General Lake, who in 1803 had defeated the Marathas, who had opposed the British under Holkar and pursued them across the trans-Sutlej states, had been persuaded by the Sikh chieftains of that area, jealous of Ranjit Singh’s growing power, of the danger he could pose to the Company. Lord Lake seemed receptive to these voices, and one seasoned British administrator of the time reflects what must have been the British army’s response to the propaganda of the cis-Sutlej chieftains in his comment that ‘the prospect of a big fight was cheering’.12 Bemused by a long-held belief in their own invincibility, the British administrators and officers were convinced that the wild men on their horses who were opposing them on the battlefield would easily be annihilated by the disciplined white troops. They would soon be wiser.
While Lake in pursuit of Holkar’s troops had reached the banks of the Beas and got a feel of the terrain, young Ranjit Singh had not been idle. Through his intelligence network which he had begun to assemble early on in his rule, combined with his common sense, he assessed far more accurately than most the threat the British would eventually pose to the Sikh kingdom. Taking advantage of the presence of General Lake’s troops on the Beas, he paid a secret visit to the English camp and noted ‘the machine-like drill of the sepoy battalions, the mobility of the Company’s artillery, and the solidity of the British regiments, horse and foot’.13 In all likelihood, it was this secret visit to the British army camp that convinced Ranjit Singh of the need to introduce into his own military formations those weapons, battle tactics, training methods and innovative ideas that had given the Europeans a lead over the armies of Asia and even, in due course, to recruit European officers to help achieve this. He henceforth made a point of assembling material and systematically updating his intelligence about the British in India, which helped him to develop his own insights into their moves, motives and methodology.
It is timely to interrupt the diplomatic story for a glimpse at the military forces Ranjit Singh had at his disposal at this time. His army consisted essentially of irregular cavalry, the Ghorchurras, made up mostly from soldiers from the misls, the Misldar Sowars. Distinct from these was a cavalry regiment called the Ghorchurra Khas, the first standing unit that Ranjit Singh formed as Maharaja, composed of leading Sardars and their kinsmen, eventually numbering up to 2,000 men; together with a similar regiment formed later it became known to admiring foreign visitors as ‘the Maharaja’s bodyguard’ and was considered the elite of the Sikh army.
The men of the Misldar Sowars had been taken into the Sikh state’s service after the capture of a fort or town or the death of a chief, a process that went on for most of the Maharaja’s life. These men were paid by the state – at first entirely in jagirs, since they looked on cash payment as the mark of mercenaries; only gradually did Ranjit Singh succeed in his desire to make cash payment the norm, so putting the force on a more regular footing. These Ghorchurras came to constitute the bulk of Ranjit Singh’s cavalry, their style continuing the traditions of the Dal Khalsa. Not subject to overall discipline or wearing uniform, resisting the introduction of European drill and methods to which they contemptuously referred as ‘harlots’ dancing’, they retained their local character; they wore mail shirts and a belt from which hung a bag containing musket balls; some wore a steel helmet and bore a shield on their back. Their charges were swift and deadly. Near the enemy they would halt, load, fire their matchlocks and retire, repeating the operation several times.14
Besides the state-paid Gorchurras, Ranjit Singh had at his disposal the lower-grade feudal army made up of the forces maintained by the local Sardars – those who held jagirs, the jagirdars – each of whom undertook to provide, when called upon, a contingent according to the size of his landholding. Until the 1830s, when the Sardars were called upon to provide infantry and artillery as well, these forces consisted entirely of cavalry.
