in 1846 is on the
front page.
9The Fauj-i-Khas — Napoleon’s Officers at Lahore, 1822–1839 CERTAIN
Not a battle. The army that came out of this is the reason Part Fourteen takes the British two wars and nine battles instead of one afternoon.
The Punjab acquired the only Indian army the Company was WHAT HAPPENED
genuinely unsure about
- Regular battalions from about 1810; the European officers arrive in 1822.
- Lahore — the cantonments, the arsenal and the gun foundry.
- Jean-Baptiste Ventura and Jean-François Allard, then Claude Auguste Court and Paolo Avitabile.
- Muster rolls, the officers’ own memoirs, and detailed British intelligence reports.
Who they were
1. They were unemployed Napoleonic officers. After Waterloo, Europe was full of professional soldiers with
- nothing to do. Ventura was Italian, Allard French, and both had served in the Grande Armée. They arrived at Lahore in 1822 by way of Persia and Afghanistan, looking for work.
- Ranjit Singh tested them for months before employing them, and then set conditions: they were to grow beards, not eat beef, not smoke, and to serve the Punjab rather than any European power.
- Allard took the cavalry; Ventura took the infantry. Together they raised the Fauj-i-Khas — the special army — a model corps with its own standards, drilled to French words of command.
- Court and Avitabile came in 1827. Court, a French artilleryman, took the guns and the foundry; Avitabile, a Neapolitan, became a governor — of Wazirabad and later of Peshawar, where his methods restored order by means that made him notorious on both sides of the frontier.
- Others followed — including an American and the adventurer Alexander Gardner, whose own account of himself is entertaining and unreliable.
What they built
1. Regular infantry. By the end of the reign, something in the region of thirty thousand drilled infantry in
- permanent battalions — a completely new thing in the Punjab.
- Artillery, and the means to make it. A gun foundry at Lahore casting its own pieces, arsenals, and trained crews. The Sikh artillery of 1845 was, by British admission, as good as anything they had.
- Regular cavalry alongside the old Ghorchurra horse, which was kept because it was still the best light cavalry in Asia.
- Pay, in cash, on time. The single most boring item on this list and the one that made the rest possible.
- And it recruited from everybody. Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Hindus, Gurkhas, and Purbias from the Ganges plain — including men who had served the Company.
Figures for the Khalsa army at Ranjit Singh’s death vary considerably and should be handled with the usual caution.
The regular establishment is generally given as somewhere around thirty thousand infantry, several thousand
regular cavalry, and an artillery arm with at least a hundred and fifty guns — some counts go much higher
depending on whether garrison and light pieces are included.
Beyond that were the irregular Ghorchurra cavalry, the contingents of jagirdars, and the Akalis, none of which appear
on a muster roll in any usable way. Totals of seventy thousand and upwards are commonly quoted and are estimates.
What matters is not the total but the composition. In 1799 the Punjab had perhaps fifty thousand irregular
horsemen and almost nothing else. In 1839 it had a regular army with infantry, artillery, engineers, a foundry and a pay
department.
British officers who inspected it — and several were shown it deliberately — reported home that it was the most
formidable native army in India. Sir Henry Fane, the Commander-in-Chief, saw it in 1837 and said so. Six years
later the Company doubled its garrisons on the Sutlej.
- He hired for skill and controlled for loyalty. European professionals, on Punjabi terms, with no European government behind them.
- He kept what was already good. The Ghorchurra cavalry was not abolished; it was supplemented.
- He built the industry, not just the army. A foundry and arsenals meant he was not dependent on anyone for guns — the lesson of his grandfather’s bursting matchlock in Part Twelve.
- And he paid. An army paid in cash on time does not have to be coerced into existing.
- It was loyal to him, not to a state. There was no constitution, no council of regency, no war office — only a Maharaja and an army that obeyed him.
- It was too good for the government it served. After 1839 the army was the strongest institution in the Punjab and the court was the weakest, and the panchayats of the regiments began making political decisions.
- The European officers mostly left. Allard died in 1839; Ventura, Court and Avitabile went home in the years after, taking their fortunes and their expertise with them.
- And it was built to fight the Afghans. It ended up fighting the British, and the difference is Part Fourteen.
