The Fall of the Sikh Empire: Knives at Lahore, Two Anglo-Sikh Wars and the Boy Who Signed Punjab Away

Lahore, 21 September 1845. An elephant walks slowly towards the massed regiments of the Khalsa army camped outside the city. In the howdah sits the wazir, Jawahar Singh. On his lap, held tight, is his nephew: Duleep Singh, Maharaja of Punjab, seven years old.

Jawahar Singh knows why he has been summoned. Ten days earlier a son of Ranjit Singh, Kanwar Pashaura Singh, was strangled in Attock fort after surrendering on a promise of safe passage, and the army blames the wazir. He is betting that no soldier of the Khalsa will strike at a man holding the Maharaja.

He loses the bet. Soldiers press around the elephant, lift the boy out of his arms and carry him to his mother. Then they bayonet Jawahar Singh, drag him down and spear him to death. His sister, Maharani Jind Kaur, sees it happen.

Six years earlier, Maharaja Ranjit Singh had died master of an empire from the Khyber to the Sutlej; we told his story in Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Koh-i-Noor. This is what came after: a court that devoured its own, an army run by committee, two wars the Sikh soldiers nearly won, the commanders accused of throwing them away, a queen her enemies feared, and a boy who signed away his kingdom at ten.

Shah Bilawal, outside Lahore, 15 September 1843. Maharaja Sher Singh, a son of Ranjit Singh, is shown a new shotgun by his kinsman, Ajit Singh Sandhawalia. By the most common account, Sandhawalia raises it and fires, then finishes the wounded Maharaja with his sword. Sher Singh’s young son, Partap Singh, is cut down soon after. Before the day is out, the prime minister, Dhian Singh, is dead too.

Lahore was used to funerals by then. Ranjit Singh’s heir, Kharak Singh, had died in November 1840 amid talk of poison; his son Nau Nihal Singh was crushed by falling masonry the same day. Kharak Singh’s widow, Chand Kaur, lost the fort to Sher Singh in January 1841 and was beaten to death by her maids in 1842.

Dhian Singh’s son, Hira Singh, took revenge within hours. He went to the army, promised more pay, and led the regiments against the fort, where the Sandhawalias died. In mid-September 1843 the army proclaimed a new Maharaja: Duleep Singh, Ranjit Singh’s youngest son, five years old. His mother, Jind Kaur, became regent; Hira Singh became wazir.

Hira Singh lasted 15 months, leaning on a sharp-tongued Brahmin adviser, Pandit Jalla, who insulted the Sikh chiefs and the Maharani alike. On 21 December 1844 the two fled Lahore; Khalsa soldiers, led by several accounts by Sham Singh Attariwala and Jawahar Singh, caught and killed them. Jawahar Singh, the queen’s brother, became wazir.

Lahore cantonment, the early 1840s. In regiment after regiment of the Khalsa, the soldiers have chosen their own panch, committees of five. The panches decide which officers to obey, which minister to back and what to demand from the treasury.

The army had grown from about 29,000 regulars in 1839 to more than 80,000 men by 1845, by one count. Every faction at court bought its support with pay it could not afford. British observers called it a dangerous military democracy.

The soldiers saw it differently. To them they were the Khalsa itself, the Panth in arms, guarding Ranjit Singh’s son against Dogra ministers who had grown rich, and against the British watching from across the river. They were not wrong about either.

Into this stepped Jind Kaur, daughter of the man who kept Ranjit Singh’s kennels and mother of his last son. As regent she cast off her veil, held court in public, reviewed the troops and went straight to the regimental committees.

Who is the real sovereign, Duleep Singh or Hira Singh?Maharani Jind Kaur to the army’s regimental committees, 1844, as recorded by the historian B.J. Hasrat in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism

British writers painted her as a schemer and gossiped about her private life. Sikh writers see a widow of 27 fighting for her child’s throne in a court full of killers. By 1845 she and the army were the two powers left in Lahore, and they did not trust each other.

The Sutlej, 11 December 1845. For 36 years, since the Treaty of Amritsar of 1809, this river has been the line between Ranjit Singh’s empire and the East India Company. On this day, regiments of the Khalsa army begin to cross it, near Ferozepur.

The Sikhs said they were moving into their own land, around the village of Moran, which Lahore claimed. The Governor-General, Sir Henry Hardinge, called it an invasion and declared war on 13 December. Who really started the war has been argued ever since.

