Ranjit Singh

Sikh ruler of the Punjab (r. 1792-1839)

• Born: November 13, 1780
• Birthplace: Gujranwala, India (now in Pakistan)
• Died: June 27, 1839
• Place of death: Lahore, Punjab (now in Pakistan)

Ranjit Singh was the first person to unify the vast and ethnically diverse Punjab region and became the first—and only—sovereign ruler over all Sikhs, as well as Hindus and Muslims living within his domain.

Early Life

Ranjit Singh was born Budh Singh, the son of the Sukerchakia Sikh ruler (misldar) Sardar Mahan Singh of Gujranwala and his wife, Raj Kaur, who was also known as Mai Malwain of Jind. He was renamed Ranjit, for “victor in battle,” by his warrior father following the latter’s victory over the Chattahs, a local Muslim tribe.

Ranjit had no formal education but could understand spoken Punjabi and Persian. During his early youth, he lost one eye to an attack of smallpox but nevertheless became proficient in physical exercises, martial arts, and especially in horseback riding. At the age of ten he experienced his first military action during his father’s campaign against the Bhangi chiefs (Sardars) of Lahore, who had rushed to liberate the nearby fort of Sodhran that Ranjit’s father had besieged.

After his father died in 1792, Ranjit stepped into the leadership role, but he spent much of his time hunting and in similar indulgences while the affairs of the confederacy (misl) were managed by his mother, assisted by Diwan Lakhpat. During one of Ranjit’s hunting expeditions, when he was thirteen, he faced a murderous assault on his life by a rival Sikh ruler and succeeded in killing his would-be assassin.

At the age of fifteen, Ranjit married Mehtab Kaur, a girl from the Kanhaya confederacy of Batala. Although the marriage never worked out satisfactorily for either partner, Ranjit compensated for his loveless life by pursuing power and glory with the help of his wife’s community, the Kanhaya Sikhs. In 1798, he took a second wife, Raj Kaur (who was renamed Datar Kaur), a sister of the ruler of the Nakkai Sikhs. Around that same time, he dismissed his diwan and assumed responsibility for state affairs himself. He was then eighteen years old.

Life’s Work

At the time Ranjit assumed full powers, the political situation in the Punjab region was complicated and tense. The region had twelve Sikh confederacies that were mutually suspicious of one another. It also had one district that was controlled by Pathans and another that was controlled by an English adventurer named George Thomas. Meanwhile, the entire region faced possible invasions from Afghans in the northeast, Rajputs in the north, Gurkhas in the northwest, the British in the east, and Marathas in the southeast. However, the biggest menace to a united and free Punjab came from the Afghans. Since the conquest of their strongman Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1752, they had looked upon most of northern India, including the Punjab, as part of their empire. During 1795-1797, Abdali’s grandson Shah Zaman twice tried to invade the Punjab. On November 27, 1798, he occupied Lahore, the chief city of the Punjab, but had to return home to deal with a crisis there.

After Zaman’s departure, the people of Lahore—Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims—decided to break the stranglehold of three inept Bhangi chiefs and invited Ranjit to take over the city. Ranjit occupied Lahore on July 7, 1799. On April 12, 1801, he assumed the title of maharaja. Possession of the ancient city of Lahore made the young Ranjit the most powerful chieftain in northern India.

During the following year, another Bhangi stronghold, the great city of Amritsar, surrendered to Ranjit’s army and his allies. Over the next several years, Ranjit conquered all the Cis-Sutlej states. The internal political turmoil in Afghanistan encouraged him to expand his sway westward; in 1804 he set out to conquer the dependencies of the Afghan Empire east of the Indus River. He easily cowed the local Muslim chiefs of the region between the Ravi and Indus Rivers into submission and conquered the mid-Indus region during 1820-1821. Afterward that region served as a secure buffer against Afghan inroads into the Punjab.

The secure establishment of Ranjit Singh’s authority in the Punjab forced the East India Company, which governed most of India in the name of Great Britain, to enter into amicable relations with his government. As early as 1808, a British mission led by Sir Charles Metcalfe visited Ranjit. That mission resulted in the Treaty of Amritsar (April 25, 1809), by which Britain recognized Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s sovereignty over territories north of the Sutlej River and promised perpetual friendship between him and the British.