Around 1805 Ranjit Singh was ready to begin to lay the foundations of a regular army, the Fauj-i-ain, alongside his irregular forces, with his first infantry units. By 1808 there were five battalions (1,500 men in all). When Metcalfe saw these units, consisting of only around 300 ununiformed men in each (distinguished only by a scarlet turban), armed with ‘swords and a mixture of European muskets and traditional matchlocks’, he was not impressed.15 It took a decade and a half for Sikh infantry to reach any sizeable strength and in larger battalions: around 2,800 men in 1811, 7,750 in 1819, nearly 12,000 in 1823. The total strength of this branch of Ranjit Singh’s army stood at just under 30,000 at his death in 1839.16
With continuing Sikh aversion to infantry, the ranks were at first filled mainly with Hindus, Muslims, Gurkhas and Afghans. The Hindu Diwan Ganga Ram commanded the infantry until his death in 1826, but Ranjit Singh took a particular pride in it; by 1813 it had become effective enough for a decisive defeat of the Afghans under the leadership of Diwan Mokham Chand at Chuch outside Attock. The Sikh infantryman’s powers of endurance were admired by foreign observers; he could subsist on very small quantities of food and could rapidly cover a lot of ground. The ‘iron-legged’ Sikh infantry in its developed state was distinctly more manoeuvrable than the British.
In Ranjit Singh’s first years as head of the Sukerchakia misl, only the strongest misls possessed artillery of any kind, most often taking the form of camel-mounted swivel-guns, zamburaks (‘wasps’) of one-inch calibre and firing shot of about one pound. Artillery was as generally unpopular as infantry with the Sikhs; it was looked on as an encumbrance to the movement of the horsemen, besides the problem of lack of trained personnel. When Ranjit Singh came to power as ruler of Punjab in 1801, he inherited a battery of six field guns commanded by an Afghan, Ghaus Khan, and immediately realized the importance of artillery. He created an artillery corps in 1804, divided into heavy (bullock-drawn), light (horse-drawn) and camel-drawn artillery. At first this force was built up with guns taken over from captured forts and towns, but in 1807 foundries were established in Lahore and Amritsar which eventually mass-produced copies of British guns received as diplomatic gifts. The largest guns in Ranjit Singh’s possession were captured eighteenth-century Muslim pieces firing up to 84-pound shot. Artillerymen were mostly Hindus, with ordnance factories employing a high proportion of Muslim workmen from Delhi.
The most unruly element in Ranjit Singh’s army were the Akali horsemen, also known as Nihangs, the ‘Immortals’, descendants of Guru Gobind Singh’s armed guards of the faith and keepers of the Golden Temple, by now fanatical fundamentalists. They lived an itinerant life, existing on charity or simply helping themselves. These irregulars were Ranjit Singh’s shock troops, coming to number about 4,000; they were gradually absorbed into his army and used as mounted infantry on the most dangerous missions. Here are two eyewitness descriptions of these ferocious and almost uncontrollable soldiers. According to a Sikh official, the Akali was a man ‘whose body is unaffected by pain or comfort. He is a man of firm faith, sexual restraint, meditation, penance and charity, and a complete warrior. In the presence of worldly authority, he remains full of pride… [In battle,] having no fear of death, he never steps back.’17 To W.G. Osborne ‘They are religious fanatics, and acknowledge no ruler and no laws but their own; think nothing of robbery, or even murder, should they happen to be in the humour for it. They move about constantly, armed to the teeth, and it is not an uncommon thing to see them riding about with a drawn sword in each hand, two more in their belt, a matchlock on their back, and three or four pairs of quoits fastened round their turbans.’18 These ‘quoits’ were sharp-edged steel rings some six to nine inches in diameter, thrown after being spun round the forefinger; it was claimed they could lop off a limb or slice through a neck at sixty to eighty yards, although according to some accounts they were thrown ‘with more force than dexterity’.19
The Akalis hated Europeans and Muslims and hurled abuse at them whenever they encountered them. Marching past the Maharaja on parades, they would shout insults at him and throw musket balls at his feet, disapproving of his toler
ant attitude towards the British. Ranjit Sigh bore this patiently, but if any crime was committed he would see that due punishment was exacted by the removal of a nose, ear or limb according to the seriousness of the crime.20 These ‘military madmen’, as Henry Edward Fane, an aide-de-camp to his uncle Sir Henry Fane, Commander-in-Chief of the East India Company’s army, described them, even made more than one attempt on their sovereign’s life. He always took care to prevent their concentration in large numbers, dispersing them among different regiments when necessary.
