Empire of the Sikhs (16 page)

Some of his critics suggest that the treaty showed him in a poor light since he abandoned all the Sikhs living between the Jamuna and the Sutlej, but this is to discount his strategy and his vision for the future. He wanted the Sikh state to extend far beyond the boundaries of the Punjab. He had his eyes on prized Afghan possessions all the way up to Kabul, as also other vast territories in northern India. So the first article of the treaty assured him that the British government would not concern itself with his territorial acquisitions north of the River Sutlej. It was because of his
decisive victories against the Afghans that he was able to seal the routes through which invaders had entered India over the centuries. Had he not signed the treaty and secured his southern boundary effectively, he could not have achieved what he did so spectacularly.

Ranjit Singh's success as a statesman with regard to the Sutlej Treaty can only be judged with this consideration in mind. Even Metcalfe, who was often at odds with him and robustly represented British interests in the period preceding the finalization of the treaty, acknowledged his gain. His suave remark to the Maharaja on signing it, ‘Your Excellency will reap the fruits of the alliance with the British in a period of twenty years',
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was to be proved right – in fact in less than twenty years.

With his southern border secured, Ranjit Singh now began to pursue his ambitions of strengthening and extending his kingdom in the north. Zaman Shah would give him little more trouble. On returning home after being ousted from Lahore he had been plunged back into the thick of court intrigues and as a consequence of his execution of a powerful tribal leader had been blinded by his own younger brother Mahmud. His other brother Shah Shuja had fled to India, taking with him, along with his hopes of regaining the Afghan throne, the famous Koh-i-noor diamond.

Shah Shuja sought Ranjit Singh's help to try to regain his kingdom. A cordial but wary Ranjit Singh was not keen on allowing a claimant to the Afghan throne to use Multan, on the south bank of the Ravi. as his base, which in the Sikh ruler's view was an integral part of India. So in a sudden assault on Multan city he invested it himself in February 1810, although Multan Fort under its brave commander Muzaffar Khan held out until it eventually fell to the Sikhs in early 1818.

Shah Shuja returned briefly to Kabul for a brief stint on the
throne before being thrown out again. This time he headed for the northerly town of Attock as its governor Jahan Dad Khan's guest. It was an unwise choice because the governor, on learning that Shuja was in touch with Wazir Fateh Khan, the power behind the Afghan throne whom Dad Khan passionately hated, had Shuja manacled and dispatched to his brother, Ata Mohammed, governor of Kashmir. Shuja soon found himself in a dungeon, cut off from his wife Wafa Begum and his blinded brother Zaman Shah. Even though these two, now resident in Rawalpindi, were living on a pension they received from Ranjit Singh, Zaman Shah was busy intriguing with outside powers to regain his throne. Ranjit Singh had both families brought to Lahore where he could keep an eye on them. They were, however, honoured as state guests.

Shuja's wife, Wafa Begum, now entered upon the scene. Desperate over her husband's fate, she begged Ranjit Singh to rescue him from Ata Mohammed's hold in Kashmir before the latter dispatched him, in the style of her fellow Afghans. She offered Ranjit the Koh-i-noor diamond in return for sending a military expedition to Kashmir.
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Ranjit Singh, attracted by the idea, now turned his eyes to Kashmir which was a prized possession of the Afghans, who had in turn taken it from the Mughals in 1752. Ranjit Singh was drawn to it for many reasons. He was lured as much by its wondrous lakes, valleys, snow-covered peaks, saffron fields, flora, fauna and flowering trees as by its exquisite crafts – carpets, shawls, walnut woodwork, jewellery, sapphires, beautiful women and much else. In 1812 the excuse he needed for a dramatic entry into Kashmir was, ironically enough, again provided by the Afghans, just as in the case of Attock and Multan.

Wazir Fateh Khan of the Barakzai tribe in Afghanistan, who had caused Zaman Shah to be blinded, wanted to lay hands on Shah Shuja, possessor of the Koh-i-noor and currently the Kashmir governor's captive. But there was no way he could get to
Kashmir with his forces since Ranjit Singh's Sikh army stood in his way at Attock. So he had to ask Ranjit Singh for his help in the invasion of Kashmir. With the modalities carefully worked out to the advantage of the Lahore Darbar, the combined Sikh and Afghan forces headed for Shergarh where Shuja was imprisoned.

