In 1838 Emily Eden Called Ranjit Singh's Army Review 'a Sad Blow to Our Vanities.' Eleven Years Later the British Annexed the Punjab From a Ten-Year-Old

On Thursday 29 November 1838, in the Governor-General’s camp at Ferozepore on the Sutlej, Emily Eden sat on a sofa between her brother Lord Auckland and the ruler of the Punjab. The next day she wrote to her sister: “He is exactly like an old mouse, with grey whiskers and one eye.” The Maharaja, she added, wore “nothing but the commonest red silk dress.”

In the first week of December, after a fete in the Governor-General’s camp that had fireworks, nautch girls (professional dancers) and, by one guest’s count, 42,000 lamps, she set down a longer verdict. “He is a very drunken old profligate, neither more nor less. Still he has made himself a great king; he has conquered a great many powerful enemies; he is remarkably just in his government; he has disciplined a large army; he hardly ever takes away life, which is wonderful in a despot; and he is excessively beloved by his people. I certainly should not guess any part of this from looking at him.”

tuput’s earlier piece, Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, tells his life from smallpox to the Koh-i-Noor. This one follows the British who watched him, the army they came to inspect, and the eleven years between that sofa and the proclamation that ended his kingdom.

A military secretary writes down a plan

Eden’s nephew William Osborne, Lord Auckland’s military secretary, had crossed the Sutlej six months earlier with a mission sent to win Ranjit Singh’s help against Persian pressure on Herat and suspected Russian designs. (Eden dedicated her letters to him in 1866, “My dear William,” and signed herself his aunt.) Writing in his journal for 22 to 25 May 1838, on the march to Adinanagar, Osborne set down what he expected to happen next.

Ranjit Singh’s throne, Osborne predicted, would on his death become “an object of contention” between Kharak Singh and Sher Singh, and the country would see “a protracted and bloody war.” “During the lifetime of Runjeet,” he wrote, “the invasion and conquest of the Punjab would be indefensible; but at his death the case will be altered.” The Company had “but one course to pursue on Runjeet Sing’s death,” which was “the instant occupation of the Punjab by an overwhelming force,” and Osborne added: “The East India Company have swallowed too many camels to strain at this gnat.”

Osborne published the journal in 1840 under his own name, but his employer did not follow it. According to Cunningham, whose history of the Sikhs came out in 1849, Lord Auckland had Sher Singh told in 1839 that Kharak Singh was his master. The Company annexed the Punjab nine years after the book appeared.

A host with one eye and a great many questions

At his first audience with the Maharaja, Osborne faced a barrage of questions: “Do you drink wine?” “How much?” “What is the strength of the Company’s army?” “Ill-looking as he undoubtedly is, the countenance of Runjeet Sing cannot fail to strike every one as that of a very extraordinary man,” he wrote, though he did not flatter his host and also called him “mild and merciful as a ruler, but faithless and deceitful,” and “in reality a sceptic.”

Both visitors addressed the question of violence, and both hedged. Osborne: “He rules with a rod of iron, it is true; but in justice to him it must be stated, that except in actual open warfare he has never been known to take life, though his own has been attempted more than once.” Eden wrote “hardly ever.” The strongest claims either would make are Osborne’s “known” and Eden’s “hardly,” and both wrote as guests of a government that wanted his help against Dost Mohammad of Kabul.

A line of infantry two miles long

On 22 June 1838, at Lahore, Osborne saw about twelve thousand infantry in a line that “reached to the city gates, above two miles.” Three weeks earlier he had watched two thousand of them on parade and written that they “fire with greater precision and regularity, both volleys and file firing, than any other troops I ever saw.” An Italian, General Ventura, had raised and drilled the infantry, and a Frenchman, General Allard, had been given the cavalry. The artillery was fifty-three nine-pounders cast in brass in Ranjit Singh’s own Lahore foundry “from the patterns of those presented to him by Lord William Bentinck.” No Indian power, Osborne judged, “has yet possessed so large and well-disciplined a corps.”

