1The Ten Years
This is the part where the Punjab loses, and the way it loses is not the way this book has taught you to expect.
Ranjit Singh died in June 1839 leaving a full treasury, a secure frontier and the finest army in India.
Ten years later the Punjab was a British province, its Maharaja was a ten-year-old signing away his
kingdom, and the Koh-i-Noor was on a ship to London.
What happened in between is two separate stories that are usually told as one. The first is a court that
destroyed itself — five rulers in four years, every one of them murdered or dead in circumstances nobody
believed, until the throne held a five-year-old and his mother. The second is an army that went on fighting
long after the state it belonged to had stopped functioning, and that came within an afternoon of beating the
British twice.
Four things to hold on to
- The Khalsa army was not defeated in the way defeated armies usually are. British officers who had fought Napoleon’s veterans in Spain wrote home to say they had never met anything like it. At Ferozeshah the Governor-General of India burned his papers expecting to lose. At Chillianwala the news caused a political crisis in London. Read the enemy’s despatches in this part; they are the highest tribute anybody in these sixteen parts receives.
- The question of betrayal is real and it is not settled. Two of the army’s own commanders were in communication with the British before and during the first war. This book will set out what is established, what is inferred, and where the argument still runs.
- The conquest was done as much by treaty as by battle. Lahore in March 1846, Bhyrowal in December 1846, annexation in March 1849 — three documents in three years, each one narrowing what was left. Part Twelve described this method arriving in India; here it is finished.
- And the army governed itself for four years. The regimental committees — panchayats — that ran the Khalsa army between 1841 and 1845 are one of the strangest institutions in this book, and the court’s fear of them is a large part of why the war happened at all.
CERTAIN means contemporary evidence. LIKELY means well-attested. STORY means tradition.
Almost everything here is CERTAIN — there are despatches, muster rolls, treaty texts, regimental histories,
casualty returns and eyewitness memoirs on both sides.
Which creates the reverse of Part One’s problem. Most of the surviving narrative is British, written by professional
soldiers for professional audiences. It is detailed and it is largely honest — these were men describing a war they had
nearly lost, to colleagues who would check. But it is one side’s account of the other side’s destruction, and it is read here
as such.
The Punjabi record of these years is thinner, because the state that would have kept it was disintegrating while the
events happened. That absence is itself a fact about 1839 to 1849 and this part says so rather than filling the
gap with anything.
2The Court Murders, 1839–1843 CERTAIN
Five rulers in four years. By the end of it the throne of the Punjab held a boy of five, and every man capable of governing was dead.
When: June 1839 to September 1843.
Where: Lahore — the fort, the gardens outside it, and the road between them.
Who: The Dogras under Dhian Singh; the Sindhanwalias, Ranjit Singh’s own collaterals; and the army.
The evidence: Court records and British Residency despatches, which report each killing within days.
What happened, in order
1. Kharak Singh succeeded his father in June 1839 and was deposed within months. His favourite was murdered
- in front of him; he was confined, and he died on 5 November 1840. He had been ill for a long time and had been given something; the details are argued about and the direction is not.
- Nau Nihal Singh — his son, nineteen, able, and the one man who might have held the state together — walked back from his father’s cremation the same day. An archway of the Roshnai Gate at Lahore Fort collapsed as he passed under it. He was carried inside injured. Nobody was allowed to see him. His death was announced that evening.
- Chand Kaur, Kharak Singh’s widow and Nau Nihal’s mother, claimed the regency and held it for a few months. She was pushed out in January 1841 and murdered in June 1842 by her own maidservants, who were afterwards mutilated so that they could not testify.
- Sher Singh, another of Ranjit Singh’s sons, ruled from 1841. On 15 September 1843, a Sindhanwalia sardar presented him with a new gun to inspect and shot him with it. His young son was killed the same day.
- Dhian Singh Dogra, the chief minister who had arranged or benefited from most of the preceding, was murdered by the same faction within hours.
- And the Sindhanwalias were killed the next day by Dhian Singh’s son, who brought the army against them.
- Duleep Singh, aged five, was proclaimed Maharaja, with his mother Jind Kaur as regent.
The death of Nau Nihal Singh on 5 November 1840 is the hinge of this whole part, and it deserves to be stated carefully.
What is documented: masonry from the gateway fell as the procession passed; a companion walking with him — a
son of Gulab Singh Dogra — was killed outright; Nau Nihal was injured; Dhian Singh Dogra took charge of him; he was
carried into the fort; access was refused; and his death was announced later that day. Witnesses who saw him carried in
described his injuries as serious but not obviously fatal.
What is inferred: that he was finished off inside.
This book cannot prove it and neither can anybody else. What can be said is that almost nobody at the time
believed it was an accident, that the British Resident’s reports treat it as murder, and that the man who controlled the
scene was the man with the most to gain.
And the consequence is not in doubt at all. Nau Nihal Singh was nineteen, competent, and the last plausible
ruler of the Sikh state. After 5 November 1840 there was nobody left who could both command the army and govern
the court, and the ten years in this part follow from that.
- There was no succession law and no council. Part Thirteen’s closing argument, arriving on schedule. Nothing existed to arbitrate a disputed throne except violence.
- Ranjit Singh had balanced factions personally — Dogras, Sindhanwalias, the army — and when he stopped, nothing balanced them.
- The prize was enormous. A full treasury and the richest province in India, controlled by whoever held the child on the throne.
- And each killing required the next. A faction that has murdered a ruler cannot afford to lose the next round.
- Every capable leader. In four years the Punjab lost two Maharajas, a regent, a chief minister, a prince and most of two noble houses.
- The court’s authority over the army. Soldiers watching their government murder itself annually draw conclusions.
- Any chance of a coherent policy towards the British, at exactly the moment when one was needed.
- And the loyalty of the Dogras, who by 1845 were positioning for whatever came next — which is the ugliest thread in this part.
Every one of these murders was reported to Ludhiana within days, and from Ludhiana to Calcutta.
The British had kept an Agency on the Sutlej since the treaty of 1809 — thirty years of watching, with
informants at Lahore, a network of news-writers, and officers whose job was to report what the Durbar did.
The despatches from 1839 to 1845 are one of the best sources for this part, and they are also the
record of a government studying a neighbour coming apart.
They noted that Nau Nihal Singh was dead and that nobody believed the gateway. They noted the strength
of the army and the weakness of the court. They noted the size of the treasury. They counted the guns.
And from 1843 they began moving troops up. Sindh had been annexed that year, which put British
territory on a second side of the Punjab. Garrisons on the Sutlej were reinforced; a bridging train was
moved to Ferozepur; boats were collected on the river.
From Lahore, all of that looked like exactly what it was.
This book has said since Part One that the Punjab’s protection was distance — that everything came at it
from the north-west because that was the only direction anything could come from, and that whatever
ruled the Ganges plain was always too far away to finish the job.
By 1843 the East India Company had territory on the Sutlej and territory in Sindh, a road, a river
fleet, and six years of detailed intelligence on a government that was murdering itself.
The distance had run out.
3The Army That Became the Government, 1841–1845 CERTAIN
When the court stopped governing, the regiments elected committees and governed instead. It is one of the most extraordinary things in this book, and it terrified everybody.
- 1841–1845.
- The cantonments around Lahore and across the province.
- The regimental panchayats — committees elected by the soldiers.
- Durbar records and British Residency reports, which describe the system in detail and with alarm.
What the panchayats were
1. Each regiment elected a committee — traditionally five men, hence the name — to represent it.
2. The committees coordinated between regiments, and a general body spoke for the army as a whole.
3. They negotiated pay. The army had been under-paid since 1839 and the panchayats extracted substantial increases from a court that could not refuse them.