The man Ranjit Singh handpicked to command the Sikh army in this joint expedition was Diwan Mohkam Chand, an outstanding commander and wise in the ways of the world. It did not take him long to see through the game the Afghans were planning to play – to outpace Diwan Mohkam Chand, reach Shergarh before him and take custody not only of Shuja but of the treasury as well. The Diwan informed Ranjit Singh of this plan, who told him to outwit Fateh Khan and, if he persisted in his double-crossing, to deal with him accordingly.

Mohkam Chand rose to the occasion by taking a more precipitous but shorter route to Shergarh Fort and mounting an assault on it before the Afghans were anywhere in sight. Completely taken aback by being so easily outwitted, Fateh Khan hastened to join in the assault, and when Shergarh fell he and his men put their energies into looting the treasury while the Sikhs mounted a massive search for Shuja. On finding him they swiftly transferred him to the Sikh camp and from there to Lahore.

With Shah Shuja and Wafa Begum reunited in Lahore, the Koh-i-noor again became a bone of contention, this time between Shuja and Wafa on one side and Ranjit Singh on the other. Having promised the Koh-i-noor to Ranjit Singh when she was fearful for her husband's life, Wafa and her husband were now most reluctant to hand it over to their rescuer. But he had his way and took possession of it on 1 June 1813.

‘Take five strong men,' said Shah Shuja to Ranjit Singh on being asked the value of the Koh-i-noor. ‘Let the first throw a stone northward, the second eastward, the third southward, the fourth westward, and the fifth upward. Fill all the space thus outlined
with gold and you will still not have achieved the value of the Mountain of Light.'
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The history of the Koh-i-noor diamond is as fascinating as the stone itself but can be only briefly touched on here. It was seized around 1306 from Rai Mahlak Deo, ruler of Malwa in the Deccan by Ala-ud-din Khilji, Delhi's ruling Sultan. Emperor Ibrahim Lodhi of the Lodhi Dynasty then acquired it for a time, before it was taken over by the Mughals. Babur records in his memoirs that ‘every appraiser has estimated its value at two-and-a-half days' food for the whole world. Apparently it weighs eight misqals [approximately 188 carats]. Humayun [his son] offered it to me when I arrived at Agra; I just gave it back to him.'
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Oval in shape, brilliant, colourless, around one and a quarter inches in length and just under one and a half inches in width, the Koh-i-noor came from the Golconda mines in south India, the source of other famous diamonds such as the great Mughal, the Orlov, the Pigot, Regent, Sancy and Hope. The Golconda diamond mines were situated five miles south of Hyderabad between the rivers Krishna and Godavari. The Koh-i-noor disappeared for a hundred years, then surfaced again in 1656 at the court of the Mughal Shah Jahan, who set it in his peacock throne. It was forcibly taken from the Mughals by the Persian Nadir Shah when he sacked Delhi in 1739 and slaughtered 100,000 Muslims and Hindus in eight hours. Nadir Shah is credited with naming the diamond Koh-i-noor, ‘mountain of light' in Persian. When Nadir was hacked to death in a family coup in 1747, Ahmed Shah Abdali removed the Koh-i-noor from his body, and through him it eventually came into the possession of Shah Shuja.

There was still unfinished business for Ranjit Singh to deal with. It concerned Fateh Khan's deceitful moves during the joint expedition to Shergarh. Ranjit Singh did not take kindly to duplicity. He
asked his general Mohkam Chand to annex Attock. After the battle that took place at Haidru on 9 July 1813 the Sikh forces walked in without any resistance. Four months later Wazir Fateh Khan, embittered by the loss of a major invasion route which the Afghans had traditionally taken into India, resorted to letter-writing in lieu of armed retaliation. On 25 December 1813 he wrote to Mohkam Chand: ‘Still nothing is lost. Give the fort of Attock to me so that the relations of friendship between the two parties may become strong.' Mohkam Chand replied: ‘The fort of Attock will never be handed over to you, and the country of Kashmir will soon be conquered by us.'
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Unable to reconcile himself to the loss of Attock, he died in 1818 still obsessed with getting it back.

