Sikh Empire

Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh, chief of the Sukerchakia misl, took Lahore in 1799 at the age of eighteen and spent the next four decades welding the twelve Sikh misls and the surrounding territories into a single state. He took Amritsar, Multan, Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar in 1834 — reversing, for the first time in eight centuries, the direction of conquest through the Khyber.

He never used the title of emperor and struck his coinage in the name of the Gurus rather than his own.

The state

The empire was Sikh in its ruling institution and deliberately plural in its administration. Ranjit Singh's ministers and generals included Muslims and Hindus in large numbers — the foreign minister Fakir Azizuddin, the governor of Kashmir, the Dogra brothers Gulab and Dhian Singh — and his army was trained by European officers, several of them former Napoleonic soldiers: Ventura, Allard, Court and Avitabile. The Fauj-i-Khas they drilled was, by common consent, the most formidable Indian army the British faced.

He banned cow slaughter, funded the gilding of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar — from which its English name of the Golden Temple comes — and also endowed mosques and temples. The Koh-i-Noor came to him from Shah Shuja of Afghanistan and passed from his treasury to the British in 1849.

Collapse

Ranjit Singh died in 1839 and the state fell apart in a decade of assassinations at court while the army grew more powerful and less controlled. Two wars with the British followed: the first in 1845–46, in which the Sikh army fought hard battles at Ferozeshah and Sobraon and was betrayed by commanders negotiating with the enemy; the second in 1848–49, ending at Gujrat.

The Punjab was annexed in 1849, the last major territory in India to come under British rule. Duleep Singh, Ranjit Singh's youngest son, was ten; he was separated from his mother, converted to Christianity and sent to England, where he lived as a country gentleman and died in a Paris hotel. Sikh soldiers were recruited into the British Indian Army in large numbers within a decade, and their loyalty during 1857 was decisive for the British.