Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Koh-i-Noor: The Lion of Punjab, His Empire and the Diamond Britain Kept

Gujranwala, the early 1780s. A little boy in the house of a Sikh chief is burning with smallpox. He lives, but the disease takes the sight of his left eye and leaves deep pits across his face. For the rest of his life, visitors will notice the scars first. Then they will notice that nobody in the room dares to look away from him.

He was born on 13 November 1780 (some sources say 2 November) and named Buddh Singh. His father, Maha Singh, renamed him Ranjit, ‘victor in battle’, after a win over a rival chief. By ten, the boy was riding into battle beside him.

Punjab then was not one country. After decades of fighting Mughal governors and Afghan invaders, the Sikhs had organised themselves into misls, armed confederacies led by sardars who sometimes fought together and often fought each other. The Bhangis held Lahore and much of Amritsar. The Kanhaiyas were strong in the north. Maha Singh led the Sukerchakias, a smaller misl based in Gujranwala.

In 1792 Maha Singh died, and Ranjit, about 12, became chief. His mother, Raj Kaur, ran the estates with a diwan, Lakhpat Rai. Then came a marriage that changed everything: his bride Mehtab Kaur was of the Kanhaiya misl, and her mother, Rani Sada Kaur, was one of the shrewdest operators in Punjab. She saw what the teenager could become, and put her soldiers behind him.

Lahore, 7 July 1799. The old Mughal city is in a bad way. Three sardars, Chet Singh, Mohar Singh and Sahib Singh, share it after the Afghans have come and gone, and its traders say the city is being squeezed dry.

Ranjit Singh, 18, arrives outside the walls with his own men and troops from Sada Kaur. The Lahore historian Majid Sheikh, writing in Dawn, says the city’s Muslim traders had sent him urgent messages, and that it was they who opened the gates. One sardar fled; another was away. By the end of the day the young chief held the city with barely a fight.

His first acts there were watched closely. Sheikh writes that he visited the Badshahi and Wazir Khan mosques early on, a signal that the new ruler did not mean to settle scores with the city’s Muslims. It was a political man’s move, and it worked: Lahore became his capital for the next forty years.

Lahore Fort, 12 April 1801, Baisakhi. Baba Sahib Singh Bedi, a descendant of Guru Nanak, marks the forehead of the 20-year-old and invests him as Maharaja of Punjab. After centuries of Mughal and Afghan governors, a Punjabi is proclaimed ruler in Lahore.

He was careful about the meaning of it. He called his state the Sarkar-i-Khalsa, the government of the Khalsa, and his court the Darbar Khalsa. Historians of Sikh coins note that the rupees struck in his name carried no name of his: they honoured the Gurus instead. The one experiment with a coin linked to his Muslim queen Moran, struck with a peacock-feather mark, was refused by the Akal Takht and soon stopped.

In 1802 he took Amritsar from the Bhangis and bowed at the Harmandir Sahib, promising to rebuild it in marble and gold. Over the next ten years, one misl after another was absorbed, by marriage, by money or by force. By 1813, the old confederacy of equals had become a kingdom.

Amritsar, 1808. A young British envoy, Charles Metcalfe, arrives with a request. The British are terrified that Napoleon might march on India through Persia and Afghanistan, and they want the new Sikh power as a friend.

But Ranjit Singh had his eye on the Malwa chiefs south of the Sutlej, at Patiala, Nabha and Jind, and they ran to the British for protection. British troops moved up to the river. When Napoleon got bogged down in Spain, the British no longer needed a favour, and Ranjit Singh, who knew his army was not yet ready, signed what they offered.

The Treaty of Amritsar, signed on 25 April 1809, promised ‘perpetual friendship’. The British would have no concern with his lands north of the Sutlej; the chiefs south of it came under British protection. For thirty years the line held, and he turned his armies west and north instead.

Lahore, the 1820s. A parade ground rings with commands shouted in French. Two veterans of Napoleon’s armies, Jean-Baptiste Ventura of Italy and Jean-François Allard of France, have come looking for work, and the Maharaja has hired them.

