Sikh Empire

Politics and institutions

The Sikh Empire was less a unitary kingdom than a coalition of misls that Ranjit Singh turned into a court. From Lahore he ruled through the Khalsa Darbar, a deliberately mixed elite of Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Dogra and European officers; Persian remained the language of revenue and diplomacy, and the maharaja's authority rested on the Khalsa army rather than on a hereditary bureaucracy. The Treaty of Amritsar with the British in 1809 fixed the Sutlej as the eastern frontier and left him free to expand west and north. After his death in 1839 the court lost its arbiter: princes were murdered, the army's panchayats became a political power, and the British annexed the Punjab in 1849 after two short, brutal wars.

Economy and finance

Land revenue supplied roughly seven tenths of the state's income; customs, excises and monopolies made up most of the rest. The fertile doabs of the Punjab produced grain, cotton and indigo, while Kashmir's shawls, Multan's crafts and the horse trade with Central Asia fed the treasury. Ranjit Singh kept the Mughal silver rupee standard, striking coins with Persian legends, and granted jagirs to nobles, generals and temples in return for service. The army was the largest single expense, and the European-drilled artillery corps consumed revenue that a largely agrarian state could not easily replace. After 1839 the fiscal machine survived, but the political consensus that had made it work did not.

Society and culture

The empire governed perhaps twelve million people, of whom Muslims were the great majority, Hindus perhaps a tenth and Sikhs around a tenth. Ranjit Singh's court was secular in practice: he restored Muslim qazis and muftis, banned cow slaughter, patronized Hindu temples and Muslim shrines, and appointed men by loyalty rather than creed. Persianate high culture flourished alongside Punjabi devotional life; Vaisakhi, Holi, Diwali and Basant were all kept at court. Yet Sikh rule could also be harsh in Kashmir and on the frontier, where taxes, forced labour and the closing of mosques bred resentment. The empire's social bargain was thus neither a modern secular state nor a simple theocracy, but a military monarchy holding a religiously plural society together by patronage and force.

Military and frontiers

The Khalsa army was the empire's real constitution. Ranjit Singh hired French, Italian and American officers to drill infantry and artillery, built a park of heavy guns, and combined disciplined battalions with the mounted misl cavalry. Multan fell in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, Peshawar became tributary in 1823 and was annexed in 1834; the Khyber became the western limit. The army's own panchayats, however, could overrule kings. After 1839 it became the arbiter of politics, and its decision to cross the Sutlej in 1845 triggered the First Anglo-Sikh War. Ferozeshah and Sobraon were hard fights; Chillianwala shocked the British; Gujrat in 1849 ended the state.

Foreign relations

Ranjit Singh's diplomacy was a narrow path between the British and the Afghans. The 1809 Treaty of Amritsar bought peace on the Sutlej and recognition of his conquests north of it; his foreign minister Fakir Azizuddin negotiated with the Company and with Dost Muhammad Khan, and the court kept news-writers and agents in Kabul, the Cis-Sutlej states and British India. In 1838 he joined the British in restoring Shah Shuja to Kabul, a campaign that exposed the limits of the alliance. Tributary relations with Ladakh, Baltistan and Kashmir extended his influence into the Himalayas, and a disastrous invasion of Tibet in 1841 showed how far those claims outran his power. After his death, the British used the same treaties to dismantle the state.

Legacy and influence

The Sikh Empire was the last Indian power to hold the Punjab against the British, and its memory is inseparable from Ranjit Singh: the one-eyed maharaja who rebuilt the Golden Temple's marble and gold, patronized the Kashi Vishwanath temple, and kept a court where a Muslim could be foreign minister and a Frenchman a general. British annexation made the Punjab a province and a recruiting ground; the Koh-i-Noor went to London, and Duleep Singh to exile in England. The boundary Ranjit Singh had fixed at the Khyber later shaped the British Raj's frontier policy. In 1947 the Punjab was partitioned, and the empire's old heartland was cut in two; its Sikh community, once a ruling minority, became a border people.