The Death of Ranjit Singh

27 June 1839

Ranjit Singh had been in declining health for two years, following a series of strokes, and died at Lahore on 27 June 1839. He was fifty-eight, and had held power for forty of them.^1,4

What he left

A state running from the Sutlej to the Khyber and from Kashmir to Multan. An army — the Khalsa army — that was among the most effective in Asia, trained in part by French and Italian officers who had served under Napoleon, with its own artillery arm. A treasury. A functioning revenue system. A court in which Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all held the highest offices.^1,3

And no mechanism for succession that did not run through him personally. The empire had been built by one man’s authority over other men who each commanded troops, and that authority was not transferable. It had no council that could act without him, no rule for choosing his successor that anybody was bound by, and an army that had begun to understand itself as a political body in its own right.^2,3

Ten years

The decade that followed is among the bleakest in Sikh political history. His son Kharak Singh was deposed and died in custody; Kharak Singh’s son Nau Nihal Singh was killed by falling masonry on the day of his father’s funeral; Sher Singh took the throne and was assassinated in 1843 along with the chief minister. The Dogra brothers who had risen under Ranjit Singh manoeuvred through all of it, and several of them were killed in it too.²

By 1843 the throne held a five-year-old — Duleep Singh — with his mother Jind Kaur as regent, an army that no longer trusted the court, and a court that had good reason to fear the army. The First Anglo-Sikh War began two years later.

Joseph Davey Cunningham, a British political officer on the Sutlej frontier through these years, published his account of the collapse in 1849 while the participants were still alive. It is the earliest full English narrative of the decade and it was written from the vantage point of the power that stood to gain from it — worth reading for both of those reasons at once.⁵

The judgement

Historians are fairly united on the diagnosis, and it is not that his heirs were unusually incompetent. Ranjit Singh built a personal empire and did not institutionalise it, and a personal empire ends when the person does. Grewal’s account draws the contrast explicitly with what he had inherited: the misls had been a confederacy with a functioning collective assembly, and the thing that replaced it was more powerful and considerably more fragile.³

What he did leave that outlasted the state is harder to put in a column. For fifty years there had been a sovereign Sikh kingdom in the Punjab, governed without a state religion, and the memory of it shaped Sikh political expectation for the whole colonial period that followed.