by Anand, Anita
Nanak had many such arguments with Hindu priests and Muslim clerics, infuriating them equally with his constant questioning. Even though he rejected both Hinduism and Islam, he preached tolerance and brotherhood: ‘Whether Hindu or Turk (Muslim) or Sunni or Shia recognise the caste of all mankind is one . . . Let all serve the One. The Master of all is the One. All are the form of the One. Know in all the same life giving light resides. The Hindu place of worship and the Muslim place of worship are the same. The Hindu mode of prayer and Muslim mode are the same. All humans are one but superfluous misunderstandings are many.’6
As if to prove how easily the faiths could co-exist, in his thirties Nanak left his home accompanied by his Muslim friend, a minstrel called Bhai Mardana. Together, they undertook five epic journeys, or Udasis, which would take them hundreds of miles from home and last almost three decades. The companions travelled to Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Central Asia. Wherever they stopped, the friends broke bread with people of different faiths. Stroking the three strings of his pear-shaped rebec with his bow, Mardana filled the air with music while Nanak recited his poetry about ‘One True God’. He spoke of a beneficent deity who watched over all his children no matter whether they prayed to him in a mosque, temple, field or forest.
Soon, word of the wise man and his minstrel began to spread. Nanak gained the title Guru, or ‘honoured teacher’, and his followers began to call themselves Sikhs, a derivation of the Sanskrit word for student – sisya. By the time of his death at the age of seventy in 1539, the Sikh religion was growing rapidly.
While Nanak preached, a descendent of Genghis Khan named Babur became the first Mughal emperor of India, sweeping across the Khyber Pass, crushing the Lodhis and swallowing the Punjab into his vast dominion. Some of the Mughals who followed him tolerated the proliferation of religions among the Punjabis. Others did not, and in the middle of the seventeenth century religious conflict became common, with Hindus and Sikhs battling to exert their identity under crushing Mughal rule. The sixth emperor, Aurangzeb, was particularly ruthless: he abhorred the Sikhs, finding them secretive and clannish and their beliefs subversive. Deciding they were a direct threat to his rule, his attempts to wipe them out led Sikhs to arm themselves and scatter across the Punjab; many were forced from the lands they had farmed for generations and into the forests and foothills. It was only after the death of Aurangzeb some fifty years later, and the decline of his Empire, that the Sikhs were able to emerge from the shadows, and take their place in the open once more.
As the Mughal Empire began to weaken, the Punjab became open to invaders. Mounted tribesmen from Afghanistan began to charge over the Hindu Kush again. Testing the strength of the region’s defences, they raided Punjabi villages, looting all they could carry and leaving devastation in their wake. In 1778, the Afghan ruler Timur Shah Durani sent riders to take the Punjabi city of Multan. They returned with the heads of several thousand Sikhs dangling from their horses – a gruesome warning to all who would defy the will of the Afghans.7
Just a couple of years after Timur Shah’s bloody lesson, Ranjit Singh was born in 1780. His family were Sikhs in the richly agricultural area of Gujranwala in the north-west of the Punjab. Unlike the majority of young boys around him, it was clear that Ranjit would never grow up to be a farmer. His father had been the head of a Sikh warrior clan, known as the Sukerchakias, and from an early age Ranjit showed himself to be skilled on horseback and deadly with a sword. Charismatic, but not beautiful – smallpox had ravaged his face, robbing him of his left eye – the young misldar, or clan leader, inspired trust and loyalty among his peers even before he reached his teens. On horseback he was unstoppable. By his fourteenth birthday he and a group of loyal young followers had left home looking for adventure. On their travels, the band of boys started battles against much older, more powerful men. Ranjit was victorious every time and talk of his bravery spread quickly across the territories.
His followers swelled rapidly in rank and in just five years he had amassed a small army. He was just nineteen years old when he set his sights on Lahore, the fortress capital of the Punjab. It was a conquest warmly welcomed by the majority of Lahore’s subjects, who were tired of corrupt and weak rulers and desperately sought change. When they heard the epic tales of bravery surrounding Ranjit Singh, they appealed to him to become their leader and rid them of their oppressors. He did so in 1799 without difficulty and promised to treat Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus as equals in his kingdom as long as they pledged unquestioning loyalty to him.