Here is what makes Ranjit Singh unusual, and it is not conquest — this book is full of conquerors.
Between about 1780 and 1820 every ruler in India was given the same demonstration, repeatedly,
in public. De Boigne’s brigades made Mahadji Scindia master of northern India. The Company’s sepoys
took Seringapatam. George Thomas built a kingdom in Hariana with four battalions and a foundry. At
Assaye in 1803 and again in 1818 the Marathas — who had hired the method — were destroyed by it in
British hands.
The lesson was not subtle: drilled infantry, disciplined artillery, and regular pay beat any quantity
of irregular cavalry, every time, in the open.
Nearly every Indian ruler saw it. Almost none of them acted on it in time. The Marathas hired European
officers and then let their political system waste what those officers built. The Afghans never tried. The hill
states could not afford it. The misls, as Part Twelve showed, were still fighting each other with horsemen
while it happened.
One man watched a hundred sepoys form square at Amritsar in 1809 and spent the next thirty
years rebuilding his army around what he had seen.
It nearly worked. At Ferozeshah in December 1845 the Governor-General of India spent a night on the field
expecting to lose his army, and burned his papers in case he was captured. At Chillianwala in 1849 a British
force was mauled badly enough that the news caused a political crisis in London.
The Khalsa army lost both wars — and it is the only army in India that ever gave the Company a
serious fright twice. It was built by a man who could not read, on the basis of an incident he did not
witness, thirty years before it was needed.
10Nowshera, 1823 — The Akali’s Last Charge LIKELY
The hardest battle of the reign, fought against the tribes of the frontier — and the man who won it had once had the Maharaja publicly flogged.
When: 14 March 1823.
Where: Nowshera, on the Kabul river west of Attock — Yusufzai country.
Who: Ranjit Singh against Azim Khan Barakzai and the assembled frontier tribes.
The evidence: Sikh and Afghan accounts; both describe it as unusually hard fighting.
What happened
1. Azim Khan raised the frontier tribes. The Yusufzai and their neighbours — the same confederations that
- had destroyed Raja Birbal’s column in Part Eight and a Mughal army in Part Nine — came out in very large numbers, and the campaign was declared a holy war.
- The Sikh army had to cross a river to reach them, under fire, with the tribes holding the high ground at Pir Sabak beyond it.
- The first attacks failed. The position was strong and the defenders were the best hill infantry in Asia.
- Akali Phula Singh took the Nihangs in. The irregular religious warriors went up the hill and broke the position, and Phula Singh was killed doing it.
- The tribes were driven off and Azim Khan withdrew across the Kabul river without committing his own regular troops, which ruined his standing; he died shortly afterwards.
- Peshawar became tributary to Lahore.
Part Eight described the destruction of a Mughal column in the Karakar Pass in 1586 and said that the same thing
happens to every regular army that goes into this country. Part Nine described it happening again in 1672.
Nowshera is the exception, and it is worth being clear about why.
It was not fought in a defile. It was fought on a hill above a river crossing, in country where an army could deploy, by a
force with artillery and regular infantry as well as irregular cavalry. The tribes’ advantage is the ground, and at
Nowshera they gave up part of it by standing to fight a battle rather than ambushing a column.
The rule held everywhere else. Ranjit Singh never conquered the tribal country and never tried. He took
Peshawar, held the valley, garrisoned the mouth of the Khyber, and paid, negotiated and fought with the tribes in the
hills for the rest of his life without ever attempting to occupy them.
That is the same conclusion Akbar reached in 1586, Aurangzeb reached in 1675, and the British reached in the 1890s.
Four empires, four centuries, one answer: hold the mouth of the pass and do not go up it.
- Combined arms. Artillery to prepare, regular infantry to hold, and irregular shock troops to take the hill.
- The Akalis. Whatever else can be said about the Nihangs, they went in when nothing else would.
- The Maharaja was present and visible, which mattered on a day when the first attacks had failed.
- And Azim Khan did not commit. His regular troops watched from the far bank, which decided the battle as much as anything the Sikhs did.
- Heavy casualties — by most accounts the worst of any battle in the reign.
- Akali Phula Singh, who was irreplaceable in a specific way described below.