Pay, he also noted, was in arrears “frequently upwards of a year, and seldom less than ten months,” after which Ranjit Singh paid a half or a third and “half frightens and half cheats them into giving up all further claims.” One European officer’s contract bound him “to marry a native of the Punjab” and “never to quit his country or his service without special leave,” and Osborne’s conclusion was that the army “only requires good officers and regular pay to make it a very powerful and serviceable army.”

Ranjit Singh knew what the regulars were for, and by Osborne’s account the knowledge that he kept “upwards of twenty thousand regular infantry, armed and disciplined like Europeans, has done more towards keeping his refractory Sirdars in order, than the fear of ten times their number of irregular forces would have done.” On 3 December the Company paraded its army for the Maharaja, and on 5 December he paraded his own. As Eden recorded it, Ranjit Singh “had nearly as many troops out” as the Company’s commander, and “they were quite as well disciplined, rather better dressed, repeated the same military movements and several others much more complicated.” The officers came back “rather discomfited” and told each other that the Sikhs “would run away in a real fight.” Her own comment: “It is a sad blow to our vanities!”

Counts differ with who was counting. Cunningham says Ranjit Singh left “fifty thousand disciplined soldiers, fifty thousand well-armed yeomanry and militia, and more than three hundred pieces of cannon.” The Wallace Collection puts the whole Khalsa, the Sikh army, at 85,000.

27 June 1839, and a diamond given away

Osborne had been shown the Koh-i-Noor at his farewell audience on 13 July 1838: “about an inch and a half in length,” set in a bracelet and, he wrote, “valued at three millions sterling.” Ranjit Singh died on 27 June 1839, aged 59. From Simla on 12 July, Osborne wrote a letter, printed in his book, about the death. “Two hours before he died,” Ranjit Singh “sent for all his jewels, and gave the famous diamond, called the ‘Mountain of Light,’ … to a Hindoo temple, his celebrated string of pearls to another, and his favourite fine horses … to a third.” His four wives “burnt themselves with his body, as did five of his Cachmerian slave girls.” Not there himself, Osborne had the account from the European officers who were present, which “describes it as the most horrible sight.” “Everything was done to prevent it, but in vain.”

The road to Kabul worried Osborne himself: “All our treasure and supplies to the army of the Indus must go through the Punjab,” he wrote, and the risk “will be great without Runjeet Sing’s master-mind to rule them.”

Four rulers and three ministers in six years

The heir, Kharak Singh, took the throne, and Eden thought him “apparently an idiot,” though “some people say he only affects it, to keep Runjeet from being jealous of him.”

Kharak Singh died on 5 November 1840, Cunningham records, “prematurely old and care-worn, at the age of thirty-eight.” That day his son Nau Nihal Singh, back from his father’s funeral rites, was passing under a covered gateway when part of it fell, killing a nephew of the minister Dhian Singh and fatally injuring the prince. “It is not positively known that the Rajas of Jammu thus designed to remove Nau Nihal Singh,” Cunningham wrote, “but it is difficult to acquit them of the crime.” A footnote records that General Ventura thought the fall accidental.

Sher Singh held the throne until 15 September 1843. Ajit Singh Sandhanwalia, the Maharaja’s drinking companion, got him to inspect some newly raised troops, approached with a carbine as if to present it, and “raised the weapon and shot his sovereign dead.” “The remorseless Lahna Singh took the life of the boy Pertab Singh, at the same time,” Cunningham adds. Back in May 1838, Osborne had met Pertab Singh, “a boy of seven years of age, son of Sher Sing.” Then Ajit Singh shot the prime minister, Dhian Singh. Dhian Singh’s son Hira Singh led the troops who stormed the citadel, and a child, Duleep Singh, was proclaimed Maharaja, with Hira Singh as vizier (chief minister). Hira Singh was overtaken and killed as he fled Lahore on 21 December 1844. Jawahir Singh, his successor, had the commander of a division that had once held him prisoner mutilated, “barbarously” in Cunningham’s word, by the loss of his nose and ears.

