Ranjit Singh

Rise

Born in 1780 into the Sukerchakia misl, Ranjit Singh inherited its leadership as a boy, having lost an eye to smallpox in childhood. He took Lahore in 1799 at nineteen, and was proclaimed Maharaja of the Punjab in 1801. Over the following two decades he absorbed the other misls by conquest, marriage and negotiation, and extended his territory to Multan, Kashmir, Peshawar and the Derajat.

The Treaty of Amritsar with the East India Company in 1809 fixed the Sutlej as the boundary between them. He kept to it, and directed his expansion north and west instead, taking territory from the Afghans that no Indian power had held for centuries.

The army

His army was the instrument of this. He recruited European officers — Ventura, Allard, Court, Avitabile, several of them veterans of the Napoleonic wars — to train infantry and artillery on European lines, producing the Fauj-i-Khas. Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Gurkha troops served in it, and it was widely regarded as the most formidable Indian army of its day, a judgement the Anglo-Sikh Wars after his death bore out.

Government

Ranjit Singh ruled a Punjab in which Sikhs were a minority. His administration reflected that: his foreign minister was a Muslim, his finance minister a Hindu, and his court and army drew from every community. He funded the gilding of the Harmandir Sahib, from which its English name derives, and also endowed Hindu temples and Muslim shrines, and he abolished the jizya.

Coin was struck in the name of the Gurus rather than his own, and he did not use the title of king in the Persian style, presenting himself as the servant of the Khalsa.

After

He died in 1839. The kingdom did not survive him by a decade: a succession of assassinations and factional struggles weakened the court, the army became a political actor in its own right, and the two Anglo-Sikh Wars ended in the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The Koh-i-Noor, which he had taken from Shah Shuja, passed to the British Crown.