- And it settled nothing on the frontier. Peshawar became tributary; it took eleven more years to annex it and it was never quiet.
Akali Phula Singh was the head of the Nihangs — the irregular religious warriors of the Khalsa, who
answered to no government, kept their own encampment at Amritsar, and regarded themselves as the
conscience of the community.
He had fought for Ranjit Singh in most of the campaigns of the reign. He was also, on at least one famous
occasion, his judge.
The Maharaja had married a Muslim dancing girl of Amritsar named Moran — a match that scandalised
the orthodox, and which he compounded by having coins struck that carried her name. Whatever else
Ranjit Singh was, he was not discreet.
Phula Singh summoned him to the Akal Takht.
The tradition is that the Maharaja came, on foot, and was sentenced to be tied to a tree and flogged; that he
accepted the sentence and presented himself for it; and that the assembled congregation, seeing him
submit, remitted the punishment to a fine.
Treat the details as STORY. Treat the fact that he went as very well attested and completely
extraordinary.
Consider what is being described. The absolute ruler of the Punjab — a man who had absorbed
eleven states, imprisoned his own mother-in-law and taken the Koh-i-Noor by extortion —
walked to a building at Amritsar and accepted a sentence from an institution with no army, no
revenue and no power to compel him whatever.
He did it because the Akal Takht’s authority, established in 1606 in Part Nine and exercised by the Sarbat
Khalsa through Parts Ten to Twelve, was the only thing in the Punjab that could still say no to him — and
because a ruler who denied it would have stopped being the servant of the Khalsa and become simply a
king, which was the one thing his legitimacy could not survive.
Phula Singh died at Nowshera in 1823, going up a hill first.
Nobody summoned Ranjit Singh to the Akal Takht again.
11Peshawar and Jamrud, 1834–1837 LIKELY
The door that this book has been complaining about since Part Four was finally shut and bolted from the Indian side — and the man who bolted it was killed doing it.
When: 1834 Peshawar annexed; 30 April 1837 the battle at Jamrud.
Where: Peshawar, and Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber Pass.
Who: Hari Singh Nalwa, governor of Peshawar, against Dost Muhammad Khan's sons.
The evidence: Sikh, Afghan and British accounts; the fort at Jamrud still stands.
What happened
1. Peshawar had been tributary since 1823 and was annexed outright in 1834, with Hari Singh Nalwa as
- governor.
- He fortified forward. Rather than sit in Peshawar, he pushed the frontier to the mouth of the Khyber and built a fort at Jamrud in 1836, at the point where the pass opens onto the plain.
- The Afghans came to take it back. In April 1837, while Ranjit Singh and most of the court were at Lahore for the wedding of his grandson, Dost Muhammad Khan sent an army under his sons.
- The battle at Jamrud was fought on 30 April 1837. The garrison was small; Nalwa came out to fight; he was mortally wounded.
- His death was concealed. The accounts say the garrison was not told, so that the fort would hold — and it held until relief came up from Peshawar.
- The Afghans withdrew. Peshawar and the Khyber mouth stayed with Lahore until 1849, when they went to the British with everything else.
This book has made one complaint more often than any other, and it began in Part Four.
“Nobody ever garrisons the door.” Every invasion of India for two thousand years came through the same three or
four passes, and no Indian power ever put a permanent force at the mouth of them. The Mauryas did not. The Guptas
did not. The Delhi Sultanate did not. Part Five described the Hindu Shahis losing Kabul in 870 and everything after
being fought on Indian ground.
In 1836 a fort was built at Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber, by a Punjabi government, and garrisoned.
That is the complaint answered — nine hundred and sixty-six years after the Shahis lost Kabul, and about two
thousand one hundred years after the first invasion in this book came down that road.
It held for thirteen years. In 1849 it passed to the British, who kept a garrison there for the next century for exactly the
same reason.
Whatever else Ranjit Singh’s reign was, it is the only period in this entire history in which the Punjab held its
own doors.
- The fort was in the right place. The mouth of a pass is the one point where a small garrison is worth an army.
- Nalwa came out and fought rather than being shut up, which bought the time the relief needed.
- The death was concealed. A garrison that does not know its commander is dead does not lose the battle he died in — the single point of failure, defeated by an administrative decision.
