Hari Singh Nalwa Governed Kashmir, Hazara and Peshawar for Ranjit Singh, Founded the Town of Haripur and Held the Khyber Frontier Until His Death at Jamrud on 30 April 1837

Hari Singh Nalwa, born at Gujranwala in April 1791, was one of the commanders Maharaja Ranjit Singh sent out on the campaigns that built the Sikh Empire. He served at Kasur, Multan and Attock and in Kashmir, governed Kashmir and then Hazara, and founded the town of Haripur, which became the headquarters of the British district of Hazara after the annexation of 1849.

He died on 30 April 1837 at Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, fighting an Afghan army under Muhammad Akbar Khan, a son of the ruler of Kabul. Cunningham, whose history of the Sikhs appeared in 1849, wrote that the Afghans “could not master Jamrud or Peshawar itself.”

The Maharaja’s own life is in Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, and his army as British visitors saw it is in the piece on Emily Eden and the Khalsa. This one follows his frontier commander through Cunningham, Charles Masson (who was in Afghanistan in 1837), Baron Hügel (who visited Hari Singh’s territory in 1835 and 1836), the Punjab Government’s 1883 Hazara gazetteer, and the historians Autar Singh Sandhu and Hari Ram Gupta. Where they disagree, each is named.

A personal attendant who was given a regiment

Sandhu, writing in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, says that in 1805 the young Hari Singh took a recruitment test, impressed the Maharaja with his drill and became a personal attendant. Soon afterwards he was given 800 horse and foot. The promotion, in Sandhu’s telling, followed an incident in which he split the head of a tiger that had seized him, and it earned him the name Nalwa. Hügel, who met him in January 1836, wrote that Hari Singh gave him a drawing of himself killing the animal.

By Sandhu’s account he commanded a regiment at the last attack on Kasur in 1807, was rewarded with a jagir (a grant of land revenue), and served in four of Ranjit Singh’s seven Multan campaigns, those of 1810, 1816, 1817 and 1818. At Attock in 1813 he was second-in-command to Diwan Mohkam Chand, and he went to Kashmir in 1814 and 1819. To Cunningham he was “the most enterprising of Ranjit Singh’s generals.”

Kashmir in 1820, and a rupee that kept his name

In 1820, Sandhu says, Hari Singh became governor of Kashmir after Diwan Moti Ram. His measures included dividing the valley into parganahs under collectors and thanas under police officers, putting down forest robbers, beginning forts at Uri and Muzaffarabad and shrines at Matan and Baramula, and organising relief after the floods of 1821. Limits on worship and dress for Kashmiri Pandits were lifted and the government’s share of the saffron crop was lowered, Gupta adds.

Writers differ on how long he stayed. June to December 1820 is Gupta’s figure. Wiggins and Goron, in a numismatic study, say he governed from early 1820 and throughout 1821. Rhodes and Wiggins give 1820 to 1822.

His name survived on the money. Ranjit Singh let him strike a coin in his own name, Sandhu writes, the Hari Singhi rupee, which stayed in circulation in the valley until the closing years of the nineteenth century. To Shahamat Ali, who passed through Gujranwala in 1839, it was a new rupee of base coinage that still bore his name. Its value was two-thirds of a Nanakshahi rupee, Gupta writes. The collectors’ site SikhCoins.in, citing Hans Herrli and Vanit Nalwa, says no die bearing his name has been found and that the name stuck through use.

On the cost to Kashmiris, Wiggins and Goron call his administration extreme and tyrannical and say his accumulated wealth was confiscated when he was recalled. Lepel Griffin, as Gupta quotes him, held that Kashmir was “ground to powder by Sirdar Hari Singh Nalwa.”

Haripur, the town he built in Hazara

In 1822 Hari Singh was sent to Hazara, the hill country on the north-west of the Sikh kingdom, and stayed fifteen years. Near Salik Serai, on the left bank of the Dor river, he built a strong fort and named it Harikishangarh after the Eighth Guru, Sandhu says. Beside it rose a town, Haripur. The 1883 gazetteer calls Haripur an old town founded under Sikh rule by Sardar Hari Singh, governor of Hazara, about 1822 or 1823.

Hügel passed the fort in December 1835 and found it built in regular form, though only of mud, about twelve years earlier. At Hasan Abdal, Shahamat Ali recorded in 1839, Hari Singh had built the small shrine called Panja Sahib beside the rock where, in the tradition, Guru Nanak stamped his fingers.

His Hazara fights are listed in the gazetteer. At Mangal, it says, his 7,000 foot soldiers defeated a force of hill men it estimates at 25,000 and killed 2,000 of them. From 1827 to 1831 he also faced the religious leader Sayyid Ahmad, who, Cunningham says, crossed the Indus in June 1830 to attack a Sikh force under Hari Singh and General Allard and was beaten off.

Not every fight went his way. At Nara in October 1824, the gazetteer says, Sikh troops were beaten, Hari Singh himself barely escaped, and the stated Sikh loss was 500 out of 8,000. Another record, Cunningham’s, speaks of “a severe check” for him that year.

Peshawar in 1834 and the work of frontier government

On 6 May 1834, Cunningham says, Peshawar’s citadel was taken by a force under the nominal command of the Maharaja’s grandson Nau Nihal Singh, “but really led by Sirdar Hari Singh.” Masson, who was in Peshawar when the Sikhs came, put the force at no more than nine thousand men and noted that Ranjit Singh with twenty-five thousand had not ventured to hold the city some years earlier. He also heard Sultan Muhammad Khan, the Barakzai chief of Peshawar, complain of Hari Singh’s disregard of oaths. Hari Singh, Cunningham adds, openly showed contempt for all Afghans and did not hide his plan to carry Sikh arms beyond Peshawar.