4. They removed officers. Commanders judged incompetent or corrupt were dismissed, and in some cases
- killed.
- And they made political decisions. By 1843 no wazir could hold office without the army’s acquiescence, and in September 1845 the panchayats had the regent’s own brother, the wazir Jawahar Singh, put to death in front of the boy Maharaja.
It is easy to describe this as indiscipline and several British observers did. That is not quite what it was.
The Khalsa army in 1841 was the only institution in the Punjab that still worked. It was paid, organised, drilled
and disciplined internally; it had a chain of command that functioned; and it had a strong sense of itself as the army of
the Khalsa rather than of any particular ruler. Part Thirteen described what Ranjit Singh had built. This is that
machine, still running, with nobody at the controls.
So the regiments did what soldiers have done in that situation elsewhere — they elected representatives and
started making decisions. The closest parallel in European history is the Agitators of the New Model Army in the
1640s, and the resemblance is close enough that several historians have used it.
And the panchayats invoked the old vocabulary. They spoke of themselves as the Khalsa, took decisions in the
name of the community, and appealed to a tradition of collective authority that ran back to the Sarbat Khalsa of Part
Eleven and beyond that to 1699.
Whether that was sincere or convenient is unanswerable. What is clear is that the institution Ranjit Singh had
allowed to lapse reasserted itself, in uniform, forty years later — and that the court found it intolerable.
- It was the last thing standing. The court was murdering itself; the army was not.
- It had the money problem on its side. An unpaid army with guns is a political actor whether it wants to be or not.
- It had a tradition to appeal to. The Khalsa’s collective authority was a real inheritance, not an invention.
- And nobody could replace it. The Punjab’s frontier needed defending and there was no second army.
- A committee of soldiers can veto and cannot administer. They could remove a wazir and could not run a revenue department.
- It had no foreign policy. Against a government in Calcutta with a strategy, an army with grievances is not a match.
- It frightened its own state into destroying it. Which is War Three, and it is the darkest reading in this part.
- And it grew. By 1845 the army was substantially larger than Ranjit Singh had ever maintained, and correspondingly more expensive and less controllable.
There is a thread running through the last six parts of this book that comes to the surface here in a form
nobody expected.
Part Nine: the Khalsa is founded in 1699, with authority vested in the order rather than the man, and five
ordinary members empowered to bind even the Guru. Part Ten: the Sarbat Khalsa emerges in the forests,
meeting twice a year and binding twelve chiefs by resolution. Part Eleven: that assembly appoints
commanders, divides provinces and refuses an Afghan king’s terms. Part Twelve: it stops being convened,
because the misls stop needing each other. Part Thirteen: Ranjit Singh never calls it once in forty years.
And then in 1841, with the state coming apart, the soldiers of the Khalsa army elect committees, call
themselves the Khalsa, and start passing resolutions.
It is not the same institution. A regimental panchayat is not the Sarbat Khalsa and a demand for arrears of
pay is not a gurmata. Several of the army’s decisions were factional, some were murderous, and the men
involved were pursuing their interests like everybody else in this part.
But the shape of the thing is unmistakable, and it did not come from nowhere. A hundred and forty
years after Anandpur, in the collapse of a monarchy that had set the collective tradition aside, an army
reached for it again — because it was the only model of legitimate collective authority the Punjab had.
It lasted four years, it could not govern, and its own government sent it across the Sutlej to be destroyed.
4The Crossing, December 1845 LIKELY
The Khalsa army crossed the Sutlej, and the argument about why has been running for a hundred and eighty years.
When: 11 December 1845.
Where: The Sutlej, the treaty line of 1809.
Who: The Khalsa army, under Lal Singh as wazir and Tej Singh as commander-in-chief.
The evidence: Both governments’ records — and a set of intercepted communications that are the heart of the controversy.
Three explanations, all of them partly true
1. The British were preparing for war. This is not a nationalist claim; it is in their own papers. Sindh had
- been annexed in 1843, putting British territory on a second side of the Punjab. Garrisons at Ferozepur, Ludhiana and Ambala were reinforced from 1843 onwards. A bridging train was moved to Ferozepur and boats were collected. By late 1845 there were tens of thousands of troops and a large artillery park on the Sutlej. From Lahore this looked like an invasion being assembled, because in an important sense it was.
- The army wanted to go. Confident, larger than ever, and contemptuous of a court that had murdered five rulers in four years. It had been told for six years that the British were coming, and it preferred to fight on ground of its choosing.
- And the court wanted the army destroyed. This is the reading most historians accept in some form. A government that cannot control its own army, and whose ministers have watched the panchayats execute a wazir, has an obvious interest in that army being broken by somebody else.
This is the most serious accusation in this part and it needs to be handled precisely.
What is documented. Both Lal Singh, the wazir, and Tej Singh, the commander-in-chief, were in communication
with British officers before and during the war. Correspondence exists. Captain Peter Nicolson, the British agent at
Ferozepur, was receiving information from Lal Singh. After the war both men were retained in office by the
British-backed settlement, and Lal Singh was later removed only for a separate offence.
What is inferred from conduct. At Ferozeshah, Tej Singh arrived on the morning of 22 December with a fresh army,
against a British force that was exhausted and nearly out of ammunition — and withdrew without attacking. At
Sobraon, he crossed the bridge to the rear early in the battle, and the bridge behind the Sikh army failed at the moment
it was most needed. Lal Singh’s handling at Mudki and Ferozeshah was, at best, extraordinarily poor.
What is contested. Whether this amounts to a coordinated plan to have the army annihilated, or to two frightened
men hedging against a defeat they thought inevitable, or to some combination. Historians differ, and the difference
matters.
This book’s position is that the communications are established, the conduct at Ferozeshah and Sobraon requires an
explanation, and that no innocent explanation has ever been offered that accounts for both. That is not the same as a
proven conspiracy, and it will not be described as one.
- Six years of intelligence on a disintegrating neighbour, from an Agency forty miles away.
- Sindh in 1843 gave them a second front and a river route.
- They had prepared the ground — troops, guns, boats and supplies were in place before a shot was fired.
- And they had friends inside. Whatever the extent of it, they were not fighting blind.
- The army did not trust its commanders and was right not to.
- There was no government behind it. No war policy, no reserves plan, no diplomacy, no ally.
- It crossed a river with an enemy in front and nothing at its back.
- And it fought four battles in eight weeks, which no army can sustain without a state.
British despatches of December 1845 describe an unprovoked invasion of Company territory by a barbarous
soldiery, and the war was fought and justified on that basis.
It is worth being exact about what the crossing actually was. The Lahore Durbar held territory on
both banks of the Sutlej — the treaty of 1809 fixed a boundary, not an exclusion. Sikh possessions on the
left bank were long established. Crossing the river was therefore not, by itself, an act of war in the way the
despatches presented it, and everybody involved knew that.
It is equally worth being exact about the other side of the ledger. The army crossed in force, with
artillery, and invested Ferozepur. Whatever the legal position, that is a campaign, not a border dispute.
And the third thing is the one this book keeps returning to. Both governments had spent two years
preparing for a war they each said the other was going to start. The Company moved troops and
bridging equipment to the frontier; the Durbar increased an army it could not pay. Each buildup justified
the next.
Wars that everybody has prepared for tend to happen, and the question of who technically began
them is usually the least interesting thing about them.
What was genuinely one-sided was the aftermath. Within three years the Punjab had lost a province, its
treasury, its army, its regent and its independence — and the winner wrote the account of how it
started.
5Mudki, 18 December 1845 CERTAIN
The first battle was fought in dust and failing light by two armies that could not see each other, and the British won it at a price that told them what the next one would cost.