- And Peshawar was close. A relieving force could reach it, which is what a forward fortress is for.
- Hari Singh Nalwa. The best field commander in the Sikh service, on the frontier that needed him most, two years before the Maharaja died.
- The frontier was never pacified, only held — and holding it consumed troops for the rest of the reign.
- And the timing was terrible. The court was at a wedding; the army was dispersed; and it demonstrated to everybody watching that the state could be surprised.
Hari Singh Nalwa is the only Punjabi commander in this book whose reputation crossed the frontier and
stayed there.
He rose from a modest family in Gujranwala, fought in most of the campaigns of the reign, and governed
Kashmir, Hazara and finally Peshawar. He built forts, founded a town, minted coin as governor, and spent
the last fifteen years of his life on the most difficult frontier in Asia.
There is a tradition — repeated on both sides of the Khyber, and repeated by British officers who served
there afterwards — that Pashtun mothers used his name to quiet children. Whether that is literally
true is unverifiable and it is the sort of thing that gets said about frontier commanders; it is also recorded
early enough and widely enough to be worth mentioning.
What is not tradition is the strategic fact. He was the man who moved the Punjab’s western frontier
from the Indus to the mouth of the Khyber and kept it there.
And what is worth ending on is the manner of the last day. Mortally wounded at Jamrud, with a small
garrison in a new fort and an Afghan army outside it, the decision was taken not to announce that he
was dead — so that the men holding the walls would go on believing he was behind them.
Seven armies in this book have been destroyed because a commander went down in front of his men: Porus,
Anandapala, Ghor at Tarain, Qutlugh Khwaja, Hemu, Wazir Khan, the Marathas at Panipat.
At Jamrud in 1837 somebody finally thought of simply not telling them.
12The Court and the State CERTAIN
Not a battle. How a Sikh maharaja governed a province where most of his subjects were Muslim, and what he got right and wrong doing it.
- 1799–1839.
- Lahore — the fort, the durbar and the revenue offices.
- Fakir Azizuddin, Diwan Dina Nath, Dhian Singh Dogra, Misr Diwan Chand and the rest of the durbar.
- Court records, revenue papers, and a dozen European travellers who described it in detail.
Who ran what
1. Foreign affairs: Fakir Azizuddin, a Muslim from a Lahore family of physicians, who conducted every
- important negotiation with the British and the Afghans for thirty years.
- Finance: Diwan Dina Nath, a Hindu, who ran the revenue system.
- Chief minister: Dhian Singh Dogra, a Hindu Rajput from Jammu, whose family became the most dangerous force at court after 1839.
- Field command: Misr Diwan Chand and Mokham Chand, both Hindus; Hari Singh Nalwa and Sham Singh Attariwala, both Sikhs; Ventura, Allard, Court and Avitabile, all Europeans.
- And the army recruited from everybody, including large numbers of Punjabi Muslims and men from outside the province.
The state’s record on religion is usually described in one of two ways, and both are wrong.
What is genuinely to his credit. The jizya was not levied. Muslims held the highest offices, including the foreign
ministry, for the whole reign. Muslim shrines received state endowments, and the Sunehri Masjid at Lahore — which
had been taken over — was returned to Muslim use at Fakir Azizuddin’s request. Executions for religious offences did
not happen. There was no forced conversion. By the standards of any state in this book, including the ones ruled
by the tolerant emperors of Part Eight, this is a good record.
What is not. Cow slaughter was banned, which was a real restriction on Muslim practice. The call to prayer was
restricted in some places at some times. And the Badshahi Mosque at Lahore — one of the great buildings of the
Mughal empire — was used as a military store and its courtyard as a stable and parade ground. That was a
deliberate humiliation of a kind that this book has described being inflicted in the other direction in Parts Nine and
Eleven, and it should be recorded in the same words.
The Kashmir administration, as War Seven said, was extractive and is not remembered kindly in the valley.
The fair summary is that it was a state which did not persecute and did not entirely refrain from
humiliating, in a province that had spent the previous hundred and fifty years in a religious war. That is a
considerable achievement and it is not a clean one.
- Competence was the qualification. He hired the best available person for the job and did not much care what they were.