From 1822 they trained the Fauj-i-Khas, a model brigade drilled on European lines, with infantry in the French pattern and its own flag bearing the Sikh motto ‘Deg Tegh Fateh’. Others followed: the Neapolitan Paolo Avitabile and the Frenchman Claude Auguste Court, an artillery man.

Around that core, the Khalsa army grew from about 35,000 men in the 1820s to well over 100,000 by 1845. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims served in it, and some of its best gunners were Muslims. It was, by most accounts, the finest army any Indian ruler put in the field against the British.

Multan, June 1818. The giant Zamzama gun, dragged in from Lahore, has smashed two breaches in the fort wall. An Akali, Sadhu Singh, leads Nihangs through one of them. Inside, the old Nawab, Muzaffar Khan, fights in the breach with his sons and dies there, with several of them and, by one record, a daughter.

What came next was ugly. The fort and city were plundered, houses were burned and, by the accounts gathered on the siege, thousands of people were massacred. Ranjit Singh later ordered the loot handed in to the treasury, and gave the Nawab’s surviving family a pension. Both facts belong in the story.

Kashmir fell after the battle of Shopian in 1819. Kashmiris who had suffered under Afghan governors welcomed the change at first. It did not last. Historians describe the Sikh governors there as harsh: the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar was closed, the call to prayer was banned and killing a cow could mean death. Taxes were crushing. After a famine in 1832 the land tax was halved and farmers were given loans, and a later governor repealed the anti-Muslim laws.

To the west, Peshawar paid tribute after the battle of Nowshera in 1823 and was annexed in 1834. In 1837, at Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber, his most famous general, Hari Singh Nalwa, was killed fighting the Afghans. The Khyber became the empire’s western wall.

Lahore, 1 June 1813. In a haveli inside Mochi Gate, a deposed king arrives late and sits in silence for almost an hour. Then his eunuch unrolls a small bundle of cloth, and the Maharaja leans forward to look at the most famous diamond in the world. He glances at Fakir Azizuddin, who nods. Ranjit Singh picks up the stone and leaves.

The Koh-i-Noor had already passed through a lot of bloody hands. The Persian invader Nader Shah carried it off from Delhi in 1739. After he was murdered, it went to his Afghan general Ahmad Shah Durrani, and down the Durrani line to Shah Shuja, who wore it on his arm. In 1809 Shuja lost his throne in Kabul and fled east with his family and his jewels.

What happened next depends on whose account you read.

Once he had it, he never let it go far. He wore it on his turban, then as an armband at Diwali, Dussehra and durbars, and showed it off to British visitors. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand write that he was nervous of theft all his life, and moved it in one of several identical camel bags so nobody knew which held the stone.

Amritsar, 1830. Craftsmen are laying gold leaf over the copper sheets on the sanctum of the Harmandir Sahib. The man in charge of the roof work is a Muslim, Mistri Yar Muhammad Khan, supervised by Bhai Sand Singh. The gold that the world now associates with the Golden Temple begins here.

The temple’s rebuilding was the Maharaja’s great gift to the Panth: marble and copper by 1809, gold leaf by 1830. His general Hari Singh Nalwa decorated the Akal Takht. And the Maharaja’s generosity crossed lines: in 1835 he gave gold to plate the dome of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, and at Moran’s request he built a mosque in Lahore that still stands.

His court looked like Punjab itself. His foreign minister and physician, Fakir Azizuddin, was a Muslim from Lahore, and his brothers Nuruddin and Imamuddin held senior posts. His finance chief, Dina Nath, was a Hindu Brahmin. His prime minister, Dhian Singh, was a Hindu Dogra, and Dhian’s brothers Gulab Singh and Suchet Singh were powers in their own right. No one was forced to convert, and his wives kept their own faiths.

A very drunken old profligate, neither more nor less.Emily Eden, sister of Governor-General Lord Auckland, who also admired his justice

Another British visitor, seeing him in old age, compared him to ‘an old mouse, with grey whiskers and one eye’. Small, pockmarked, dressed in plain white, he still frightened everyone in the room. Eden’s line points to the other side of him. He drank hard and took opium, more so as he aged. He married many times; estimates run from 16 to 46 marriages. Sikh tradition tells that when he married Moran, a Muslim dancer, Akali Phula Singh summoned him to the Akal Takht and sentenced him to be flogged, and that the Maharaja bowed and accepted it. Historians are less sure of the details; the tradition has lasted because it says the Panth stood above even the king.