When: 18 December 1845, from late afternoon into the night.
Where: Mudki, in the scrub country south of Ferozepur.
Who: Sir Hugh Gough with about eleven thousand, against a Sikh force under Lal Singh.
The evidence: British despatches, regimental records and casualty returns.
What happened
1. Gough’s army had force-marched from Ambala and arrived at Mudki exhausted and thirsty, and was
- attacked as it was settling.
- The ground was low scrub and sand, and the fighting kicked up so much dust that in the failing December light neither side could see what it was doing. The battle is remembered in the British army as “Midnight Mudki.”
- The Sikh guns were well served and did serious damage before the British cavalry got among them.
- Lal Singh withdrew — early, and with much of his force intact.
- British losses were about eight hundred and seventy. Among the dead were Sir Robert Sale, the defender of Jalalabad and one of the most famous soldiers in India, and Sir John McCaskill.
Gough had fought in Spain against Napoleon’s armies and in China. Most of his officers had spent careers fighting
Indian armies and had a settled view of what those were like: brave, badly led, and certain to break when pressed.
At Mudki the Sikh artillery outshot theirs, the infantry did not break, and the withdrawal was orderly. Two
generals were killed. Eight hundred and seventy casualties for an evening’s fighting against a force that had not been
trying very hard was not the arithmetic anybody had expected.
The despatches after Mudki change tone noticeably. Officers who had written about “the Sikhs” as a rabble
started writing about them as an army.
And there is a detail that recurs through every battle in this part and starts here: the Sikh gunners stayed with their
guns. British accounts of Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon all note the same thing, in the same words, with the
same puzzled respect — that the artillerymen were killed at their pieces rather than abandoning them.
- Cavalry. Their horse got round the flanks in the confusion and into the gun line, which the Sikh cavalry did not prevent.
- Discipline in the dark. Formed infantry that can keep its order in dust and darkness has an enormous advantage over one that cannot.
- And the Sikh commander did not commit. Lal Singh fought a portion of his force and took it away.
- The Sikh army was substantially intact and three days later was entrenched at Ferozeshah with a hundred guns.
- The ground was chosen by nobody — a meeting engagement, not a battle either side had planned.
- British losses were disproportionate for the result, and they had a much harder fight coming.
There is an arrangement in this campaign that has no parallel in British military history and it says a good
deal about how seriously the war was taken.
Sir Henry Hardinge was the Governor-General of India. He was also a Peninsular veteran who had lost
a hand at Ligny two days before Waterloo, and he did not think much of Gough’s tactics.
So he volunteered to serve under Gough as second-in-command.
Consider the position. The head of the government of British India — the man with civil authority over a
hundred and fifty million people — placed himself in the field as the military subordinate of the
Commander-in-Chief, in order to be present at the battles and to intervene if things went wrong. It was not
vanity. Hardinge had concluded that this war might be lost, and that if it was lost the Company’s
position in northern India would go with it. His own private letters say so.
Three days after Mudki, at Ferozeshah, he told Gough that the attack should not go in that evening — and
was overruled, because Gough was his commanding officer. That night he sent his sword and his state
papers to the rear at Ferozepur, with orders that they were to be destroyed if the battle was lost.
The sword was one Wellington had given him; it had belonged to Napoleon.
6Ferozeshah, 21–22 December 1845 CERTAIN
The hardest-fought battle the British ever had in India, and the closest they came to losing one. It was decided by a general who arrived with a fresh army and did not attack.
When: 21–22 December 1845, over two days and a night.
Where: Ferozeshah, a fortified camp in flat scrub country.
Who: Gough and Hardinge with about eighteen thousand, against roughly thirty-five thousand Sikhs with over a hundred guns under Lal Singh — and Tej Singh with a second army nearby.
The evidence: Extensive, from both sides, and unusually candid on the British side.
Day one
1. The Sikh army was entrenched in a defended camp with a large and well-served artillery park — the
- strongest position anybody had built against a British army in India.
- Gough waited most of the day for Littler’s division to come up from Ferozepur, then attacked in the late afternoon. Hardinge argued against attacking so late and was overruled.
- The assault went in and partly succeeded. British and Company infantry got into the entrenchments; some of the guns were taken; the fighting was hand to hand and extremely costly.
- Then the light went.
The night
1. The British army spent the night scattered among the Sikh entrenchments, in the dark, in pieces, in and
- around the enemy’s own camp, with Sikh guns still firing into them at intervals.
- Units were lost. Regiments did not know where their brigades were. Some formations had withdrawn; others were still in the camp; ammunition was low and there was no water.
- Hardinge sent his papers and his sword to the rear. 4. Officers who survived it wrote afterwards that India was won and lost several times during that night.
Day two
1. At first light the British re-formed and cleared the camp. By mid-morning the position was theirs and the
- Sikh army had drawn off.
- And then Tej Singh arrived with a fresh army.
- The British force in front of him was finished. It had marched, fought two battles in four days, spent a night among enemy guns, was almost out of artillery ammunition, and had no reserve. Several accounts describe cavalry being sent away to look like a manoeuvre because there was nothing else left to do.
- Tej Singh made a demonstration and withdrew.
Everything in this part turns on an hour on the morning of 22 December 1845, and it is worth stating what was actually
available to each side.
The British: perhaps twelve thousand effective men, no fresh troops, artillery ammunition nearly exhausted, no water,
casualties of well over two thousand, and the Governor-General of India on the field.
Tej Singh: a substantially intact army that had not fought, with its own artillery, arriving on the flank of an enemy in
that condition.
He did not attack.
The explanations offered at the time and since: that he believed the British were manoeuvring to cut him off; that
his own troops were unwilling; that he judged the position too strong. The explanation most historians give: that he
did not want to win.
This book set out the evidence for that in War Three and will not repeat it. What can be said without any inference
at all is that the outcome of the First Anglo-Sikh War was decided by a Sikh commander declining to engage a
beaten enemy, and that his own army never forgave him for it.
- Discipline through a night that should have broken them. Whatever else is said about the British army of 1845, it did not disintegrate at Ferozeshah, and it very nearly should have.
- The Sikh command was divided and half of it was not trying.
- Two armies were never combined. Lal Singh’s and Tej Singh’s forces fought the same battle on consecutive days rather than together on one.
- And luck, which the survivors said so themselves.
- Their commanders. This is the whole answer and every other line is a detail of it.
- No coordination between the two forces — the oldest failure in this book, appearing for the last time.
- They fought a defensive battle brilliantly and could not follow up. Nobody ordered the counter-attack that was there to be made.
- And they had no government to exploit a victory even if they had won one.
This book has spent thirteen parts asking who is writing and what they need you to believe, and it has
usually had to work with victors describing people they had just destroyed.
Ferozeshah produced the opposite. The British accounts of this battle were written by professionals for
professional readers who would check, about a fight they had nearly lost, and they are startlingly generous.
They describe artillery served better than their own. They describe infantry that stood in entrenchments
and did not run. They describe gunners killed at their pieces. They describe, repeatedly and with
something close to bewilderment, that Sikh soldiers did not surrender.
Hardinge — the Governor-General, who had fought the French — wrote privately that he had never seen
troops fight like it, and that another such victory would undo them.
Gough said afterwards that policy prevented him from recording publicly what he thought of the gallantry
of the men he had beaten.
Take that at exactly its face value and no more. These were officers of an army engaged in conquering
the Punjab, and generosity about a defeated enemy is cheap and flatters the winner. But the purpose was
not to praise Sikhs. It was to explain to London why a victory had cost two and a half thousand
casualties in four days, and the honest answer was that they had met the best army in Asia and
had barely got past it.