- The revenue was lighter than the Afghans’ and it was collected regularly, which is what a cultivator actually notices.
- He was personally accessible. Every European visitor remarks on it — a ruler who rode about, asked endless questions, and held durbar in the open.
- And he did not execute people. Almost uniquely in this book. Rebels were fined, dispossessed or pensioned. Sada Kaur’s confinement is the harshest thing in the reign, and she was not killed.
- There was no institution. No council, no assembly, no law of succession, no body that could act in his absence. Everything ran through one man’s judgement.
- He never called the Sarbat Khalsa. The one body that might have been able to arbitrate a succession had not met in his lifetime.
- He built factions instead of ministries. The Dogras, the Sindhanwalias, the army — each with a patron, and all of them balanced by him personally.
- And his heirs were not up to it. Which he knew.
Every European who met Ranjit Singh wrote about him, and the descriptions are unusually consistent.
They describe a small, scarred, one-eyed man in plain white clothes with no jewellery except an armlet
holding an enormous diamond, sitting cross-legged in a chair, in a court where everybody else was dressed
magnificently. Victor Jacquemont, a French naturalist, said he was the first inquisitive Indian he
had met and complained that the Maharaja asked him a hundred thousand questions — about
Europe, about Bonaparte, about medicine, about how things worked.
He could not read. His education had been abandoned during a chaotic minority and he never repaired it.
Documents were read aloud to him. Treaties were read aloud to him. He signed with a seal.
And this is the man who understood the significance of a hundred sepoys forming square, hired Napoleon’s
officers, built a gun foundry, kept a treaty for thirty years, and worked out that the East India Company was
a different kind of thing from anything else on the subcontinent long before most literate rulers did.
There is a story — STORY, but a good one — that when a map of India was shown to him with the
British possessions coloured red, he looked at how much of it was red and said “sab lal ho jayega”: it will
all become red.
Whether he said it or not, he behaved for forty years as though he believed it. He never fought the
British, never gave them a pretext, honoured every clause of the treaty of 1809, and spent the
entire time building an army and taking everything to the west that they could not object to.
It was the correct strategy and it required only one thing to work, which was that it had to be continued
after he died.
13Ropar and the Tripartite Treaty, 1831–1838 CERTAIN
The two powers left in India met on a riverbank, spent a week impressing each other, and both went away knowing exactly what they had seen.
When: October 1831 at Ropar; the Tripartite Treaty in June 1838.
Where: Ropar, on the Sutlej — the treaty line of 1809.
Who: Ranjit Singh and the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck.
The evidence: Both governments’ records, and several eyewitness accounts.
What happened at Ropar
1. It was a state visit, staged by both sides to be looked at. Camps facing each other across the river, troops
- paraded, gifts exchanged, and a week of ceremonial.
- The Sikhs displayed their army. Deliberately. The regular battalions, the artillery and the Ghorchurra cavalry were all shown to the British.
- The British displayed theirs. Equally deliberately.
- Both sides went home reassured and worried in roughly equal proportions, and the reports each wrote about the other are the most useful documents of the decade.
- Nothing was signed of any substance, which was the point. Ropar was about measurement.
And then Afghanistan
1. In June 1838 the Tripartite Treaty was signed — the British, Ranjit Singh, and Shah Shuja, the exiled
- Durrani king who had given up the Koh-i-Noor in 1813 — to put Shuja back on the throne at Kabul.
- The British wanted a friendly Afghanistan because they were frightened of Russian influence in Persia, which is the beginning of the long game the nineteenth century called the Great Game.
- Ranjit Singh signed and gave nothing. He agreed in principle, kept Peshawar, and refused to let a British army march through the Punjab. 4. So they went the long way round, through Sindh and the Bolan Pass — a route that added months and enormous cost, and contributed to the disaster that followed.
- The Army of the Indus reached Kabul in 1839 and Shah Shuja was restored. Two and a half years later he was murdered, and a British army was destroyed retreating through the passes in January 1842.
The single most revealing thing Ranjit Singh ever did about the British is that he would not let their troops cross his
country, even as their treaty partner, even in a cause he had signed up to.