Lahore, June 1839. The Maharaja, 58, has had several strokes and can barely speak. Courtiers crowd his bedside, and the talk turns to the diamond.

A priest, Bhai Gobind Ram, said the dying man wanted the Koh-i-Noor sent to the Jagannath temple at Puri. The treasurer, Beli Ram, said it was state property and could not be given away. It stayed in Lahore.

He died on 27 June 1839. At his cremation, four Hindu queens and seven concubines were burned alive on the pyre with him, in the practice of sati. It is the grimmest scene of his reign, and it happened at his own funeral, in front of his court. Their ashes lie in small urns around his in the Samadhi that his son Kharak Singh began on the spot.

Lahore, 5 November 1840. Kharak Singh, the Maharaja’s heir, is dead, after months as a prisoner in his own palace and amid talk of poison. His son, Nau Nihal Singh, performs the last rites by the Ravi. Walking back through a gateway near the fort, he is hit by falling stones. By that night he is dead too.

Was it an accident? The European officer Alexander Gardner, walking just behind him, said the prince seemed only lightly hurt at first. The court physician later found his skull crushed. Some suspected the prime minister, Dhian Singh; others defended him. Nobody has proved anything.

Out of the bloodshed came a five-year-old Maharaja, Duleep Singh, Ranjit Singh’s youngest son, with his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, as regent. The army, unpaid and unruly, was now the real power in Lahore, and its own commanders were talking to the British.

The Sutlej, 10 February 1846. The Khalsa army is dug in on the riverbank with its back to a bridge of boats. British guns open up at dawn. By the end of the day, roughly 8,000 to 10,000 Sikh soldiers are dead, many drowned when the bridge gave way behind them.

The first Anglo-Sikh war began when the Khalsa crossed the Sutlej on 11 December 1845. Hard battles followed at Mudki and Ferozeshah, then Aliwal, then Sobraon. The old general Sham Singh Attariwala died fighting at Sobraon and is remembered in Punjab as a hero.

The commanders were another story. Sikh historians say the vizier Lal Singh and the army chief Tej Singh betrayed their own men, holding back at key moments and keeping in touch with British officers. Sikh accounts say the bridge was weakened on purpose; British accounts say it broke under the retreat.

The Treaty of Lahore of 9 March 1846 took the Jullundur Doab and demanded 1.5 crore rupees. Lahore could not pay, so it gave up Kashmir and Hazara, and the British sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh, the Dogra, for 75 lakh. Later that year a British Resident took real control in Lahore. Jind Kaur was locked up in 1847 and sent away from her son.

In 1848 a revolt at Multan grew into a second war. At Chillianwala on 13 January 1849 the Sikhs fought the British to a bloody standstill. At Gujrat on 21 February they lost. In March the Khalsa army laid down its arms.

Aaj Ranjit Singh mar gaya.A grey-bearded Sikh veteran at the surrender, March 1849, as told by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand (‘Today Ranjit Singh has died’)

Lahore Fort, 29 March 1849. A ten-year-old boy is led into the Shish Mahal, the mirrored hall where his father once held court. His mother is gone. Around him stand men in red coats. He signs. Within minutes, the Khalsa flag comes down over the fort. Duleep Singh would later call it ‘the crimson day’.

The treaty handed Punjab to the East India Company. Its Article III dealt with one object alone: the Koh-i-Noor ‘shall be surrendered by the Maharaja of Lahore to the Queen of England’.

I have caught my hare.Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General, on hearing Duleep Singh had signed, 1849

Dalhousie saw the stone as a trophy of conquest and said so, writing that it had ‘found its proper resting place’. In December 1849 he came to Lahore himself and took it from Duleep Singh’s guardian, Dr John Login. It was put in a small leather bag sewn by Lady Dalhousie, and the Governor-General signed a receipt.

