Ranjit Singh Proclaimed Maharaja

From sardar to sovereign

Ranjit Singh took Lahore in 1799 as one misl chief among a dozen, invited in by residents who had had enough of the city’s existing arrangement. Holding the capital was not the same as ruling the Punjab, and the two years after were spent making the second follow from the first.¹

On Vaisakhi — 12 April 1801 — he was proclaimed Maharaja at Lahore. The ceremony was performed by Sahib Singh Bedi, a descendant of Guru Nanak. He was twenty.^1,3

Whose name is on the coin

The detail that historians return to is the coinage. A new monarch puts his own name on the currency; it is close to the definition of the thing. Ranjit Singh did not. His coin was struck as the Nanakshahi rupee, in the name of the Gurus, carrying the same legend Banda Singh Bahadur had used ninety years earlier and the misls had used at Lahore in 1765 — deg o tegh o fateh, the kettle, the sword and victory.^2,4

His government was called the Sarkar Khalsaji, and his seal ran in the same idiom. He is generally reported to have avoided sitting on a throne in the conventional sense and to have declined the honorific formulas that went with one.

Whether this was conviction or a very good reading of his position is a fair question, and the sources do not settle it. What it did is not in doubt: it made him the executive of an authority the Khalsa already recognised, rather than a chief who had raised himself above his equals. The other misl leaders could be absorbed on those terms.²

What followed

Within two decades the Sarkar Khalsaji ran from the Sutlej to the Khyber, absorbing Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar in 1834. It was, by the standards of the time and place, a strikingly non-sectarian state: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all held senior office, the army was trained in part by European officers, and no state religion was imposed on a population in which Sikhs were a minority.^1,2

The boundary it never crossed was the one it had agreed to eight years into the reign.