Part Ten found its most valuable witness in two English merchants with no reason to be kind. This is the
same thing at a larger scale: the highest tribute the Punjab receives in these sixteen parts is written
in the reports of the men who were killing them.
7Aliwal, 28 January 1846 CERTAIN
The one battle in this war that the British fought properly, and the only one they are unreservedly proud of.
When: 28 January 1846, after a check at Baddowal a week earlier.
Where: Aliwal, on the Sutlej near Ludhiana.
Who: Sir Harry Smith against Ranjodh Singh Majithia.
The evidence: Detailed on both sides; the tactical accounts are unusually clear.
What happened
1. A Sikh force had crossed near Ludhiana to threaten the British communications and had checked Smith at
- Baddowal on 21 January.
- Smith came back reinforced and found them drawn up with the river behind them.
- He fought a methodical battle — artillery first, then a general advance, with his flanks secured and his cavalry used at the right moment.
- The 16th Lancers charged Sikh infantry squares and broke them, in an action that became one of the most celebrated in British cavalry history.
- The Sikh army was driven back into the fords and lost heavily crossing under fire. Sixty-seven guns were taken.
- British casualties were under six hundred — by the standards of this campaign, almost nothing.
British military writers have called Aliwal “the battle without a mistake,” and the phrase is worth unpacking, because
what it praises is the absence of the thing that characterised the rest of the war.
Gough’s method was the frontal assault with the bayonet. It had worked in Spain and in China and it worked in
the Punjab too, at Mudki, Ferozeshah, and later Chillianwala — at a cost that appalled his own government. He
distrusted long bombardments and preferred to close.
Smith did the opposite. He used his guns first, kept his formations in hand, secured his flanks, and committed cavalry
when the infantry had done its work.
The result was the only engagement of the First Sikh War in which the British lost fewer men than they might have
expected.
And the lesson was not learned for three more years. Gough remained Commander-in-Chief; Chillianwala in
January 1849 was fought his way and cost him twenty-three hundred casualties in an afternoon. Only at Gujrat, six
weeks after that, and under enormous political pressure, did a British army in the Punjab finally fight the way Harry
Smith had fought at Aliwal.
- Artillery preparation. The guns did the work before the infantry went in.
- The Sikhs had a river at their back. A position with no line of retreat is a trap for whoever is standing in it.
- He had time. Unlike Gough at Ferozeshah, he was not fighting at the end of a forced march against a clock.
- And this was a detached force, not the main Khalsa army.
- They stood with the Sutlej behind them and no bridge worth the name.
- They were on the wrong side of the river for the strategic purpose, isolated from the main army.
- Their infantry formed squares against cavalry — correct doctrine, and useless without guns to break up the charge.
- And sixty-seven guns lost is a catastrophe for an army whose artillery was its greatest asset.
Count what the Khalsa army lost in artillery between December 1845 and February 1846.
Guns taken in the entrenchments at Ferozeshah. Sixty-seven at Aliwal. The whole of the artillery in the
bridgehead at Sobraon two weeks later. And then, by the treaty of March 1846, thirty-six more surrendered
as a condition of peace.
The gun park that Ranjit Singh spent twenty years building — the foundry at Lahore, the trained
crews, the French artillery officer who organised it — was destroyed in eight weeks.
Part Twelve described the lesson that everybody in India was given between 1780 and 1820 and that only
one ruler acted on: drilled infantry and disciplined artillery beat any quantity of irregular cavalry. Part
Thirteen described him acting on it, deliberately, for thirty years, building the industry as well as the army.
The guns were the reason the British nearly lost at Ferozeshah. Every British account of that battle
says so; the Sikh artillery outshot theirs and held them out of the entrenchments through an afternoon.
And an army’s guns are the hardest part of it to replace. Men can be recruited; a foundry takes years and a
trained gunner takes longer. When the Khalsa army rose again in 1848 it fought two more full-scale
battles — and at Gujrat it was outgunned three to one by an enemy that had learned, finally, to
use artillery properly.
What was lost in eight weeks in 1846 was not recovered, and could not have been.
8Sobraon, 10 February 1846 CERTAIN
The army was destroyed in a bridgehead with a river behind it and a bridge that failed. It is the end of the Sikh state as a military power, and it produced the last great figure in this book.
When: 10 February 1846, from dawn to early afternoon.
Where: Sobraon, on the east bank of the Sutlej.
Who: Gough and Hardinge, against roughly thirty thousand Sikhs in prepared entrenchments.
The evidence: Extensive and detailed on both sides.
The position
The Sikh army had built a bridgehead on the east bank — a horseshoe of earthworks perhaps three kilometres
long, well sited, with a heavy gun line, resting both flanks on the river.
Behind it was a single boat bridge. That is the whole battle. An army in a bridgehead with one crossing behind
it is either winning or annihilated, and there is nothing in between.
What happened
1. The British opened with a bombardment of about two hours from a heavy battery brought up for the
- purpose — and ran short of ammunition without having broken the earthworks.
- So Gough attacked anyway. His remark on being told the guns were running out is recorded in several versions and all of them amount to: then we will do it with the bayonet.
- The assault was extremely costly and it went in. The entrenchments were carried after prolonged fighting at the parapet.
- And then the bridge went. Whether it broke under the weight of retreating men, or was damaged by the river, or was cut, is disputed and is discussed below.
- The Sikh army was destroyed against the water. Men went into the Sutlej under artillery fire at close range. The dead are usually put between eight and ten thousand. 6. British casualties were about two thousand four hundred.
- Tej Singh had crossed to the far bank early in the action.
The failure of the boat bridge behind the Sikh army is the most serious of all the allegations in this part, and it needs
the same care as the others.
What is agreed: the bridge failed at the moment the army needed it, and the destruction of that army followed directly
from it. The Sutlej was high; the bridge was under strain; and men and guns were crossing it under fire.
What is alleged: that Tej Singh, having crossed early, had it weakened or cut behind him. This is asserted in a great
many accounts and it is entirely consistent with the rest of his conduct.
What can be established: not enough. A boat bridge under that load, in that river, with an army retreating over it,
may well have failed on its own.
This book’s position is the one it has taken since War Three. The pattern of Tej Singh’s conduct across the whole
war requires an explanation and no innocent one has been offered that fits all of it. Whether he personally
destroyed the bridge at Sobraon cannot be proved and will not be asserted here.
What is beyond dispute is the result: the finest army in Asia was penned against a river it could not cross and killed
there.
- Weight of assault. Gough’s method was crude and at Sobraon it worked, because there was nowhere for the defenders to go.
- The position was a trap for its own garrison. A bridgehead is only as good as the bridge.
- Their artillery finally had the range and the metal for the second half of the battle, when it mattered most.
- And the Sikh command was on the wrong side of the river.
- One crossing. The single decision that made the annihilation possible, and it was made by the men who chose the ground.
- They could not be reinforced or withdrawn once the action started.
- The river was rising.
- And nobody was coming. The rest of the Khalsa army was across the water and did not intervene.
He was about sixty. He had been a sardar under Ranjit Singh, had fought on the frontier, had been sent as
an ambassador, and had spent the years after 1839 watching a court he despised murder itself.
He came to Sobraon knowing what it was.
The accounts — Sikh and British both — describe him dressed in white, having taken a vow not to
leave the field alive, going through the entrenchments before the battle telling the men what was
expected of them.
He fought in the earthworks and he was killed there, with the men who did not cross the bridge.
British officers who wrote about Sobraon afterwards singled him out, which they did not have to do. And
the same accounts record the detail that runs through every battle in this part: at Sobraon, with the
position lost, the bridge gone and the river behind them, the Sikh army did not surrender. Officers
describe men walking into the Sutlej under fire rather than laying down arms, and gunners standing at
their pieces until they were killed.