How the frontier was run is set out in Gupta’s volume. Hari Singh, the first governor of Peshawar under direct rule from Lahore, commanded 12,000 men west of the Indus from 1834 and lived in a new fortress on the site of the old Bala Hisar. In Hazara the real power lay with civil officers, and the garrisons in the forts were called on in emergencies. On 23 June 1831 Ranjit Singh told him to collect the yearly revenue of Chach and Hazara “in proper manner and to take care to keep always before his eyes the welfare of the poor and the weak.” Hari Singh was once fined two lakh rupees (200,000) for keeping fewer men than he was required to, Gupta records, and he charged Lahore heavy sums for putting down Yusafzai revolts and kept a good part of them.

The fort at Jamrud

Accounts of the fort at Jamrud, at the foot of the Khyber, do not quite agree. One account, Sandhu’s, has the fort built in 1836 and the pass sealed to invaders. In Shahamat Ali’s version Hari Singh repaired and occupied an existing fort in 1837, which alarmed the Khyber tribes so much that they asked Dost Mohammad Khan to help expel him. A petty castle is Masson’s phrase, and Gupta says the Maharaja ordered it built and that Mihan Singh held it with 600 men.

Dost Mohammad stayed in Kabul. According to Masson, his minister Mirza Sami Khan and five of his sons marched into the Khyber, with Muhammad Akbar Khan commanding. The Sikh garrisons in the Peshawar valley had been thinned, Cunningham adds, to send men to Lahore for Nau Nihal Singh’s wedding and the expected visit of the British Governor-General and commander-in-chief. The wedding was in March 1837, and Gupta prints Hari Singh’s letters to Lahore: on 10 March that the Afghans were at Jalalabad, on 21 April that the princes had crossed the pass and dug in three kilometres from Jamrud, and on 28 April that their guns had brought down one side of the fort wall.

30 April 1837, as three writers tell it

On 30 April, Cunningham says, the Afghans attacked the post and could not carry it, Hari Singh feigned a retreat to draw them onto the plain, and that he was “present everywhere amid his defeated, retiring and rallying masses” before he fell mortally wounded. In a note he adds that the Afghans were at first routed or repulsed with the loss of some guns, until a detachment under the Amir’s relation Shams-ud-din Khan turned the battle, and that “had not Hari Singh been killed, the Sikhs would have retrieved the day.”

Masson, writing from the Afghan side, has it the other way round. In his account the Afghans bombarded Jamrud for two or three days, and on the morning of the 30th Hari Singh attacked and “for the moment carried all before him,” taking fourteen Afghan guns. Shams-ud-din’s cavalry then arrived and the Sikhs became fugitives. The Afghans recovered eleven of the fourteen guns and took three Sikh guns, and the Sikhs carried off the other three Afghan guns. Two Sikh guns were lost, by Cunningham’s count.

The largest numbers are Gupta’s. He has Hari Singh march from Peshawar with 6,000 foot, 1,000 regular cavalry, 3,000 irregulars and 20 guns, against 7,000 Afghan horse, 2,000 matchlockmen, 9,000 irregular fighters and about 20,000 tribal volunteers, and puts the dead of both sides together at about 7,000.

How he died, and who won

Four gunshot wounds and two sabre cuts across the chest, Sandhu says, did not stop Hari Singh giving orders until a shot hit his side. He rode to his field tent, was carried into the fort and died that evening. His last instruction was that his death not be announced until the Maharaja’s relief column arrived. In Gupta’s version two balls hit him, in the stomach and the side, and Mihan Singh kept the news from the troops. In Masson’s account he was carried off the field and “was burnt the evening of the action.” A popular version, repeated in a 2016 Dawn column, has his body propped up on the walls to deceive the Afghans. None of the other accounts says so.

Who won is still argued. For Shahamat Ali, the balance of victory turned in favour of the Afghans. Masson thought Muhammad Akbar Khan “plumed himself on a transcendent victory” while the Afghans “had really not much to boast of in this action.” Dost Mohammad’s “fruitless victory” is Cunningham’s phrase. Kabul was lit with bonfires, Gupta says, but Jamrud and Peshawar stayed in Sikh hands.

After the battle

Ranjit Singh was moved to tears, Cunningham says. The Maharaja went to Rohtas, and his minister Dhian Singh hurried to the frontier and worked with his own hands on the foundations of a regular fort at Jamrud. In Gupta’s list of Sikh forts, Fatehgarh at Jamrud is Hari Singh’s and holds his tomb, while an eyewitness account of the 1839 expedition, quoted in Shahamat Ali’s book, says the old fort was demolished soon after the fatal action and Fattehgarh built in its place.

What became of his estate depends on the writer. The whole jagir, worth about eight lakh rupees a year, was taken back by the Maharaja and divided among other sardars with little left for the family, Shahamat Ali says. Gupta instead has the Maharaja seizing his property, including eighty lakh rupees (8 million) in cash held by Amritsar bankers. In Hazara, Maha Singh took over, and in October 1837 a court faction hostile to the dead sardar had him recalled. At Peshawar, Gupta says, Avitabile succeeded him.

What happened to the Sikh state afterwards is told in the piece on the Anglo-Sikh Wars. The gazetteer says Haripur became the headquarters of the British district of Hazara on annexation in 1849 and lost that role to Abbottabad in 1853. It counted 4,884 people there in the 1881 census, and an old garden begun by Hari Singh was then managed by the municipal committee.