While the Maharaja was attending to the state of his army, the East India Company, having solved the Wellesley problem, had another concern – the treaty signed by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit in July 1807. London viewed this treaty as a threat to the British hold on India, especially as Persia had also been persuaded by the French to grant passage to a French army should Napoleon decide to attack India.
It is held by some that it was around this time that Ranjit Singh began to give serious thought to the need to establish a demarcation line between British territories and the Sikh kingdom. Perhaps the Jamuna or the Sutlej rivers could provide that line. He was not unaware of British concerns about Napoleon’s victories in Europe and the distinct possibility of his making plans to annex India. If he was right in his assessment, then the British would prefer a strong Sikh state to hold an enemy at bay. And the Sikhs had proved their ability to expel intruders from India. So he was keen to turn the French threat to his advantage.
The incoming governor-general Lord Minto was as convinced of the likelihood of hostile French moves against India as were the mandarins in London, and soon after he took up office in the summer of 1807 the British opened negotiations for a treaty with the Lahore Darbar. In 1803, while they were debating whether the River Jamuna or the Sutlej should be the dividing line between the British and Sikh spheres of control, Ranjit Singh had already suggested the Sutlej as the natural frontier between them. This boundary had the disadvantage of splitting Punjab, leaving many cities, towns and regions south of the river, such as Ludhiana, Kapurthala, Jind, Patiala, Nabha, and Faridkot, outside the Sikh state. But Ranjit Singh had much bigger plans for his Sikh empire beyond the Punjab.
Wellesley’s indecision on which boundary to agree on had given Ranjit Singh the opportunity he needed, and the justification for making the most of it. He crossed the Sutlej in 1806, 1807 and 1808 and each time not only added new territories to his state south of it but redistributed some of the lands to win allies. The British continued to debate treaty terms that would suit them best, and Ranjit Singh complicated the matter for them by being unwilling to sacrifice Sikh interests south of the Sutlej to the British. In 1808, after the governor-general had received intelligence that the French were planning the conquest of Kabul and Punjab, the British government accordingly decided to dispatch envoys to both Lahore and Kabul. Mr Charles Theophilus Metcalfe was chosen to conduct negotiations with Lahore and a rising member of the British political service in India, Mountstuart Elphinstone, with Kabul.21 Metcalfe was the younger of the two, aged only twenty-three. Born in Calcutta, he was the son of a director of the East India Company, whose service Metcalfe had entered at the age of sixteen. He was assistant to the resident at Delhi, where the British held sway over the blind and infirm Mughal emperor Shah Alam, when he was called to Lahore. He was to develop into an able British adminstrator, but at this stage he had a lot to learn. The real purpose of the mission he headed was ‘to initiate a penetration of the Punjab’,22 although this was disguised as a response to the serious threat Napoleon was perceived to pose to India.
The eight months following Metcalfe’s crossing of the Sutlej on 1 September 1808 were stormy so far as his negotiations with Ranjit Singh were concerned. His brief was twofold: to alert Ranjit Singh to the imminent danger of a French invasion from the north and to make him agree to accepting Britain’s suzerainty over all the territories south of the Sutlej. Ranjit Singh found this demand impudent and proved himself more than a match for Metcalfe in the art of negotiation. He was not as inexperienced as the British had hoped. Easily seeing through the Napoleon ruse, he expressed his complete willingness to side with the British in the event of a French invasion. But English suzerainty south of the Sutlej was quite a different matter. A rueful British comment on Metcalfe’s inability to make full use of the French card aptly summed it up: ’In this wild encampment the bogey of Napoleon could not look so convincing as in the dining rooms of Calcutta and Delhi.’23
Ranjit Singh brushed aside the envoy’s talk about British commitments to the Sikh chiefs south of the Sutlej. Indeed, he went a step further. After their meeting at Kasur, on the north bank of the river, Metcalfe, on waking up the next morning, found that Ranjit Singh and his force had moved on and left word for him to follow. The highly indignant envoy, left with no option, reluctantly rode after Ranjit Singh and caught up with him the next day. The discussions that followed, although affable, did not serve the British purpose at all. To add to British discomfiture, Ranjit Singh, with Metcalfe following him around, set about straightening out some recalcitrant Phulkian states, starting with Faridkot, which surrendered on 1 October 1808. In the two months or so that Ranjit Singh campaigned south of the Sutlej he annexed not only Faridkot but Shahabad and Ambala. While he shrewdly kept the talks with Metcalfe in progress, he made sure they were held while he was on the move – which was all the time – because the obvious message this sent to the Phulkian chiefs was that the British were a party to Ranjit Singh’s designs on them. Why else would their envoy be by his side all the time? In fact the Patiala chief, who now looked on the British as his protectors, was described by the British resident in Delhi as ‘labouring at this moment under the most cruel anxiety’ lest Ranjit Singh attack him.