A footnote added for the 1840 book has Osborne saying Kharak Singh “owes his peaceable accession to the predominating influence of British authority” and to “the presence of a British army” at the moment of Ranjit Singh’s death. “This alone prevented those civil commotions and rival contests which would otherwise have infallibly taken place.”

When the regimental committees ran the state

By then the army was the state, and Cunningham, who spent eight years among the Sikhs, described how its relation to the government “was determined by a committee or assemblage of committees, termed a ‘Panch’ or ‘Panchayat’, i.e. a jury or committee of five,” chosen in each battalion or company. Through them, he wrote, the Sikh people “were enabled to interfere with effect… in the nomination and in the removal of their rulers.” Yet he was no romantic about it: the assemblies “sometimes added military licence to popular tumult.”

On 21 September 1845 the committees summoned Jawahir Singh and “resolved that Jawahir Singh should die as a traitor to the commonwealth.” Arriving on an elephant with the boy Maharaja and a quantity of gold and jewels, he was told to be silent, and “a party of soldiers advanced and put the wazir to death by a discharge of musketry.” Of the killing, Cunningham wrote that “the act partook of the solemnity and moderation of a judicial process, ordained and witnessed by a whole people.”

In early November the army accepted Lal Singh as vizier and Tej Singh as commander-in-chief. Cunningham wrote that “Their desire was to be upheld as the ministers of a dependent kingdom by grateful conquerors,” though a footnote adds that the Calcutta Review doubted the extent of that treachery. The army crossed the Sutlej on 11 December 1845. Four battles followed, ending at Sobraon on 10 February 1846, where the National Army Museum puts Sikh casualties at perhaps as many as 10,000 and British losses at more than 2,000.

The Treaty of Lahore of 9 March 1846 demanded one and a half crore rupees (15 million) in damages. Article 7 limited the regular army to “25 Battalions of Infantry” of 800 men and 12,000 cavalry. The 1918 edition of Cunningham prints archive figures for 1844: 45 infantry battalions, about 40,000 men, and 11 cavalry regiments of roughly 6,000. Nine months later, on 16 December 1846, the Treaty of Bhairowal gave a British Resident (the Company’s agent at the court) “full authority to direct and control all matters in every department of the State.” It charged the Durbar 22 lakh rupees a year for a British force at Lahore and was to run until the Maharaja reached sixteen, “or on the 4th September of the year 1854.”

Multan, and a war promised “with a vengeance”

Vans Agnew and Lieutenant Anderson, two British officers, went to Multan in April 1848 to take over the fort from its governor, Diwan Mulraj. They were attacked and wounded on 19 April as they came out of it, and both were killed in the fighting that followed. Dalhousie, Governor-General since January, wrote on 3 May to Sir John Hobhouse, who oversaw Indian affairs from London: “I have no inclination to make this incident an excuse for picking a quarrel with the State.” By 15 August he told Hobhouse that if a wider conspiracy were proved, “it will have then become indispensable for us to suppress the Sikh dynasty… and to convert the Punjab into a British province.”

According to his biographer Sir William Lee-Warner, Dalhousie said at a ball at Barrackpore on 5 October: “I have striven for peace, I have longed for it. But since the Sikh nation desire war, on my word they shall have it, and with a vengeance.” At Chillianwala on 13 January 1849 the British 24th Regiment suffered 515 casualties, 238 of them killed, by the National Army Museum’s count, and at Gujrat on 21 February Gough’s roughly 24,000 men beat a Sikh force the National Army Museum estimates at 60,000 or more.

The Sikh army gave up its arms on 14 March at Rawalpindi, Lee-Warner records: “18,000 Sikhs” to “a British column not exceeding 8000 men.” Neville Chamberlain later told Dalhousie that one old soldier laid his shield, sword and matchlock on the pile, saluted them, and said, “Aj Ranjit Sing mar gaya.” Lee-Warner’s translation is: to-day is the death of Ranjit Sing.

