Treaty of Amritsar

The problem on both sides

By 1806 Ranjit Singh had crossed the Sutlej more than once and was drawing the Sikh chiefs of the Cis-Sutlej states — Patiala, Nabha, Jind and the rest — towards Lahore. Unifying every Sikh territory under one authority was the obvious next move, and he was in a position to make it.¹

The East India Company had a different problem. Napoleon and Persia were, on the intelligence then available in Calcutta, a plausible threat to India through the north-west, and the Company wanted the Punjab as a buffer rather than a rival. The Cis-Sutlej chiefs, meanwhile, preferred a distant protector to a near one and asked for British protection against Ranjit Singh.^1,2

Charles Metcalfe was sent to Lahore to negotiate, arriving with a small escort and, behind him, a British force moved up to Ludhiana.

The line

The treaty was concluded at Amritsar on 25 April 1809. Its substance is short: Ranjit Singh would not extend his authority south or east of the Sutlej; the Cis-Sutlej states passed under British protection; each side undertook to keep out of the other’s territory.^2,3

What it bought and what it cost

It bought thirty-six years. The Sikh Empire and the Company did not fight until 1845, and in the interval Ranjit Singh turned the whole force of the state in the only direction still open to it — north and west, to Multan, Kashmir, Peshawar and the Khyber. Much of what the empire became, it became because this treaty closed the other door.^1,2

The cost was a permanent division of the Sikh world at a river. The Cis-Sutlej states entered the British system in 1809 and stayed in it; the Punjab proper stayed sovereign for forty more years and was then annexed. The two halves acquired different administrations, different land settlements and different relationships to British power — a divergence still legible in the region.

How it is read

There is a long argument about whether Ranjit Singh conceded too readily. The case for is that he was twenty-eight, had held Lahore for a decade, and gave up the unification of the Sikh territories without a fight. The case against is that the Company could concentrate more force than he could in 1809, that he knew it, and that he took the arrangement that let him build a state instead of losing one early.^1,2

Grewal’s judgement — that the treaty settled the empire’s direction more than any battle did — is the one most often followed.²

The earliest full English narrative of the negotiation is Cunningham’s, published in 1849 by an officer who went on to serve on the very frontier the treaty created — and who was removed from his post for what he wrote about how that frontier was eventually crossed.⁵