He was seventy-nine years old and in poor health. The Company was the strongest power in Asia. He had every
diplomatic reason to oblige them and no realistic prospect of ever fighting them.
He said no anyway, and they went round.
He understood that a British army inside the Punjab, with a legitimate reason to be there and a line of
supply through it, would be very difficult to get out again. He had watched the subsidiary alliance system swallow
half the states in India by exactly this route: an ally accepts troops, then pays for them, then finds they are a garrison.
Six years after he died, British troops crossed the Sutlej. Ten years after he died, they stayed.
- Neither side wanted the war. The Company had the Marathas, Burma, Sindh and Afghanistan to deal with; he had Multan, Kashmir and the frontier.
- He was scrupulous. Thirty years without a single serious breach of the 1809 treaty, under repeated provocation.
- The army was a deterrent. That is what Ropar was for, and it worked.
- And the British respected him personally, which mattered more in that period than it should have.
- The relationship was personal, not institutional. The Company had a system; the Punjab had a man.
- The balance was moving. Every year the Company got relatively stronger, and both sides could see the trend.
- Sindh went in 1843, which put British territory on a second side of the Punjab.
- And the Afghan disaster of 1842 made the British more nervous, not less. A humiliated power on your border is a dangerous neighbour.
The meeting at Ropar in October 1831 is worth picturing, because it is the only time in this book that the
Punjab meets the power that will eventually take it, on equal terms, with both sides trying to impress.
On one bank of the Sutlej: the Governor-General of India, with the Company’s troops in review order —
scarlet, drilled, silent, moving in perfect time.
On the other: the Maharaja of the Punjab, with the Fauj-i-Khas drilled by Napoleon’s officers, an artillery
train cast in his own foundry, and behind them several thousand Ghorchurra horsemen in the finest silks
in Asia.
Both armies were being shown off for exactly the same reason, and both sets of officers understood exactly
what they were being shown.
The British reports afterwards are respectful and slightly uneasy. They had come expecting Indian
irregulars and had been shown a European-style army with good artillery, held by a ruler who
was not going to give them a pretext.
Fourteen years later, at Ferozeshah, some of the men who had watched that parade fought each other.
And this is the thing worth ending the section on. Ropar in 1831 was the high point of the Punjab’s
standing in the world since the Shahis — an independent state, dealing as an equal with the greatest
power in Asia, on a border it had agreed and both sides kept.
Eight years later the Maharaja was dead, and everything in the next section is about the fact that nobody
had made any arrangements at all.
14June 1839 — The Succession Nobody Solved CERTAIN
He built everything and arranged nothing, and it took ten years to lose all of it.
When: 27 June 1839.
Where: Lahore.
Who: Ranjit Singh, aged fifty-eight, and the court he left behind.
The evidence: Court records and British Residency reports.
What he left
1. A kingdom from the Sutlej to the Khyber and from Multan to Ladakh, with a full treasury.
2. The best native army in India, in the region of seventy thousand men with modern artillery.
3. An heir who was not capable of governing. Kharak Singh, his eldest son, was widely regarded — including
- by his father — as unequal to it.
- A grandson who might have been. Nau Nihal Singh, Kharak Singh’s son, was able and popular.
- Three factions. The Dogras under Dhian Singh and his brothers; the Sindhanwalias, the Maharaja’s own collaterals; and the army.
- And no mechanism whatever. No council of regency, no succession law, no assembly, no arbitrating institution. The Sarbat Khalsa had not met in forty years.
One thing must be recorded about the funeral and not passed over.
Four of his queens and several women of the household were burned on his pyre. Sati was practised at the
Lahore court and it was practised here, publicly, with the whole city present, and it is described by European
eyewitnesses.
The same ruler who did not execute rebels, who employed Muslims as ministers, who submitted to the Akal Takht and
who returned a mosque to its congregation, had women burned alive at his funeral because it was the custom of his
court.
Sikh teaching had condemned the practice from the beginning — Guru Amar Das spoke against it in the
sixteenth century, in Part Eight. It happened anyway.
This book has stated facts of this kind about every other ruler in it and it is not going to make an exception for this one.
- Everything ran through him personally. Every faction was balanced by his judgement and nothing was balanced by a rule.
