Ranjit Singh Captures Lahore

A nineteen-year-old takes the capital

Ranjit Singh was born into the Sukerchakia misl, one of the smaller of the twelve, and inherited its leadership as a child. On 7 July 1799 — he was nineteen, and blind in one eye from childhood smallpox — he took Lahore from the three Bhangi chiefs who had held it since the misls captured it in 1765.^2,3

On Vaisakhi 1801 he was proclaimed Maharaja of the Punjab, the ceremonial saffron mark applied by Sahib Singh Bedi, a descendant of Guru Nanak.^2,4

The name on the coin

Here is the detail that makes this more than a warlord’s success story. At his own coronation Ranjit Singh refused the emblems of royalty and declined to sit on a throne, continuing to hold court cross-legged in a chair as he always had. His coins carried the name of the Gurus, not his own effigy or title. The state seal made no reference to him. The government was not called after him or his family: it was the Sarkar Khalsaji, the government of the honoured Khalsa, and the court the Darbar Khalsaji. He preferred to be addressed as plain Singh Sahib.^2,4

The continuity runs straight back. Banda Singh’s seal at Lohgarh in 1710 named the Gurus rather than Banda; the misls struck the same legend on the Nanakshahi rupee in 1765; Ranjit Singh, ruling the largest Sikh state there has ever been, kept the convention intact. Sovereignty in this tradition is held on behalf of someone else.

What kind of state

The kingdom that resulted ran from the Sutlej to the Khyber and into Kashmir, and it was conspicuously not a Sikh confessional state. Ranjit Singh’s senior appointments included Muslims and Hindus — Fakir Azizuddin as foreign minister, Dhian Singh Dogra as chief minister — and his army was trained by European officers, several of them former Napoleonic soldiers.^1,3 Sikhs were a minority in the population he governed.

Grewal’s assessment is that the state’s character was dynastic and territorial rather than religious, whatever the language on the coinage.¹

The weakness he did not solve

What Ranjit Singh fixed was the misls’ central defect: twelve sovereignties could not hold a frontier province. What he did not fix was succession. He died in 1839, and within a decade the kingdom was consumed by court murders, army politics and two wars with the East India Company, ending in annexation in 1849.

The Sarbat Khalsa, the assembly that had authorised the misls by gurmata, had by then effectively ceased to function — its authority absorbed into a single ruler who never claimed it in his own name.