The tradition is that his body was recovered from the field and carried home to Attari, and that his wife
performed sati.
This book has described a great many last stands — Porus at the Hydaspes, the Shahis on the Indus,
forty men in a mud house at Chamkaur, thirty at the Akal Bunga in 1764.
Sham Singh Attariwala is the last one. After Sobraon there is no independent Punjabi army left to
make one, and the four remaining battles in this book are fought by an army that already knows
how it ends.
9The Three Treaties, 1846 CERTAIN
The Punjab was not annexed after Sobraon. It was taken apart with paper over the following ten months, which was cheaper and worked better.
When: 9 March 1846 (Lahore); 16 March 1846 (Amritsar); 16 December 1846 (Bhyrowal).
Where: Lahore, and a village on the Beas.
Who: Sir Henry Hardinge for the Company; the boy Maharaja’s government for the Punjab.
The evidence: The treaty texts. CERTAIN.
What each one did
1. The Treaty of Lahore, 9 March 1846. The Jalandhar Doab — the whole country between the Beas and the
- Sutlej — was ceded outright. An indemnity of a crore and a half of rupees was imposed. The Khalsa army was to be reduced to twenty thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, and thirty-six guns surrendered. A British Resident was installed at Lahore.
- The Treaty of Amritsar, 16 March 1846. The Durbar could not pay the indemnity. So Kashmir and the hill country were transferred to Gulab Singh Dogra for seventy-five lakhs — a Sikh vassal buying a Sikh province from the British with the money the Sikh state owed them.
- The Treaty of Bhyrowal, 16 December 1846. The one that mattered. Jind Kaur was removed from the regency. A Council of Regency of eight sardars was set up, subject in everything to the British Resident, who was given full authority over every department. British troops were to garrison Lahore. The arrangement was to last until Duleep Singh came of age in 1854, and the Durbar was to pay for it.
Hardinge could have taken the Punjab in March 1846 and chose not to. The reasons are entirely practical and worth
setting out, because they explain the whole shape of this part.
It would have cost too much. Governing a province of that size, with a hostile population and an undefended Afghan
frontier, was an expense the Company did not want.
It would have made them the frontier. A weak Sikh state as a buffer between British India and the Khyber was
strategically preferable to a British border on the Indus.
And they could get the substance without the liability. Bhyrowal gave the Resident control of the revenue, the
army, the appointments and the succession, while a Sikh government remained nominally responsible for everything
that went wrong.
This is the subsidiary alliance system that Part Twelve watched arrive in India, applied to the last
independent state on the subcontinent. It had swallowed Hyderabad, Awadh, Mysore and the Maratha houses by
the same route: accept a Resident, accept troops, pay for them, and discover in a few years that you are a district.
It took two and a half years here rather than a decade, because in 1848 the Punjab rose.
- There was nobody to say no. The army was destroyed, the regent was being removed, and the Maharaja was eight.
- The Council of Regency were beneficiaries. Eight sardars given power they could not otherwise have held, on condition of obedience.
- The indemnity was the lever. A debt that cannot be paid converts into whatever the creditor wants.
- And it looked like a protectorate rather than a conquest, which mattered in London.
- It humiliated without disarming the population. Disbanded soldiers went home to villages, with their grievances intact.
- It removed the one figure with real standing. Jind Kaur’s exile in 1847 was felt as an insult across the province.
- British officers were now administering revenue districts, which put them where they could be resented daily.
- And the sale of Kashmir told everybody exactly what the Punjab was worth to its new managers.
She was the daughter of a kennel-keeper at Ranjit Singh’s court, the last of his wives, and the mother of his
youngest son. In September 1843 she became regent of the Punjab because everybody else was dead.
She was about twenty-six.
She held it for three years, in the worst circumstances any ruler in this book inherits — an army nobody
controlled, a court that had murdered five rulers, and a British Agency across the river taking notes. She
was not good at it and it is not clear that anybody could have been. Her brother was made wazir and was
killed by the army in front of her and her son.
The British removed her from the regency at Bhyrowal in December 1846 and separated her from
Duleep Singh in 1847, sending her first to Sheikhupura and then out of the Punjab entirely, to a fort near
Benares, with a reduced pension.
The despatches describing her are worth reading for what they reveal about the writers. She is
“intriguing,” “dangerous,” “the only man in the Punjab” — and a good deal worse than that. British
officials of the 1840s had no vocabulary for a woman exercising political power except abuse, and they used
all of it.
The abuse is also a measurement. They took her away from her son at nine years old and moved her
a thousand kilometres because they were afraid of what she could do from Lahore.
In 1849 she escaped from Chunar disguised as a servant and reached Nepal, where she lived in exile for
years. In 1861 she was allowed to join Duleep Singh in England — and it was she who told him what he
had signed away at ten years old, which he had never properly understood. He spent the rest of his
life trying to get it back.
She died in 1863. Her ashes were eventually brought home to the Punjab.
10Multan, April 1848 — Two Officers at a Gate CERTAIN
A handover of a governorship went wrong, two British officers were murdered, and the whole province rose. It is the last war in this book fought by Punjabis for the Punjab.
When: 19–20 April 1848; Multan falls 22 January 1849.
Where: Multan, and then Hazara and the Chenab.
Who: Diwan Mulraj, governor of Multan; then Chattar Singh and Sher Singh Attariwala.
The evidence: Company records, Edwardes’s own account, and the trial papers.
What happened
1. Mulraj resigned the governorship of Multan in a dispute over an increased revenue demand from the new
- administration at Lahore.
- A successor was sent, escorted by two young British officers — Patrick Vans Agnew and Lieutenant William Anderson.
- On 19 April they were attacked at the fort by Mulraj’s soldiers and wounded, and they were killed the following day. Whether Mulraj ordered it or was overtaken by his own troops is disputed; he took command of the revolt afterwards either way.
- The British did not move. Gough argued that a campaign in the hot weather was impossible; the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, agreed to wait until the autumn.
- So a young political officer did it himself. Herbert Edwardes, with locally raised forces and Pathan levies, beat Mulraj in the field and shut him up in Multan.
- And by then the province had risen. Chattar Singh Attariwala rose in Hazara; his son Sher Singh Attariwala, sent to help besiege Multan, went over to the rebels in September and marched north to join his father.
- They offered Peshawar to the Afghans in exchange for support, and Dost Muhammad Khan sent cavalry.
The five-month pause between the murders in April and the campaign in November is one of the most argued-over
decisions of the period, and the argument is not really about the weather.
A quick, small operation in May could probably have contained Multan as a local mutiny. Edwardes, on the spot
with improvised forces, very nearly did it alone.
What happened instead was that the revolt had five months to spread, and by November it was a national rising
involving the Attariwalas, the disbanded soldiers of the old Khalsa army, and an Afghan alliance.
Dalhousie’s own words are the reason historians suspect the delay was not purely logistical. On the outbreak
he wrote that the Sikh nation had called for war, and that on his word they should have it — with a vengeance. His
declared intention was annexation, and a local mutiny could not be used to justify it. A national rebellion
could.
This book will not assert that he deliberately let it spread. It will note that he wanted the outcome that the delay
produced, said so in writing, and got it.
- Two years of resentment. Disbanded soldiers, reduced sardars, a Resident running the government, and British officers in the districts.
- Jind Kaur’s removal and exile, which was felt as a national humiliation.
- The sale of Kashmir to a man widely regarded as having sold the state in the first war.
- And the army had gone home, not been destroyed. The men of Ferozeshah and Sobraon were in their villages and came back.
- No guns. The artillery of 1845 was gone and could not be replaced.