- The army was the strongest institution left. Within a few years the regimental panchayats — committees of soldiers — were making political decisions, because nothing else could.
- The factions had armies of their own. The Dogras held Jammu; the Sindhanwalias had followings; and both had reason to prefer a weak Maharaja.
- And the British were watching every hour of it from Ludhiana, forty miles away, with a Resident and a network of informants.
- Kharak Singh died in 1840. Nau Nihal Singh died the same day, in an accident at his father’s funeral that almost nobody has ever believed was one.
- Five years of court murders followed, and by 1843 the Maharaja was a five-year-old boy, Duleep Singh, with his mother Jind Kaur as regent.
- The army lost confidence in the court and the court became afraid of the army — an arrangement that has only ever ended one way.
- And in December 1845 that army crossed the Sutlej.
Set the two halves of this book’s last two hundred years against each other, because they are the same
lesson from opposite ends and the Punjab paid for both.
The Khalsa of 1699 was built specifically so that it would not die with a man. Part Nine described a
Guru taking initiation from five men he had just created, so that the order would outrank its leader. Part
Nine ended with him vesting the Guruship in a book. Part Ten described that design being tested by a state
that hanged its leadership in public in 1716 and failing to kill it. Part Eleven described it absorbing the loss
of half its people in a morning and reassembling eight months later.
Part Twelve described that system failing, because a confederacy with no coercive centre
dissolves the moment nobody is attacking it.
And Part Thirteen is the correction — and the correction went too far.
Ranjit Singh built a treasury, an army, an arsenal, a frontier, a revenue system and a foreign policy. He did
not build a council, a regency, a succession, or any body that could make a decision without him. He
restored the single point of failure that the Khalsa had spent a century engineering out of itself.
Seven armies in this book were destroyed because one man went down in front of them. At Jamrud in 1837
his own governor solved that problem with an administrative decision — they simply did not tell the
garrison.
Two years later the Maharaja died in his bed at Lahore and there was nobody to not tell.
Ten years after that, the Punjab was a British province.
15The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Fourteen
1. The door is finally shut — and it is shut for thirteen years. Part Four opened with the complaint that
- nobody garrisons the passes, and every part since has repeated it. Attock in 1813, Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, Peshawar in 1834, Jamrud in 1836. For the only time in this book, a Punjabi government holds every one of its own doors — and in 1849 all of them pass to somebody else in a single treaty.
- He copied the winning method and nobody else did. Drilled infantry, disciplined artillery, a foundry and regular pay — the lesson of Part Twelve, acted on by one ruler out of a subcontinent. It is the only reason Part Fourteen takes two wars.
- The single point of failure, restored on purpose. The Khalsa spent a century engineering itself so that no leader’s death could end it — 1699, 1704, 1708, 1716, 1762. Ranjit Singh built a state with no institution that could act without him. At Jamrud they solved the problem by not telling the garrison; in 1839 there was nobody to not tell.
- The army outlives the state. By 1843 the Khalsa army is the strongest institution in the Punjab and the court is the weakest, with regimental committees making political decisions because nothing else can. Watch who actually decides to cross the Sutlej in 1845, and why.
- And the treaty line was the trap and the shelter both. The Sutlej border of 1809 kept the British out for thirty-six years and fixed the Punjab in place while the Company took Sindh, Gwalior, Awadh and everything else. Distance had protected this province since Part One. In 1843 the distance ran out.
The Anglo-Sikh Wars, 1839–1849. Six years of court murders — Kharak Singh, Nau Nihal Singh, Chand Kaur, Sher
Singh, Dhian Singh — until the throne holds a five-year-old, Duleep Singh, and his mother Jind Kaur is regent over an
army nobody controls. Then the First Sikh War: Mudki and Ferozeshah in December 1845, where a Governor-General
burned his papers expecting to lose; Aliwal; and Sobraon in February 1846, where Sham Singh Attariwala died in the
bridgehead. The Treaty of Lahore, the sale of Kashmir, and a British Resident in the fort. Then 1848: two officers
murdered at Multan, the army rising again, Chillianwala — the worst day the British had in India in that century —
and Gujrat in February 1849. The Khalsa army lays down its arms at Rawalpindi. On 29 March 1849 the Punjab is
annexed, the Koh-i-Noor is sent to London, and a ten-year-old signs away the last independent state in India.
