Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab*

by Khushwant Singh

*Ranjit Singh, the greatest monarch of the Sikhs, was born in 1780 and died in 1839. This extract is taken from Ranjit Singh: Maharaja of the Punjab.

A calligraphist who had spent many years making a copy of the Quran and had failed to get any of the Muslim princes of Hindustan to give him an adequate price for his labours turned up at Lahore to try and sell it to the foreign minister, Fakeer Azizuddin. The Fakeer praised the work but expressed his inability to pay for it. The discussion was overheard by Ranjit Singh, who summoned the calligraphist to his presence. The Maharaja respectfully pressed the holy book against his forehead and then scrutinized the writing with his single eye. He was impressed with the excellence of the work and bought the Quran for his private collection. Sometime later Fakeer Azizuddin asked him why he had paid such a high price for a book for which he, as a Sikh, would have no use. Ranjit Singh replied: ‘God intended me to look upon all religions with one eye; that is why he took away the light from the other.’

The story is apocryphal. But it continues to be told by Punjabis to this day because it has the answer to the question why Ranjit Singh was able to unite Punjabi Mussalmans, Hindus and Sikhs and create the one and only independent kingdom in the history of the Punjab. Another anecdote, equally apocryphal and even more popular, illustrates the second reason why Ranjit Singh succeeded in the face of heavy odds: his single-minded pursuit of power. It is said that once his Muslim wife, Mohran, remarked on his ugliness—he was dark, pitted with smallpox, and blind of one eye (‘exactly like an old mouse with grey whiskers and one eye’—Emily Eden)—‘Where was your Highness when God was distributing beauty?’

‘I had gone to find myself a kingdom,’ replied the monarch.

Ranjit Singh has been poorly served by his biographers. Hindu and Sikh admirers deified him as a virtuous man and a selfless patriot. This academic apotheosis reduced a full-blooded man and an astute politician to an anaemic saint and a simple-minded nationalist. Muslim historians were unduly harsh in describing him as an avaricious freebooter. English writers, who took their material largely from Muslim sources, portrayed him as a cunning man (the cliché often used is ‘wily Oriental’) devoid of moral considerations, whose only redeeming feature was his friendship with the English. They were not only not averse to picking up any gossip they could (every Oriental court has always been a whispering gallery of rumours) but also gave them currency by incorporating them in works of history. In recent years, monographs on different aspects of Ranjit Singh’s government have been produced under the auspices of departments of history in some Indian universities. These are mostly catalogues of known facts put in chronological order without any attempt to explain them in terms of historical movements. This method of treatment makes the meteoric collapse of his kingdom appear as a freak of history instead of as the culmination of an important historical movement. Just as a tide seems deceptively still to those who watch it from the shore, so did the swift undercurrent of Punjabi nationalism pass unnoticed by people who did not fathom the depths beneath the swell on which the Sikhs led by Ranjit Singh rode to power. In the same way, the fall of the Sikh kingdom was not simply due to misfortune in the field of battle but, as a wave spends itself on the sands when its driving force is gone, it was the petering out of a movement whose life force was spent and which had lost its leader.

Ranjit Singh was neither a selfless patriot nor an avaricious freebooter. He was neither a model of virtue nor a lascivious sensualist. Above all, he was too warm and lively a character to have his life story told in a lifeless catalogue of facts, figures, and footnotes. As a political figure, Ranjit Singh was in every way as remarkable a man as his two famous contemporaries, Napoleon Bonaparte of France and Mohammed Ali of Egypt. He rose from the status of petty chieftain to become the most powerful Indian ruler of his time. He was the first Indian in a thousand years to stem the tides of invasions from whence they had come across the northwest frontiers of Hindustan. Although he dispossessed hundreds of feudal landholders to consolidate his kingdom, he succeeded in winning their affections and converting them into faithful courtiers. In the history of the world, it would be hard to find another despot who never took life in cold blood yet built as large an empire as Ranjit’s. He persuaded the turbulent Sikhs and Mussalmans of the Punjab to become the willing instruments of an expansionist policy that brought the Kashmiris and the Pathans of the Northwest Frontier under his subjection and extended his sphere of influence from the borders of China and Afghanistan in the north to the deserts of Sindh in the south. His success was undoubtedly due to his ability to arouse the nascent sense of nationalism amongst his people and make them conscious that more important than being Muslim, Hindu or Sikh was the fact of being Punjabi. His Sikh and Hindu troops subdued the Sikh and Hindu rajas of the Punjab. His Mussalman najibs rejected the appeals of their Hindustani, Afghan, and Pathan co-religionists to crusade against the ‘infidel’ and instead helped to liquidate the crusaders. The year Ranjit Singh died, it was his Muslim troops led by Colonel Sheikh Basawan that forced the Khyber Pass and carried Ranjit’s colours through the streets of Kabul in the victory parade.

And a couple of years later Zorawar Singh, a Dogra Hindu, planted the Sikh flag in the heart of Tibet. These events were the high watermark of Punjabi imperialism which had carried Ranjit Singh to the heights of power and which subsided soon after his death.

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