Thoroughly exasperated by Ranjit Singh’s diplomacy-on-the-run since it made them look quite silly, the British decided they did not want to keep up with Ranjit Singh’s momentum but, rather, gain time to find their own feet, especially as their latest assessment showed that the danger of French invasion of India was receding, and having Ranjit Singh as a buffer between British India and possible invaders from the north was now less important to their interests. From a position of ‘scrupulous nonintervention’ they could not now ‘resist the conviction that the interests and security of the British Government would be best promoted by the reduction, if not the entire subversion of [Ranjit Singh’s] power’.24
To warn Ranjit Singh of their displeasure, and send a signal of their clout to him, a Lieutenant-Colonel David Ochterlony was dispatched with an expeditionary force to a point south of the Sutlej so as to underscore the extent to which the territories between the Jamuna and the Sutlej were now British protectorates. At the same time Metcalfe, too, was withdrawn from Ranjit Singh’s side and asked to camp some way off. On returning to Lahore at the end of 1808 and being told of the new aggressiveness in British moves south of the Sutlej, Ranjit Singh ordered General Mohkam Chand to proceed with a force to Phillaur, which lay north of the Sutlej facing Ludhiana on the south bank. The British in turn ordered Ochterlony to Ludhiana.
Suddenly British intelligence reports indicated a renewal of French interest in India. The British commander-in-chief was quietly told to withdraw his military force from its advance position; Ranjit Singh had again become important as the redoubtable defender of northern India. Reflecting this pragmatic view of their self-interest, the British now put forward terms for a treaty of ‘perpetual friendship’ with the Sikhs, and the Sutlej Treaty was signed on 25 April 1809. According to its provisions the Lahore Durbar would not relinquish its sovereignty over the territories acquired by it south of the Sutlej prior to 1806. The ‘perpetual friendship’, according to the treaty, would rest on these four main clauses: that the British would leave control of the territories north of the Sutlej to the Sikh state; Ranjit Singh would not maintain ‘more troops than are necessary for the internal duties’ of his territories south of the Sutlej; he would ‘n
ot commit or suffer any encroachments on the possessions or rights of the chiefs in its vicinity’; in the event of a violation of these articles, or a ‘departure from the rules of friendship’, the treaty would be considered terminated.
THE TREATY WITH LAHORE OF 1809
Treaty between the British Government and
the Raja of Lahore (dated 25th April 1809)
Whereas certain differences which had arisen between the British Government and the Raja of Lahore have been happily and amicably adjusted; and both parties being anxious to maintain relations of perfect amity and concord, the following articles of treaty, which shall be binding on the heirs and successors of the two parties, have been concluded by the Raja Ranjit Singh in person, and by the agency of C.T. Metcalfe, Esquire, on the part of the British Government.
Article 1. – Perpetual friendship shall subsist between the British Government and the State of Lahore: the latter shall be considered, with respect to the former, to be on the footing of the most favoured powers, and the British Government will have no concern with the territories and subjects of the Raja to the northward of the river Sutlej.
Article 2. – The Raja will never maintain on the territory which he occupies on the left bank of the river Sutlej more troops than are necessary for the internal duties of that territory, nor commit or suffer any encroachments on the possessions or rights of the Chiefs in its vicinity.
Article 3. – In the event of a violation of any of the preceding articles, or of a departure from the rules of friendship, this treaty shall be considered null and void.
Empire of the Sikhs Page 10