The Treaty of Amritsar barred Ranjit’s eastward expansion, thereby preventing the union of all Sikh territories under a single state. Ranjit instead turned his attention to the north—to Kangra and the hill states occupied by the Gurkhas. Both regions soon came under his sway. He then took Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, Peshawar in 1823, and Leh in Ladhak in 1836. His domain eventually covered more than one-quarter million square miles of prosperous and strategically sensitive territory of South Asia.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s power and status reached their peak during the 1830’s, the last decade of his life, when he was reckoned as a powerful and resourceful Indian prince by both the English and the French. On October 26, 1831, a meeting was arranged between him and Lord William Bentinck, the British governor-general of India.

Though practically illiterate, Ranjit was a patron of arts and letters. He patronized such renowned poets as Fakir Aziz-ud-Din, Syed Muhammad Hashim, Ahmad, and Qadir Yar. These were writers whose creative talent led to the flourishing of heroic verse and a variety of Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi poetic forms. During Ranjit Singh’s reign, the renowned Sikh theologian Bhai Santokh Singh published two celebrated works, Nanak Parkash and Gur Partap Surya . Although a true man of the world and bon vivant, Ranjit was also a deeply religious man of eclectic faith. He respected both Sikh scriptures and Islam’s holy Qur՚ān.

Although an active man throughout his life, Ranjit Singh suffered from several bouts of paralysis. He survived the first two attacks in 1826 and 1834 but was severely weakened by a third attack in December, 1838. On June 27, 1839, he succumbed to a fourth attack and died in Lahore.

Significance

Ranjit Singh created the new state of Punjab not by merely by military means but also through a calculated policy of accommodation and conciliation with the Sikh, Rajput, and Pathan peoples of the region. He presided over the new ruling classes in his kingdom, which encompassed Sikhs, Jats, Khatris, Brahmans, Sayyids, Pathans, and Europeans, and allowed them to share in the distribution of the resources of the state as ministers, courtiers, provincial governors, and commanders. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, the ruling classes as well as the people at large developed a heightened Punjab identity that transcended the communal differences making for a multicultural and yet a cohesive regional state.

Bibliography

Bakshi, S. R. History of the Punjab: Maharaja Ranjit Singh. New Delhi: Anmol, 1991. A detailed scholarly account of the rise of Ranjit Singh and Anglo-Sikh relations during his reign. A valuable work of reference.

Banerjee, Anil C. The New History of Modern India, 1707-1947. 1983. Kolkata, India: K. P. Bagchi, 1992. The seventh chapter is a critical analysis of Ranjit Singh’s reign by a noted expert on the history of the Punjab. Succinct and solid scholarship.

Banga, Indu. “The Punjab Under Sikh Rule: Formation of a Regional State.” In History and Ideology: The Khalsa over Three Hundred Years, edited by J. S. Grewal and Indu Banga. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 1999. An insightful assessment by a distinguished historian of Ranjit Singh’s achievement as the architect of the state of Punjab.

Duggal, K. S. Ranjit Singh: A Secular Sikh Sovereign. New Delhi: Abhinav, 1989. An illustrated biography by a leading Punjabi novelist and scholar. Useful for both specialists and lay readers.

Grewal, J. S., and Indu Banga, eds. Maharaja Ranjit Singh and His Times. Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1980. A collection of research papers by the historians of the Punjab’s leading university, including several distinguished specialists.

Khullar, K. K. Maharaja Ranjit Singh. New Delhi: Hem, 1980. A work of solid scholarship with an informative appendix containing a note on indigenous historiography, and texts of the treaties entered into by Ranjit Singh.

Lafont, Jean-Marie. Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Lord of the Five Rivers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Examines Singh’s achievements, focusing on how he and the Punjabi people established a state in the Land of the Five Rivers.

Osborne, W. G. Ranjit Singh: The Lion of the Punjab. 1840. 2d ed. Calcutta, India: Susil Gupta, 1952. A contemporary British estimate of Ranjit Singh as a ruler and an eyewitness account of his court in Lahore.

Singh, Khushwant. Ranjit Singh: Maharajah of the Punjab. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962. A popular biography by a well-known critic and historian.