The First Anglo-Sikh War

A court that feared its own army

After Ranjit Singh’s death the Lahore court spent six years destroying itself, and by 1845 the Khalsa army was the only institution in the Punjab with coherence and force. It had its own elected regimental committees, it had not been paid reliably, and it did not regard the ministers as legitimate. The ministers, for their part, had concluded that an army they could not control was more dangerous to them than a war.^1,2

British forces had meanwhile been concentrating on the far bank of the Sutlej, in numbers that did not read as defensive.

Both of those facts are why the war started, and historians differ mainly on the weighting. What is not seriously disputed is that the Sikh commanders — Lal Singh and Tej Singh — conducted the campaign in a manner that has never been explained by military reasoning.^1,2

Three months

The army crossed the Sutlej in December 1845. Four major actions followed in quick succession: Mudki and Ferozeshah in December, Aliwal in January 1846, and Sobraon on 10 February.

Ferozeshah was close enough that British accounts of it are unusually frank about how nearly it went the other way. At Sobraon the Sikh army fought in a bridgehead position on the wrong side of the river with the boat bridge behind it; the bridge failed or was destroyed during the battle, and the force was broken against the water. British commanders wrote afterwards, with evident discomfort, about troops who would not surrender.^1,3

At the decisive moments of both Ferozeshah and Sobraon, Lal Singh and Tej Singh withdrew with substantial reserves that had not been committed.^1,2

The witness on the other side

This is usually presented as the Sikh version of events, and it is worth being clear that it is not.

Joseph Davey Cunningham was a British political officer on the Sutlej frontier and was present at the campaign. In 1849 he published A History of the Sikhs, the first serious account of the Sikhs in English, and in its closing chapters he stated plainly that the two Sikh commanders had been bought, and criticised Lord Hardinge’s Punjab policy for what had been done.⁵

He was removed from his political appointment for it and returned to regimental duty, losing his income and any prospect of advancement. He died at Ambala in 1851.⁵

So the charge that the Khalsa army was sold at Ferozeshah and Sobraon is not a grievance retrofitted by the losing side. It was made in print, in 1849, by an officer of the winning one, who was punished for making it — and whose book is free to read. What remains genuinely argued over is the extent of what was arranged and when, not whether something was.^1,2,5

The Treaty of Lahore

Signed on 9 March 1846. The Punjab remained nominally sovereign under the boy Duleep Singh, and the terms made the sovereignty ornamental: the Jalandhar Doab was annexed outright, the army was cut to a fraction of its size, an indemnity of a crore and a half of rupees was imposed, and a British Resident was installed at Lahore with control of the administration.^2,3

Kashmir, which the empire could not pay for, was sold on to Gulab Singh of Jammu for seventy-five lakhs under a separate treaty a week later — creating the princely state whose disposition remains contested to this day.^1,2

What it was for

A protectorate rather than a conquest, in form. In substance the Punjab was now administered by the Company while remaining responsible for its own costs, which was a difficult position to hold and was not held long. The second war came in 1848, and it ended the state.