Tej Singh’s force reached Ferozepur, where the British garrison lay exposed, and did not attack it. Lal Singh’s men met Gough and Hardinge at Mudki late on 18 December in a confused evening battle fought in clouds of dust. The British held the field; among their dead was Sir Robert Sale, a hero of their Afghan war.

Ferozeshah, 21 December 1845. The Khalsa is dug in behind earthworks with around a hundred guns. Hardinge had made Gough wait two days for the Ferozepur garrison, and when the attack finally goes in there are only a few hours of daylight left.

The Sikh gunners are superb. British and Indian infantry walk into the fire and fall in rows; the Company would count 694 killed and 1,721 wounded. By nightfall some British units are inside the Sikh lines and others have been thrown back.

Hardinge thought he would lose. He sent word that the state papers in his baggage were to be burned if the day went against them, and handed his sword, a trophy once owned by Napoleon, to an aide. The ammunition was nearly gone.

In the morning the British took the rest of the entrenchments; Lal Singh made no attempt to rally his men. Then a second Sikh army appeared from the west, Tej Singh’s, fresh, with its own guns. They opened fire on the exhausted British, and officers seriously discussed surrender.

What saved Gough was a mistake. A staff officer sent some horse artillery back to Ferozepur for ammunition, with much of the cavalry as escort. Tej Singh read the movement as an attempt to outflank him, and ordered his army to withdraw.

In January the Sikhs struck again upstream. Ranjodh Singh Majithia burned part of the Ludhiana cantonment, but at Aliwal on 28 January 1846 Sir Harry Smith caught him and took almost all his guns.

Sobraon, 10 February 1846. The Khalsa holds a great bridgehead on the left bank, with its back to the river and a bridge of boats behind it. Sikh tradition says the old general Sham Singh Attariwala made an ardas before the Guru Granth Sahib and vowed to come back victorious or not at all; it remembers him riding a white mare, dressed in white. Jind Kaur had sent word urging the officers to fight on.

Fog delayed the British guns; when it lifted, 35 heavy guns and howitzers pounded the Sikh lines for two hours. Gough, told the ammunition was running short, is said to have answered that he would be at them with the bayonet. The breakthrough came on the sandy Sikh right, where General Robert Dick was killed leading his division in.

Tej Singh left the field early. Then the bridge broke, trapping thousands of Sikh soldiers on the British side of a swollen river. Sikh accounts say Tej Singh had weakened it; British accounts blame the flood and the crush of men. Sham Singh died fighting with his men. Between 8,000 and 10,000 Sikh soldiers were killed, many in the water.

Gough, who had ordered the attack, wrote later that he could have wept at the slaughter of so devoted a body of men, and that policy stopped him praising a fallen foe in public. Sham Singh’s samadh at Attari, by the Wagah border, is still a place of pilgrimage.

Bhopal, 1849. A British captain, Joseph Davey Cunningham, publishes A History of the Sikhs. He had been with Harry Smith at Aliwal and an extra aide-de-camp to Hardinge at Sobraon. His verdict: the British could have lost, and were helped by treachery, with Lal Singh, Tej Singh and Gulab Singh betraying their own army to different degrees.

Hardinge was furious. Cunningham was removed from his political post and sent back to regimental duty, and died at Ambala in 1851, still in his thirties. His book is now a standard work. The charge he wrote down has never gone away.

Amritsar, 16 March 1846. Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu, signs a treaty with two British officers, Frederick Currie and Henry Lawrence. For 75 lakh Nanakshahi rupees, the hill country between the Indus and the Ravi, Kashmir included, becomes his. Every year he is to send the British one horse, twelve shawl goats and three pairs of Kashmiri shawls, as a token of their supremacy.

A week earlier, the Treaty of Lahore of 9 March 1846 had set the price of defeat: the Jullundur Doab, an army cut to about 20,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, and 1.5 crore rupees. The treasury could not pay, so it handed over Kashmir and Hazara instead.

Gulab Singh, Dhian Singh’s brother, had stayed out of the fighting, then come to Lahore after Sobraon and negotiated the peace as wazir. To the British he was a sensible man who had earned his reward. To many Sikhs he was the third traitor.

