The Conquest of Multan

Sixteen years of failing to take it

Multan was the fortified key to the south-western Punjab and had been held for the Durrani Afghans by the Sadozai governor Muzaffar Khan since before Ranjit Singh was proclaimed Maharaja. The Sikh army went at it repeatedly from 1802 onward and repeatedly came away with tribute instead of the city. The walls were the problem: Multan’s fort was built for exactly this, and a besieging force without heavy guns could not do more than sit outside it.¹

1818

The 1818 expedition was different in kind. It was large, it was commanded by Misr Diwan Chand under the Maharaja’s authority, and it brought siege artillery — including the great gun the Sikhs called Zamzama, which is still in Lahore. The siege ran for months. The walls were breached, the fort stormed on 2 June 1818, and Muzaffar Khan died fighting in it with several of his sons.^1,3

Why this one mattered

Multan ended the Durrani claim to the southern Punjab, which had been notional for years and was now not even that. It also removed the last serious obstacle between the Sikh Empire and everything to the west: Kashmir was taken the following year, and Peshawar over the decade after, with the frontier eventually fixed at the Khyber itself.^1,2

There is a longer point underneath the campaign. For roughly eight centuries the traffic through the north-western passes had run one way — invading armies coming down into the Punjab, most recently and most destructively Ahmad Shah Abdali, within living memory of the men who took Multan. From 1818 the direction reverses, and it stays reversed until the empire falls.²

The administration afterwards

The government installed at Multan followed the pattern of the rest of the empire, which is worth stating because it cuts against the expected story. The province was Muslim-majority and was not governed as conquered religious territory: revenue arrangements were largely continued, mosques were not converted, and Muslim officers served in the administration and the army. Ranjit Singh’s state was expansionist and it was not, in its internal arrangements, a confessional one.^1,2