Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh was the founder and first maharaja of the Sikh Empire, which he ruled from Lahore from 1801 until his death in 1839. Beginning as the teenage head of one of the Sikh confederacies of the Punjab, he united the region, took Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar from the Afghans, and built one of the strongest armies in Asia. Known as Sher-e-Punjab, the "Lion of the Punjab", he kept the expanding British at bay by treaty, but the state he created collapsed within ten years of his death.

In the later eighteenth century the Punjab had no single ruler. Mughal authority had collapsed, the Afghan Durrani kings repeatedly invaded from the north-west, and power was divided among a dozen Sikh confederacies called misls, as well as Muslim and Hindu chiefdoms. Ranjit Singh was born on 13 November 1780 at Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan, the only son of Maha Singh, chief of the Sukerchakia misl, and Raj Kaur, daughter of the ruler of Jind. Smallpox in infancy cost him the sight of his left eye and left his face scarred. He never went to school and did not learn to read beyond the Gurmukhi script, but he was trained in riding and arms, and fought beside his father at about the age of ten.

Maha Singh died in 1792, leaving the boy as nominal chief, with his mother and a minister running the estates. His marriage to Mehtab Kaur in 1796 brought him the support of her mother, Sada Kaur, the formidable head of the Kanhaiya misl, who backed him through his early campaigns.

The Afghan king Zaman Shah, grandson of the Durrani founder Ahmad Shah, invaded the Punjab in 1796–97 and again in 1798, occupying Lahore. Ranjit Singh harried his forces and won a name as the leading Sikh fighter against them. When Zaman Shah withdrew to deal with troubles at home, Ranjit Singh and Sada Kaur marched on Lahore, held by rival Bhangi chiefs, and took it on 7 July 1799. Many of the city's Muslim and Hindu inhabitants welcomed the change.

In April 1801 he was invested as maharaja of the Punjab by Baba Sahib Singh Bedi, a descendant of Guru Nanak. He avoided the trappings of personal kingship, calling his government the Sarkar Khalsa, the state of the Sikh community, and striking coins in the name of the gurus rather than his own. In 1802 he took Amritsar, the Sikh holy city, and over the next decade he absorbed or subdued the other misls and hill states, by force, marriage alliance and diplomacy.

The British East India Company had by then reached the Sutlej river, and the Sikh chiefs between the Sutlej and the Yamuna looked to it for protection. By the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809 Ranjit Singh accepted the Sutlej as his south-eastern limit, and in return the British left him free to expand north and west. He kept to the agreement for the rest of his life.

His conquests came mostly at Afghan expense. His forces took Attock in 1813, the same year he obtained the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the exiled Afghan king Shah Shuja. Multan fell in 1818 after a long siege, and Kashmir in 1819. Peshawar became tributary in the 1820s and was annexed in 1834; the battle of Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber Pass in 1837, in which his celebrated general Hari Singh Nalwa was killed, marked the western limit of his power. Ladakh was conquered in the 1830s by his Dogra vassals of Jammu. At his death the kingdom stretched from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej and from Kashmir to the borders of Sindh. In 1838 he joined the British in a plan to restore Shah Shuja to the throne of Afghanistan, which led to the disastrous British occupation of Kabul after his death.

Ranjit Singh's greatest instrument was his army. He built up a standing force paid in cash from the treasury, with a large modern infantry and artillery trained on European lines, alongside the traditional Sikh cavalry. To drill it he hired foreign officers, several of them veterans of the armies of Napoleon, among them the Frenchmen Jean-François Allard and Claude Auguste Court and the Italians Jean-Baptiste Ventura and Paolo Avitabile, though he avoided employing Britons. Foundries and arsenals in Lahore made cannon and muskets, so the army did not depend on imported arms. British officers who fought it in the 1840s regarded it as the most formidable Indian army they had met.

Muslims formed a large majority of his subjects, with Hindus the next largest group and Sikhs a minority of perhaps a tenth or less. Ranjit Singh was a devout Sikh, and he poured money into Sikh shrines, above all the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, whose upper storeys he covered in gilded copper, giving it the popular name the Golden Temple. But his court and army were mixed: his foreign minister, Fakir Azizuddin, was a Muslim, his leading ministers in later years were Hindu Dogras and Brahmins, and Muslim gunners commanded much of the artillery. He gave grants to Hindu temples and some Muslim shrines and did not impose forced conversions.

Historians differ in their judgements. Sikh and many Indian writers celebrate his reign as a time of tolerance and prosperity. Some Muslim writers of the nineteenth century, and some modern historians, point out that several Lahore mosques, including the great Badshahi Mosque, were used as stores or stables, that cow slaughter was punishable by death, and that the burden of taxation fell heavily on peasants. Others note that he governed largely through the inherited system of revenue farming and personal loyalty, without building lasting institutions. Many sum him up as an able but personal, and often benevolent, autocrat.

In the 1830s Ranjit Singh suffered a series of strokes, worsened by heavy drinking and opium. He died in Lahore on 27 June 1839, and several of his wives and concubines were burned on his funeral pyre, following the custom of sati. His samadhi, or memorial, stands beside Lahore Fort.

Without him the kingdom fell apart. His son Kharak Singh and grandson Nau Nihal Singh both died within eighteen months, and a succession of rulers, ministers and army factions fought for power, with several murdered. The army, unpaid and politicised, crossed the Sutlej in 1845, beginning the first Anglo-Sikh War. After a second war in 1848–49 the British Empire annexed the Punjab. His youngest son, Duleep Singh, was exiled to Britain, and the Koh-i-Noor was presented to Queen Victoria.

Ranjit Singh is remembered in Sikh history as the ruler who turned the Sikh community into a sovereign power, and the brief period of the Sikh kingdom remains a powerful memory for Sikhs in India, Pakistan and abroad. His palaces, gardens and the gilded Harmandir Sahib are the most visible reminders of his reign.