Lal Singh had his own ideas. When Lahore’s governor of Kashmir, Sheikh Imamuddin, refused to hand the valley over, letters showed Lal Singh had told him to resist. A British court of inquiry found him guilty in December 1846, and he was exiled; he died at Dehradun in 1866.

That month the Treaty of Bhyrowal finished the job. A British Resident, Henry Lawrence, would run Lahore through a regency council until Duleep Singh turned 16, and the Maharani was pensioned off. The Sikh state still had a king and a flag, but no government of its own.

Lahore Fort, August 1847. The Resident has arranged a ceremony to make Tej Singh Raja of Sialkot, and the Maharaja is to perform the ceremony. Duleep Singh, nine in a month, refuses. Henry Lawrence blamed the boy’s mother.

Jind Kaur was locked in the fort’s Samman Burj, then sent to Sheikhupura, her pension cut from 1.5 lakh to 48,000 rupees. In 1848 the next Resident, Frederick Currie, sent her far away to Chunar Fort on the Ganges and took her jewels.

On 18 April 1849 she walked out of Chunar dressed as a servant. Eleven days later she reached Kathmandu, with almost nothing, and Nepal gave her refuge. Her British captors had already paid her the highest compliment they knew.

She has the only manly understanding in the Punjab.Lord Dalhousie, in a letter to Brigadier Armine Mountain, 31 January 1849

On 16 January 1861 she was allowed to meet her son at Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta, and went with him to England. She died in Kensington on 1 August 1863. One of her last wishes, as Khushwant Singh records it, was not to let her bones rot in that inhospitable country. Her body was taken back to India and cremated.

Multan, April 1848. The governor, Diwan Mulraj, has resigned rather than meet the new government’s demands. On 18 April two British officers, Patrick Vans Agnew and Lieutenant William Anderson, arrive with his successor, Sardar Kahan Singh. Mulraj’s soldiers and a city crowd attack them, their escort goes over, and within a day or two both officers are dead.

Whether Mulraj planned it or was swept along by his men is still argued. A young officer at Bannu, Herbert Edwardes, raised Pathan levies and, with troops from Bahawalpur, beat Mulraj’s men in June and July and shut them inside Multan.

Dalhousie, Governor-General since January, did not send the main army until the cool season. His critics say he let the fire spread on purpose. On 15 August 1848, in a private letter, he wrote that annexing Punjab was the most advantageous policy for Britain.

Then the north rose. Chattar Singh Attariwala, governor of Hazara, rebelled in August; by accounts of that killing, he was the man who had Pashaura Singh strangled at Attock. On 14 September his son, Raja Sher Singh Attariwala, sent with Lahore troops to help the British at Multan, joined the revolt. Afghan horsemen came east, and at Ramnagar on 22 November the Sikhs threw back a British cavalry charge.

Near the Jhelum, 13 January 1849. Once again Gough attacks late in the day, through thick jungle that hides the Sikh guns. The 24th Foot charges through scrub and water straight at them and is shot to pieces. Its brigadier, John Pennycuick, is killed, and so is his son. The regiment’s Queen’s colour is lost.

On the right, after a confused order, the 14th Light Dragoons gallop to the rear. By dark the British hold the field and little else: 602 killed, 1,651 wounded and 104 missing by their own count, and four guns lost. The Sikhs lost 12 guns and, by an unreliable estimate, 4,000 to 8,000 men. That night Sikh irregulars killed many British wounded left in the scrub.

As plucky as lions.A British observer, describing the Sikh soldiers at Chillianwala, January 1849

Three days of rain followed and both armies drew back, each claiming victory. Historians including Khushwant Singh and J.S. Grewal call it a British defeat. London replaced Gough with Sir Charles Napier, and Dalhousie called Gough’s claim of victory ‘poetical’. Years later, after the Charge of the Light Brigade, a British general would say it was nothing to Chillianwala.

Multan fell first. British troops stormed the city on 2 January 1849 and Mulraj gave up the citadel on 22 January. He was tried by the British and spent the rest of his short life a prisoner.

Gujrat, 21 February 1849. This time Gough did not rush. Nearly a hundred guns pounded the Sikh lines for three hours before the infantry moved, and cavalry chased the broken army for four hours more. The Sikhs lost 3,000 to 5,000 men and 53 guns; the British, 96 killed and 700 wounded.

