Maharaja Ranjit Singh

The one-eyed boy from Gujranwala

Born in 1780 to the chief of the Sukerchakia misl, scarred and blinded in one eye by childhood smallpox, Ranjit Singh inherited his father’s warband at twelve and took Lahore at nineteen. On Vaisakhi 1801 he assumed the title Maharaja — coining money, as the misls had, in the Gurus’ names, calling his government Sarkar-i-Khalsa.^1,2

The empire

In four decades he absorbed the remaining misls and pushed the empire to Multan (1818), Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar — turning the Khyber’s traffic of invasion back for the first time in eight centuries. His Fauj-i-Khas, drilled by Napoleonic veterans, became Asia’s most formidable modern army; his darbar was pointedly plural — the Muslim Fakir Azizuddin as foreign minister, Hindu Dogras at court, Europeans in command — and his rule, the histories note, unusually sparing of the death penalty for its age. He roofed the Harmandir Sahib in gold, giving the Golden Temple its English name, and wore the Koh-i-noor on his arm.^1,2

After the Lion

He died in 1839, and the empire — held together, as contemporaries observed, by his person — devoured itself within a decade. The British annexed the Punjab in 1849; his youngest son Duleep Singh died a pensioner in Paris. Punjab remembers him simply as Sher-e-Punjab — the Lion.^1,2