- No government. A rising without a state has no money, no supply and no diplomacy.
- The Cis-Sutlej states stayed out — the consequence of the 1809 treaty, forty years later.
- And the Afghan alliance cost more than it delivered. Offering Peshawar to Kabul lost the rising support in the very districts that Hari Singh Nalwa had secured.
This city has appeared in eight parts of this book and this is its final entry, so here is the whole sequence in
one place.
712: an Arab army cuts its water supply and takes it. 1006: Mahmud fights over it. 1175: Muhammad of
Ghor’s conquest of India begins here. 1397: Timur’s grandson besieges it for six months. 1445–1526: the
Langahs make it an independent country. 1772: the Bhangi misl takes it; 1779: Timur Shah takes it back.
1818: Ranjit Singh takes it and Muzaffar Khan dies in the breach. 1848: two British officers are killed at its
gate and a province rises. 1849: it falls, and its guns free the siege train that wins the war.
Eleven hundred and thirty-seven years, and every single time for the same reason. It sits where the
road from Sindh, the road from Khurasan and the road up the Punjab meet. Part Seven called it the city that
keeps being the door; Part Twelve counted its owners.
Here it is one last time, and this time what comes through the door is a British siege train coming
up from Sindh — from the south, which is the one direction nothing in this book has ever come from
before. That is the whole strategic story of 1849 in a sentence. For five thousand years the Punjab was
invaded from the north-west, because that was the only way in. In 1843 the Company annexed Sindh,
and in 1848 they came up the Indus. The door everybody had watched for fifty centuries was not the
one that finally opened.
11Chillianwala, 13 January 1849 CERTAIN
The worst day the British army had in India in that century, fought a few miles from where Alexander crossed the Jhelum — and it nearly ended a Commander-in-Chief’s career and a government’s nerve.
When: 13 January 1849, from mid-afternoon into darkness.
Where: Chillianwala, in dense scrub jungle near the Jhelum.
Who: Gough with about twelve thousand, against Sher Singh Attariwala with perhaps thirty thousand.
The evidence: Very extensive on the British side, including the parliamentary row that followed.
What happened
1. Gough found the Sikh army in thick scrub where neither artillery nor cavalry could work properly, and
- where formations lost sight of each other after fifty yards.
- He intended to camp and attack in the morning. Sikh guns opened on his position; he changed his mind and went in late in the afternoon.
- There was almost no artillery preparation. The infantry went forward into the jungle against an entrenched enemy with guns.
- It became a confused, disconnected brawl. Brigades lost direction; one regiment went in without its muskets loaded on an order it should never have been given; units were enfiladed by guns they could not see.
- The 24th Foot lost something near half its strength in minutes. Four guns were lost. Three regiments lost their colours — which, in the British army of 1849, was a disgrace of a kind that did not happen.
- British casualties were about twenty-three hundred.
- Both armies stayed on the ground for two days and then both withdrew. Gough claimed a victory; Sher Singh claimed a victory; and neither claim was worth much.
The despatch reached England in February 1849 and caused something close to panic.
Twenty-three hundred casualties, lost guns and lost colours was not the news the British public expected
from India. The Duke of Wellington was consulted. The government decided that Gough had to go, and Sir Charles
Napier — the conqueror of Sindh — was sent out to replace him.
Napier arrived in May, by which time the war had been over for three months, and the replacement was never made.
The row afterwards was about Gough’s tactics and it was justified. His method was the frontal assault; he
distrusted long bombardments; and he had now spent four years applying it against the best artillery in
Asia. Mudki, Ferozeshah, Sobraon and Chillianwala had cost him a number of casualties that a European army would
have found difficult to explain.
The other half of the explanation is the one the row did not want to state. The reason those battles cost what
they did is that the enemy was extremely good, and had been for four years, and had now been beaten twice and come
back.
Six weeks after Chillianwala, at Gujrat, Gough fought a battle the way Harry Smith had fought Aliwal — guns first, for
three hours, and then the advance. It cost him under a thousand men and won the war. He had known how to do it
the whole time.
- The ground. Dense scrub is the worst possible terrain for a regular army and the best for a defender who knows it.
- Their artillery was well sited and could not be located from the front.
- Sher Singh Attariwala was a real commander — the first the Khalsa army had had since 1845 who was actually trying to win.
- And they were fighting for their own country in a war their government had not started.
- They could not follow up. No reserve, no supply and no second army.
- Multan fell nine days later, freeing a siege train and fifteen thousand men to join Gough.
- The British could replace two thousand men. The Sikhs could not replace anything.
- And the Afghan cavalry was of no use in a jungle fight.
Chillianwala is fought a few miles from where this book’s second part is set. In 326 BCE, Alexander of
Macedon crossed the Jhelum in a thunderstorm, upstream and at night, and beat Porus on the far
bank — the battle of the Hydaspes, and one of the most studied engagements in military history. Part Two
described it: the elephants turning on their own line, the king fighting on after his army had gone, and the
exchange afterwards about how he wished to be treated.
In January 1849, on the same stretch of river, a British army fought the last full-scale battle of the
last independent Indian state.
Two thousand one hundred and seventy-five years apart. Both times an army from far away, with better
organisation and a professional command structure, against a Punjabi army fighting on its own ground.
Both times the Punjabi side fought well enough that the winner’s own account is full of respect, and both
times it made no difference to the outcome. And both times the fighting turned on the same thing, which
this book has been counting since Part Two: whether an army can go on functioning when the plan
has come apart.
There is a monument at Chillianwala with the names of the British dead on it. There is nothing on that
ground for Porus, and nothing for the men of the Khalsa army killed there in 1849 either.
Two of the most consequential battles ever fought on Punjabi soil, on the same river, and the
province they were fought over has one obelisk between them, put up by the people who won the
second one.
12Gujrat, 21 February 1849 — The Battle of the Guns CERTAIN
Six weeks after the worst day of his career, Gough fought the way he should have fought all along, and it took an afternoon.
When: 21 February 1849.
Where: Gujrat, on the plain between the Chenab and the Jhelum.
Who: Gough with about twenty-four thousand and ninety guns, against Sher Singh and Chattar Singh with perhaps fifty thousand and about sixty.
The evidence: Detailed British accounts; the tactical narrative is clear and undisputed.
What happened
1. Multan had fallen on 22 January and its besieging force — with the heavy siege train — had come north and joined Gough. For the first time in the war he had proper artillery superiority.
2. He used it. The battle opened with a bombardment of something close to three hours, methodically, before a
- man moved forward.
- The Sikh guns were silenced or destroyed in the counter-battery work, which is what had never happened at Ferozeshah or Chillianwala.
- Then the infantry advanced across open ground, in order, with the guns moving up in support.
- The Sikh army broke and was pursued — properly, for the first time in either war, by fresh cavalry.
- Dost Muhammad Khan’s Afghan cavalry, on the Sikh side, was driven off and pursued to the Khyber.
- British casualties were under a thousand. The Sikh army ceased to exist as a fighting force.
Set Gujrat beside the four battles that came before it, because the contrast is the whole argument.
Ferozeshah: attack late in the day with insufficient bombardment against entrenchments and guns. Two thousand
four hundred casualties, and the war nearly lost in a night.
Sobraon: two hours of bombardment, ammunition exhausted, then the bayonet. Two thousand four hundred
casualties.
Chillianwala: almost no bombardment at all, into scrub. Twenty-three hundred casualties, four guns and three colours
lost.
Aliwal, and then Gujrat: guns first, thoroughly, then advance. Under six hundred and under a thousand respectively,
and both decisive.
Gough had watched Harry Smith demonstrate it in January 1846 and did not adopt it until February 1849, after
Parliament had decided to sack him.