On 12 March 1849, near Rawalpindi, Chattar Singh and Sher Singh Attariwala surrendered to Sir Walter Gilbert, and about 20,000 men laid down their arms. The Afghans fell back through Attock and Peshawar. The Khalsa army was finished.

Lahore Fort, 29 March 1849, early morning. The day before, the Foreign Secretary, Henry Elliot, told the regency council that resistance would be a mistake. Now a ten-year-old boy is asked to sign, and he signs. Elliot reads out Dalhousie’s proclamation, which blames the Sikhs for breaking their agreements.

Under the terms, Duleep Singh kept his title and a pension, the state’s property went to the Company, and the Koh-i-Noor went to the Queen of England (that story is told here). Dalhousie acted without waiting for authority from London.

Some of the sharpest objections came from the British themselves. Henry Lawrence, who had been the boy’s guardian as Resident, called the annexation and deposition unjust and impolitic. John Sullivan, a member of the Madras Council, put it in one line.

A guardian has visited his own misdeeds upon his ward.John Sullivan, in his pamphlet Are We Bound by Our Treaties?, on the annexation of Punjab

Fatehgarh, 8 March 1853. The boy who signed is 14, living far from Punjab with his guardian, Dr John Login, who treats him as a son. In a private ceremony he is baptised a Christian, hailed by his new masters as the first Indian prince to join their church.

He sailed for England in 1854, became a favourite of Queen Victoria and lived as a Suffolk squire. Then came the reunion with his mother, and later his cousin Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia, who told him who he had been.

I particularly desire to be rebaptized into the faith of my ancestors.Maharaja Duleep Singh, letter to the Secretary of State for India, 1886, as given in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism

The British would not let him reach India. They stopped him at Aden, and there, on 25 May 1886, five Sikhs, among them his cousin Thakur Singh, gave him amrit. He spent his last years trying to win Punjab back, even from the Tsar’s Russia, and died in a Paris hotel on 22 October 1893. He is buried at Elveden in Suffolk.

Some want him home. In 2017 Lord Rana and the Southall MP Virendra Sharma backed returning his remains for Sikh rites; Amandeep Singh Madra of the UK Punjab Heritage Association pointed to a will in which, he said, Duleep Singh asked to be buried where he died.

A village near Amritsar, about 1846. A Muslim poet, Shah Muhammad, writes the war in Punjabi verse. He calls it the war of Hind and Punjab, not an Anglo-Sikh war. He mourns the Khalsa’s dead, remembers the Lahore court as a time when Punjabis of every faith lived together, and blames the chiefs, not the soldiers.

Shah Muhammada, ikk sarkar bajhon, faujan jitt ke ant nu haariyan ne.Shah Muhammad, Jangnama (‘Without one government, the armies won, and in the end they lost’)

That is Punjab’s memory: an army of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims betrayed by those who should have led it. The British memory is of their dead at Ferozeshah and Chillianwala, and of an enemy they came to respect.

Both are true. The Sikh gunners at Ferozeshah, Sham Singh’s last stand, the 24th Foot walking into fire at Chillianwala, the Company’s sepoys who fought and died beside the redcoats: courage was not short on either side.

Eight years later, in 1857, Sikh and Punjabi soldiers helped the British retake Delhi (see the Revolt of 1857), and the Khalsa’s fighting name passed into the British army, all the way to Saragarhi.

The Sikh Empire was not conquered in a day at Sobraon. It began dying in 1839, in the rooms of Lahore Fort, when the men around Ranjit Singh’s heirs decided that killing each other was easier than governing together. By the time the British crossed the Sutlej, Lahore had a boy king, a regent its ministers despised and an army that trusted nobody.

That army deserved better. It nearly won the first war at Ferozeshah and fought the second to a standstill at Chillianwala. The record strongly suggests some of its own leaders sold it out; paid agents or frightened, selfish men, the soldiers paid either way.

The British case deserves its hearing too. The Khalsa crossed the river first, two British officers were murdered at Multan, and Hardinge did not annex when he could have. But Dalhousie did, against the treaty that made Britain the boy’s protector, and some of his own officials said so at the time.

Remember Jind Kaur, locked away for refusing to be quiet, and Shah Muhammad, a Muslim poet weeping for a Sikh army. Punjab lost an empire in those ten years. It did not lose its honour, and neither, in the field, did its enemies.