While the incursion into Kashmir in 1812 had been a spin-off of the Koh-i-noor's seductive lure, the fall of Multan Fort in 1818 was due to another symbol of Afghan pride – the Zam Zama,
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the great cannon. Rated as one of the most formidable cannons in the world, it had helped Ahmed Shah Abdali win the Battle of Panipat against the Marathas. If the Koh-i-noor was soon to fall into Ranjit Singh's hands, the legendary Zam Zama was already his, and in a supremely ironic turn of events the cannon Abdali had wanted to decimate his enemies with would now be turned by Ranjit Singh against the Afghans entrenched in Multan Fort. As the cannon tore gaping holes in the massive walls of the fort, the Nihangs, the fearsome Sikh warrior sect, launched their do-or-die attacks through them. The second of the four principal Afghan cities in India, following the annexation of Attock in 1813, was now in Sikh hands. Since Multan, a city of great antiquity from the time of Alexander the Great and a flourishing centre of trade, yielded considerable revenues, Ranjit Singh took care to appoint able governors to administer it. The third, Diwan Sawan Mal, appointed in 1821, was to be the most outstanding of all, holding the post for an unusually long spell of almost a quarter of a century.

The capitulation of Multan Fort, a significant victory at no less
than a seventh attempt, was also a blot on the reputation of Ranjit Singh's army, known for its just treatment of vanquished foes. For some reason, never satisfactorily explained, the Sikh troops seemed to have lost their sense of self-restraint when the fort fell. Every house was searched and looted. Ranjit Singh ordered his forces to give up whatever they had taken and proclaimed the death penalty in case of default, but no evidence has survived as to whether the death penalty was ever actually carried out. Only some shawls, utensils, rich apparel, books and carpets worth a few lakhs of rupees were returned but no gold or silver coins or jewellery or precious objects.
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It is scarcely possible to list comprehensively all the territories Ranjt Singh annexed to the Sikh state, because in addition to outright annexations many were left under the political and administrative control of their chieftains or rulers while being under his suzerainty and subject to a tribute they paid annually to him until they were eventually taken over. Other such interim arrangements, with many variations, were also entered into. Some idea of how the Sikh empire grew out of this bewildering chequerboard of territorial acquisitions can be had from a glimpse provided over a nine-year period by the Sikh historian J.S. Grewal – the years between the Treaty of Amritsar signed in 1809 and the conquest of Multan in 1818. It was during this period, and the conquest of Kashmir and the north-west in the 1820s and 1830s, that Ranjit Singh's realm emerged into an entity that may truly be termed an empire.

Grewal lists a number of towns which are familiar Sikh place-names:

The Sikh territories annexed by Ranjit Singh included Hariana, Jalalpur, Manawar, Islamgarh, Bajwat, Gujrat, Chunian, Dipalpur, Satghara, Jethpur, Haveli, Muhiyuddinpur, Jalandhar, Patti, Fatehgarh, Sujanpur, Hajipur, Mukerian, Rawalpindi, Sri Hargobindpur and Miani … The Hindu territories
annexed by Ranjit Singh included Kangra, Sayyidgarh, Kotla, Jandiala, Samba, Kathua, Guler, Nurpur and Jaswan. With the exception of Jandiala, all these territories were in the hills close to the plains. In the process, about half a dozen chiefs were subverted, and the most powerful hill principalities of Kangra and Jammu suffered diminution…. The Muslim territories annexed by Ranjit Singh included Khushab, Kachh, Sahiwal, Kusk, Attock, Makhad, Jhang, Tulamba and Kot Nau. In the process, some Baloch and Sial chiefs were subverted and the rulers of Bahawalpur, Multan and Kabul lost some of their territories. Thus, before the conquest of Multan, the lower hills and upper and middle portions of all the five doabs fell under the effective control of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
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