Dalhousie against his own Resident

The Governor-General took the decision on his own. To Sir Henry Lawrence, the Resident at Lahore, he wrote from Ferozepore on 1 February 1849 that the peace of the empire required the Sikh government to be defeated and then “subverted, and their dynasty abolished.” Lawrence replied from Lahore that month: “My own opinion, as already more than once expressed in writing to your lordship, is against annexation. I did think it unjust: I now think it impolitic.” After the signing, Dalhousie told Hobhouse that apart from Diwan Dina Nath, the only people who “exhibited signs of dejection and regret” were “the two Lawrences.”

London had asked him to wait. Hobhouse wrote on 7 November that “it is clear now that you have the right to do what you choose,” but on 7 December that “we wish the question of annexation to be reconsidered.” The Company’s Secret Committee wrote on 24 November that it wished “to be favoured with your further deliberations previously to your making your final arrangements.” Lee-Warner, who wrote his life of Dalhousie from the Governor-General’s own papers, concedes that he “acted upon his own responsibility without even a suggestion from home.”

Dalhousie’s defence, as Lee-Warner prints it from a letter of 15 June 1849, was that the Afghans had joined the war, British arms had suffered reverses, the Sikhs “in their camp did speak of… an early march on Delhi,” and the Punjab was falling apart: “The Governments were gone; the army was gone; there was no police.” The proclamation added that the Sikhs had paid none of their tribute, left loans unrepaid and murdered British officers.

The text of Bhairowal answers it. Article 11 let the Governor-General end British control early once he and the Durbar were satisfied that British “interposition” was “no longer necessary for maintaining the Government of His Highness the Maharajah.” Nothing in it allows that government to be abolished, and the Maharaja was ten. His other annexations are covered in the piece on the doctrine of lapse.

29 March 1849 in the Lahore palace

Henry Elliot, the Foreign Secretary, read out Dalhousie’s declaration at a durbar in the palace on 29 March, a day after the Council of Regency had signed the terms. Dina Nath pleaded for clemency, with a comparison. France, he said, had been restored to its legitimate ruler after Napoleon’s defeat, though it yielded thirty crores of revenue, and “it would be no very extraordinary act of British clemency, if the Punjab, which yielded less than three crores, should be restored to the Maharajah. However, let the Governor-General’s will be done.” Elliot’s reply was that “the time of concession and clemency was gone.”

Duleep Singh signed “by tracing the initials of his name in English letters.” Elliot noticed “the alacrity with which he took the papers” and guessed he had been told that hesitation would bring worse terms. “No Sirdar was armed,” and the jewels and robes seen at other durbars “were now thrown aside.” Elliot saw no sign of “wonder, sorrow, anger, or even dissatisfaction” except on Dina Nath’s face, and wrote of an assembly “which had met to witness the ratified dissolution of the great empire, established by the fraud and violence of Runjeet Sing.” As he left, the British colours went up on the citadel under a royal salute, “sounding the knell of the Khalsa Raj.”

Which date counts as annexation depends on the paper. The terms and the proclamation are both dated 29 March in the parliamentary papers, and Lee-Warner, Edwardes and Merivale (Henry Lawrence’s biographers) and the National Army Museum all give that day. The notification ordering the proclamation published is dated Ferozepore, 30 March. The date 2 April comes from Dalhousie’s General Order to the army, which reports that “the Punjab has been declared a portion of the British Empire in India.” Dalhousie ratified the terms on 5 April.

The terms ran to five articles. Duleep Singh gave up sovereignty “for himself, his heirs, and his successors,” and the state’s property was confiscated, while he was to receive “not less than four, and not exceeding five, lakhs of Company’s Rupees per annum,” which the Wallace Collection converts to £40,000 to £50,000. The third article reads: “The gem called the Koh-i-noor, which was taken from Shah Shoojaool-Moolk by Maharajah Runjeet Sing, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.” How that diamond ended up in the Tower of London is told in the Koh-i-Noor piece. In his despatch of 7 April, Dalhousie wrote that he was confident the directors would approve his having set the stone apart “as a historical memorial of conquest.”