And here is what that arithmetic actually measures. The reason the frontal assault was so expensive in this
particular war, and had not been in China or Spain, is that the Khalsa army’s artillery was the best any British force had
faced in Asia. Gough’s tactics did not become correct at Gujrat; the Sikh guns became fewer. Four years of
attrition, and finally a three-to-one superiority in metal, is what changed.
- Artillery superiority, used properly. Ninety guns against sixty, and three hours to work with.
- Open ground. The plain suited the side with more guns and better cavalry, and both were British.
- The Multan siege train. The delay of 1848 cost the British the autumn; the fall of Multan gave them the war.
- And they pursued. Which turned a defeat into a dissolution.
- Its guns were gone, destroyed at Ferozeshah and Sobraon and never replaced.
- It had no base. Lahore was in British hands and had been for three years.
- It had no government, no treasury and no ally that mattered.
- And there was nowhere left to go. Sindh in the south, the British in the east, and Afghans in the west who had come for Peshawar rather than for them.
There is a detail about Gujrat that deserves more than it usually gets, and it is about what the three hours of
bombardment were actually doing.
The counter-battery work at Gujrat was aimed at the Sikh gun line, and it was thorough. British
accounts describe the Sikh artillery being systematically located and destroyed piece by piece before a
single infantry battalion moved.
And the same accounts record what the Sikh gunners did about it, which was nothing different from what
they had done at Mudki and Ferozeshah and Sobraon. They stayed with their guns.
Four battles across four years, every British account, the same observation in almost the same words: the
gunners were killed at their pieces.
By February 1849 those men knew everything. They knew the state had been sold twice over. They knew
what Tej Singh had done at Ferozeshah and what had happened to the bridge at Sobraon. They knew the
guns they were serving were outnumbered three to one and were being taken apart methodically by an
enemy they could not reach.
They stayed anyway.
This book has looked for the voice of ordinary Punjabis for fourteen parts and found perhaps five instances
of it — a coin legend, a hymn, a couplet about a sickle, two men who set up a toll post to prove they existed.
The last one is a set of casualty observations in the despatches of the men who killed them,
repeated four times because the writers could not get over it, and it is the only record we have of what those
gunners thought was worth doing.
13Rawalpindi, March 1849 — The Surrender CERTAIN
The Khalsa army laid down its arms, and one of the men doing it said the sentence that this whole part is about.
When: 12–14 March 1849.
Where: Near Rawalpindi.
Who: Chattar Singh and Sher Singh Attariwala, surrendering to Sir Walter Gilbert.
The evidence: British eyewitness accounts, several of them by officers present.
What happened
1. Gilbert pursued the remains of the army north-west after Gujrat, allowing it no chance to reassemble.
2. The Attariwalas asked for terms and were given personal safety and nothing else.
3. The army came in and gave up its weapons over several days — perhaps twenty thousand men, with what artillery it had left.
4. The Afghan contingent was pursued to the Khyber and out of it, and Peshawar was retaken.
5. The men were disarmed and sent home.
British officers who watched the surrender at Rawalpindi wrote about it, and several of them recorded the same detail.
The soldiers came forward, laid their weapons on the pile, and went. Many of them were veterans of Ranjit Singh’s
campaigns — men who had been at Multan in 1818 or Nowshera in 1823 or on the frontier with Hari Singh Nalwa.
Some of them, according to the accounts, kissed their swords before putting them down. Some wept.
And one old soldier, laying down his arms, is recorded as saying: Aj Ranjit Singh mar gaya.
Today Ranjit Singh has died.
He had died ten years earlier, in his bed at Lahore, and the man saying it knew that perfectly well.
It is one of the great lines in this book and it belongs to somebody whose name nobody wrote down.
- There was nothing to fight for. Lahore was British, the Maharaja was a child in British custody, and the government had been a British department for three years.
- The guns were gone.
- The Afghans had left, and had never been fighting for the Punjab.
- And Gilbert did not give them time. A pursuit that never stops prevents an army from becoming an army again.
- The men. Twenty thousand trained soldiers went home to their villages, and eight years later the British recruited from exactly those villages for the fighting of 1857.
- The reputation. Every British officer who fought in these two wars carried the same opinion for the rest of his career, and it shaped Indian army recruitment for a century.
- And the memory. Which is Parts Fifteen and Sixteen.
Take that sentence seriously as a piece of historical analysis, because it is one.
“Today Ranjit Singh has died.”
The man who said it was standing in a field near Rawalpindi in March 1849, putting a weapon on a pile. He
was not confused about the date of the Maharaja’s funeral. What he was saying is that the thing Ranjit
Singh had built — the state, the army, the independence, the forty years — ended at that moment and not
in June 1839.
And he was right, and this book’s argument agrees with him.
Part Thirteen said that Ranjit Singh restored the single point of failure the Khalsa had spent a
century engineering out of itself, and that everything followed from it. That was a judgement about
institutions. This is the same judgement, made by somebody who was there, in six words.
But notice the other half of it, which is the more remarkable claim. He is saying that for ten years after
the Maharaja’s death, the thing was still alive — through the court murders, the panchayats, the
betrayal at Ferozeshah, the bridge at Sobraon, the treaties, the exile of the regent, and the rising of 1848.
Through all of that, as long as there was an army of the Khalsa in the field, something of it was still
standing.
What ended at Rawalpindi was not a dynasty and not a battle. It was the last armed force in India
that belonged to nobody but the country it came from.
After March 1849 there is not another one, anywhere on the subcontinent, until 1947.
1429 March 1849 — A Ten-Year-Old Signs CERTAIN
In a room in Lahore Fort, a boy who had been Maharaja since he was five gave away a kingdom and a diamond, and did not understand what either of them was.
When: 29 March 1849.
Where: Lahore Fort.
Who: Duleep Singh, aged ten, and the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie.
The evidence: The document itself. CERTAIN.
The terms
1. The Maharaja renounced all claim to sovereignty for himself and his heirs.
2. All property of the state was confiscated in settlement of the debt and the costs of the war.
3. The Koh-i-Noor was to be surrendered to the Queen of England. It is in the treaty, as a separate article, by name.
4. He was to receive a pension and to be treated with respect, on condition that he obeyed the British
- government and lived wherever it chose.
- And the Punjab became a British province, administered by a Board under Henry and John Lawrence.
He was born in 1838, made Maharaja at five, separated from his mother at nine, and signed away his kingdom at ten.
He was then removed from the Punjab entirely. Placed in the care of a British doctor and his wife at Fatehgarh,
hundreds of miles away, he was converted to Christianity at fifteen and sent to England at sixteen, where he became a
favourite of Queen Victoria, was painted by Winterhalter, bought an estate in Suffolk and became one of the best game
shots in England.
He did not properly understand what had been taken from him until he was reunited with his mother in 1861 and
she told him. He was twenty-three.
He spent the rest of his life trying to get it back — petitioning, litigating, reconverting to Sikhism, and in 1886
attempting to return to India. He was stopped at Aden. He went to Russia to look for support and found none. He died in
a hotel room in Paris in 1893, in debt, aged fifty-five.
This book is not going to sentimentalise him. He was not a leader in exile and he never seriously attempted to be
one; much of his later life was spent on grievance and money. The Punjab did not rise for him and was never going to.
But the document he signed at ten years old is the legal instrument by which the last independent country on the
subcontinent ceased to exist, and the person who signed it could not have understood a single clause of it.
- Dalhousie had decided on it before the second war started and said so in writing.
- The 1848 rising made it defensible. A rebellion by a protected state is the standard justification, and a local mutiny would not have served.
- There was nothing left to negotiate with. No army, no treasury, no government, no adult ruler.