16Words Used in This Part
“The government of the Khalsa” — the name Ranjit Singh’s state used for itself. He ruled as an autocrat and never called himself more than its servant.
The currency of the Sikh state, carrying the couplet used by Banda Singh Bahadur in 1710 and crediting everything to Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh. It never bore the Maharaja’s name.
The great bronze gun cast at Lahore in 1757, present at Panipat in 1761, fought over by the misls, taken with Amritsar in 1802, and cracked breaching the walls of Multan in 1818. Kipling’s “Kim’s Gun.”
“The special army” — the model corps of regular infantry, cavalry and artillery raised from 1822 under Ventura and Allard and drilled to French words of command.
The regular army as a whole, as distinct from the irregulars and the feudal contingents.
The irregular cavalry — the descendants of the misl horsemen, kept on alongside the regular army because they were still the best light cavalry in Asia.
The irregular religious warriors of the Khalsa, answering to no government. Akali Phula Singh led them at Nowshera and died there — and had earlier summoned the Maharaja before the Akal Takht.
A committee. In the army after 1839, the regimental panchayats became political bodies, because the court could no longer govern and nothing else could act.
The court, and by extension the government of Lahore. British despatches use “the Lahore Durbar” to mean the Sikh state.
An assignment of land revenue in return for service — the instrument by which misl chiefs were converted into courtiers.
The Sikh states east of the Sutlej — Patiala, Nabha, Jind and the rest — placed under British protection by the treaty of 1809 and never part of Ranjit Singh’s kingdom.
The agreement of June 1838 between the British, Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja to restore the latter at Kabul — the beginning of the First Anglo-Afghan War.
The diamond taken from Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739, passed down the Durrani line, obtained from Shah Shuja at Lahore in 1813, and sent to London in 1849.
The burning of a widow on her husband’s pyre. Condemned by the Gurus from the sixteenth century, and practised at Ranjit Singh’s funeral in 1839.
Sources used for this part
- The records of the Lahore Durbar, and the British Residency and Ludhiana Agency correspondence
- The treaties themselves — Amritsar 1809 and the Tripartite Treaty 1838
- Memoirs and papers of the European officers in Sikh service — Ventura, Allard, Court and Avitabile, and the unreliable but vivid narrative of Alexander Gardner
- European travellers who saw the court: Victor Jacquemont, Alexander Burnes, W. G. Osborne, Baron von Hügel and William Moorcroft
- Charles Metcalfe's mission correspondence, 1808–09
- Persian court chronicles of the Sikh period, including Sohan Lal Suri’s Umdat-ut-Tawarikh, the official diary of the Lahore court
- Afghan accounts of the campaigns of 1813, 1823 and 1837
- Kashmiri accounts of the period of Sikh rule
- Standard modern biographies of Ranjit Singh and histories of the Sikh kingdom
The open questions here include: whether the Amritsar incident of 1809 really caused the decision to raise regular
infantry, or whether that has been tidied into a single cause after the event; the true size of the Khalsa army in 1839,
where figures vary by tens of thousands depending on what is counted; the details of the Akal Takht episode; the exact
terms under which the Koh-i-Noor was surrendered; and the reliability of Alexander Gardner, who is entertaining and
should not be trusted alone on anything.
Three things about method.
First, this part has stated the discreditable things. Sada Kaur’s dispossession and death in confinement; the
Badshahi Mosque used as a magazine; the extractive administration of Kashmir; the sati at his funeral. A reign this
successful attracts hagiography, and a history that only records the successes is a monument rather than a history.
Second, most of the sources here are British and most of them were assessing a potential enemy. The
Residency reports, the intelligence summaries and the officers’ accounts of the Khalsa army are detailed and — as Part
Fourteen demonstrates — largely accurate. They are also written by the people who would shortly be fighting it, and
that has been kept in view.
Third, the closing argument of this part is a judgement, not a fact. That Ranjit Singh’s failure to build an
institution capable of surviving him is what destroyed the state is the view of most historians and it is the view of this
book, and it is stated as an argument rather than smuggled in as a description.