On 6 April 1850 it left Bombay on HMS Medea. Off Mauritius, cholera broke out on board; then a gale nearly sank the ship. It reached Britain on 29 June and was presented to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850.

The crowds at the Great Exhibition of 1851 were let down: in its old Mughal cut, the stone looked dull. So in 1852 Prince Albert had it recut. It took 38 days and cost £8,000, and the Koh-i-Noor shrank from about 186 carats to 105.6. It was later set in the crowns of Queen Alexandra (1902), Queen Mary (1911) and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1937). A rumour grew that it brings bad luck to any man who wears it; in Britain, only queens ever have.

Fatehgarh, 8 March 1853. In a private ceremony, a 14-year-old boy who had been taken from Lahore and from his mother is baptised a Christian. The Governor-General, Dalhousie, had approved it.

Duleep Singh sailed for England in April 1854. Queen Victoria took to him at once, Winterhalter painted him in his jewels, and for years he lived the life of an English gentleman, from 1863 on a 17,000-acre estate at Elveden in Suffolk.

His mother had not given up. Jind Kaur escaped from Chunar fort in April 1849 disguised as a servant and made it to Kathmandu. Mother and son met again only on 16 January 1861, at a hotel in Calcutta, after 13 years apart. She came to England with him and died in Kensington on 1 August 1863. He took her body back to India to be cremated.

She had told him who he was, and the Sikh scholar Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia, who came to London in 1884, told him more. In March 1886 Duleep Singh set out for India. The British stopped him at Aden. There, according to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, he took amrit on 25 May 1886 and returned to the faith of his father.

He renounced his British allowance, moved to Paris and, in 1887, went to Russia to ask the Tsar to help him win back Punjab. Nothing came of it. He had a stroke, was bedridden for years, and died in a Paris hotel room on 22 October 1893. He is buried at Elveden, not in Punjab. In 1999 a statue of him on horseback was unveiled in nearby Thetford.

London, May 2023. Queen Camilla is crowned in Queen Mary’s crown, with the Koh-i-Noor taken out. Weeks later, the Tower of London reopens its Jewel House with a new label: the diamond is now presented as a ‘symbol of conquest’, with the 1849 treaty explained.

The question of where it should go has never gone away, and the claims cross borders.

• India asked for it in 1947 and 1953. In April 2016 the Solicitor General told the Supreme Court it had been given, not stolen; the government backtracked within a day. In April 2017 the government said there was no concrete evidence it was a valid gift, and the Supreme Court said it could not order another country to return it.
• Pakistan claimed it in 1976, when Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asked Britain for it. In 2016 a Lahore barrister petitioned the Lahore High Court, arguing it belonged to the Takht-i-Lahore and so to Pakistan.
• Afghanistan’s Taliban government demanded it in 2000, pointing to Shah Shuja’s memoir.
• Iran is often listed as a claimant, because Nader Shah took it to Persia in 1739. We found no detailed recent demand from Tehran.
• The SGPC, the Sikh body that runs the Golden Temple, says it belongs to the Sikhs.

Lahore, today. Next to the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort stands a white building with a gilded dome. Inside, under a marble lotus, are the ashes of Ranjit Singh. Sikh pilgrims cross from India to pray there; a few hundred metres away, his bronze statue in the fort, unveiled in 2019, has been attacked three times, by men angry at how he treated Muslims and their mosques.

Both reactions miss the man. He was not a saint and not a monster. He was a brilliant, ruthless, hard-drinking, generous king who built the first Punjab-wide state run by Punjabis in centuries, filled his court with Muslims and Hindus, gilded the Guru’s house, sacked Multan, let his governors terrorise Kashmir and Peshawar, and took a diamond from a frightened guest.

His empire did not die at Sobraon. It died the day he did, because he built it around himself and left nobody able to hold it. The British saw that clearly and waited.

As for the Koh-i-Noor, almost every hand that held it took it by force, his included. That does not make the last taking, from a ten-year-old boy, any less of a theft. It just means that when people ask where it belongs, the honest answer begins with how it was taken, every time.

Read more on Punjab’s history: the Partition of Punjab, 1947 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 1919.