- And nobody could object. The Marathas were gone, Mysore was gone, and there was no other Indian power to be alarmed by it.
- The state killed itself first. Five rulers in four years; the war was fought by an army whose government had given up on it.
- The Sutlej treaty of 1809 had fixed the border for thirty-six years while the Company took everything else in India, and by 1845 there was no other power left to balance against.
- Sindh in 1843 removed the last protection, which was distance.
- And the guns could not be replaced. Everything after February 1846 was fought on borrowed time.
Follow the stone one last time, because it is the closest thing this book has to a single thread running
through five thousand years.
It came out of the Deccan and was in Mughal hands by the seventeenth century, set into the Peacock
Throne at Delhi. Nadir Shah took it in 1739 — Part Ten — and carried it back up the Grand Trunk Road
with the treasury of India, while Sikh bands raided his baggage in the dark. It went to Ahmad Shah Abdali
in 1747 and down the Durrani line through nine invasions of the Punjab. Ranjit Singh extorted it from
Shah Shuja at Lahore in 1813 — Part Thirteen — and wore it on his arm for twenty-six years.
And in 1849 it was taken out of the Lahore treasury under Article III of a document signed by a ten-year-
old, put on a ship, and given to Queen Victoria. It was recut in 1852, losing a large part of its weight, and set
in a crown.
It is in the Tower of London.
Every owner of that stone in the last three hundred years acquired it by force from the previous
one, and the argument about where it should be now is conducted between four countries with reasonable
claims and one that has it.
This book is not going to resolve that. What it will say is this.
The Punjab in these sixteen parts has been invaded, garrisoned, taxed, spent, sacked, partitioned and
written about by everybody except itself. Its independence ran for thirty-six years out of the last
thousand. The one object that stands for all of it is a stone that has been in the possession of a Punjabi
ruler for exactly that long, and which was taken away in the same document that took everything else.
What follows in Parts Fifteen and Sixteen is what happens to a country after it has stopped being
one. There is a great deal of it, and some of the worst of it is still to come.
15The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Fifteen
1. The state died before the army did. Five rulers murdered in four years, then a regency the British
- dismantled by treaty, then a rising fought by soldiers whose government had already been replaced. Part Thirteen argued that Ranjit Singh built a state with no institution capable of surviving him. This is the receipt.
- Conquest by treaty, not by battle. Lahore in March 1846, Bhyrowal in December 1846, annexation in March 1849 — three documents in three years. The Company had taken half of India this way before it reached the Sutlej, and Part Twelve watched the method arrive.
- The direction changed. For five thousand years everything came at the Punjab from the north-west, because that was the only way in. In 1843 the British annexed Sindh, and in 1848 the siege train that won the war came up the Indus from the south. The door everybody had watched for fifty centuries was not the one that opened.
- The enemy’s despatches are the tribute. The most generous account any Punjabi army receives in these sixteen parts is written by the officers who destroyed it — because they were explaining to London why a victory had cost so much. Watch what that reputation becomes after 1849, because it is the reason the British recruit from these villages for the next hundred years.
- And twenty thousand trained soldiers went home. Disarmed, not destroyed, into the same villages. Eight years later the British were recruiting from those villages to retake Delhi — and Part Fifteen is what happens when a conquered province becomes the conqueror’s army.
The Loyal Province, 1849–1919. Seventy years in which the Punjab is annexed, disarmed — and then becomes the
most important military recruiting ground in the British Empire. In 1857 the province that had been conquered
eight years earlier holds for the British, and Punjabi troops take Delhi; this book will ask, carefully, why. Then the
machinery: the canal colonies that turned the western wastes into the greatest irrigated tract on earth and rearranged
who lived where; the Land Alienation Act; the doctrine of the “martial races” and the Punjabization of the Indian Army.
And then the reaction: the Kuka movement and the men blown from guns in 1872; the agitation of 1907 and Lala Lajpat
Rai’s deportation; the Ghadar conspiracy carried home from California; the enormous Punjabi contribution to the First
World War; and on 13 April 1919, in a walled garden in Amritsar, the afternoon that ends any argument about what
the arrangement had been.
16Words Used in This Part
A committee, traditionally of five. In the Khalsa army after 1841, the elected regimental committees that negotiated pay, removed officers and made political decisions.
The court, and by extension the government of Lahore. British despatches use “the Lahore Durbar” to mean the Sikh state.
Chief minister. Between 1839 and 1845 the office was held by six men, of whom four were murdered.
The senior British political officer at an Indian court. After Bhyrowal in December 1846 the Resident at Lahore controlled every department of the Sikh government.
The Company’s principal instrument of expansion: a ruler accepts British troops, pays for them, and surrenders his foreign policy. Conquest by treaty.
The country between the Beas and the Sutlej, ceded outright by the Treaty of Lahore in March 1846.
The Sikh states east of the Sutlej — Patiala, Nabha, Jind — under British protection since 1809, and which stayed out of both wars.
A fortified position held on the enemy’s side of a river. The Sikh position at Sobraon was one, with a single boat bridge behind it.
Artillery fire directed at the enemy’s guns rather than at his troops. Its absence explains Ferozeshah and Chillianwala; its presence explains Aliwal and Gujrat.
A regiment’s flags, carried into battle and defended absolutely. Three British regiments lost theirs at Chillianwala, which is why the news caused the crisis it did.
The irregular cavalry inherited from the misl period, still serving alongside the regular army in both wars.
The house of Attari, near Amritsar. Sham Singh died at Sobraon; Chattar Singh and his son Sher Singh led the rising of 1848.
“Today Ranjit Singh has died” — recorded as said by an old soldier laying down his weapon at Rawalpindi in March 1849.
Sources used for this part
- British official despatches and campaign records of both wars, including Gough’s and Hardinge’s
- The treaty texts — Lahore and Amritsar (March 1846), Bhyrowal (December 1846), and the terms of annexation (March 1849)
- British Residency and Ludhiana Agency correspondence, 1839–1849
- Regimental histories and officers’ memoirs, including eyewitness accounts of Ferozeshah, Sobraon, Chillianwala and the
- surrender at Rawalpindi
- Herbert Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier, for the Multan rising of 1848
- The Umdat-ut-Tawarikh of Sohan Lal Suri and other Persian court records of the Lahore Durbar for the succession crisis
- Papers relating to the removal and exile of Jind Kaur, and to Duleep Singh’s later life
- Standard modern histories of the Anglo-Sikh wars and of the fall of the Sikh kingdom
The open questions here include: whether Nau Nihal Singh was murdered inside the fort on 5 November 1840; the exact
extent and intention of Lal Singh’s and Tej Singh’s dealings with the British; whether the bridge at Sobraon was cut or
simply failed; whether Mulraj ordered the killings at Multan or was carried by his own troops; and the casualty figures
at Sobraon, which range widely.
Three things about method.
First, the betrayal question is handled by separating what is documented from what is inferred, and saying
which is which. The communications with British officers are established. The conduct at Ferozeshah and Sobraon
requires an explanation. No innocent explanation has been offered that accounts for both. That is as far as the evidence
goes and this part does not go further, because a charge of that gravity should not be asserted more confidently than it
can be proved.
Second, most of the narrative here is British and it is read as an enemy’s account. Its generosity about Sikh
soldiers is genuine and it also served a purpose — explaining to London why victories cost what they did. Both things
are true and the part says so on the page.
Third, this is a defeat and it has been written as one. The Punjab lost these wars, and it lost them partly because of
British power and distance and Sindh and artillery, and partly because its own court murdered five rulers in four years
and its own commanders would not fight. A history that blames only the winner is a comfort, not an
explanation.