Lahore was the jewel of the north, and the pride of all the Punjab. Mughals had made the city their seat of power and created an environment of culture, opulence and architectural splendour. Gardens with intricate pools and fountains provided relief from the searing heat of summer. Great tombs erected in the memory of former emperors dwarfed the streets. Carved marble, inlaid with semi-precious stones, brought beauty to every quarter. At the heart of the walled city, Lahore Fort rose from the dust, spreading over twenty hectares and containing some of the finest examples of Mughal architecture, including the Sheesh Mahal, or Palace of Mirrors. Its five cusped marble arches soared up and opened into a cool and ornate courtyard. Gilded cupolas formed the roof of the palace and were decorated with thousands of intricately tiny mirrors. Within the fort stood the Moti Masjid, or Pearl Mosque, a seventeenth-century building designed by the creators of the Taj Mahal. Although he was tolerant of other religions, Ranjit Singh expelled Allah from the building and used its cool white rooms to pray to his own guru. His children played within the serenity of the Shalimar Gardens, darting between the trees and splashing in the waters.
Poets and musicians flocked to the city whose every inch seemed to be decorated with gold or embellished with stone that had been so finely carved that it looked like stiff lace. Yet Lahore was not enough for Ranjit Singh. With a strategic wisdom beyond his years, he wanted to unite all the disparate, minor kingdoms and fiefdoms that lay in an area of over 20,000 square miles between the Punjab’s five great rivers, turning the land and its people into an unassailable empire. Ranjit proclaimed he would govern in the name of his spiritual master, Guru Nanak, for the benefit of all men no matter what their creed. He revoked the hated jizya tax of his predecessors and attended ceremonies for the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religions, taking wives from all three faiths. Punjabi folklore has it that when a courtier once asked Ranjit Singh why he had one empty sightless eye socket, he answered: ‘God wanted me to look upon all religions with one eye, which is why he took away the light from the other.’ Out of a mixture of adoration, fear and awe, his people began to call their king Sher-e-Punjab – The Lion of the Punjab.
In 1801, two years after deposing Lahore’s former rulers, Ranjit Singh was crowned Maharajah, or supreme king. Great tracts of land fell to him without resistance, while at the same time he harried the Afghan tribes until they retreated back to their own lands. The message was clear: the Sikh Kingdom was inviolable and no enemy would be allowed to breach its borders again.
Yet despite his hunger for conquest, the Maharajah seemed uncomfortable with the trappings of success, refusing to wear a royal crest in his turban and preferring not to sit on his throne. He was leaving it empty, some said, for the spirit of Guru Nanak himself. Moreover, when the Maharajah had coins minted, they bore the name and image of Nanak rather than his own. It was an act of humility never known before, or after, in the region.
Ranjit’s peculiar mix of piety and power caught the attention of the authorities in London at a time when Britain was expanding its territories in the East. Not knowing what to make of the one-eyed warrior of the Punjab, they despatched a political agent, Captain William Murray, to assess the Maharajah’s rise to power and identify his weaknesses. Murray’s initial reports were fulsome in their praise: ‘Ranjit Singh has been likened to Mehmet Ali and to Napoleon. There are some points in which he resembles both; but estimating his character with reference to his circumstances and positions, he is perhaps a more rema
rkable man than either. There was no ferocity in his disposition and he never punished a criminal with death even under circumstances of aggravated offence. Humanity indeed, or rather tenderness for life, was a trait in the character of Ranjit Singh. There is no instance of his having wantonly infused his hand in blood.’8
The British presence in India had been established as early as the 1600s through the trading activities of the East India Company. It was largely confined to the Surat in western India’s region of Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast in the south-east of the country and Calcutta in the east. The white foreigners with their livery and long titles were known simply as ‘the Company’ to the Indians who watched them inch across their lands, setting down deep roots wherever they went. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the British came into direct contact with the Punjab, by which time Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s dominance was firmly established. Recognising that he would make a formidable foe, the British sought an alliance with the Sikh ruler. A treaty of friendship was signed on 1 January 1806 in which it was agreed that everything to the north of the Sutlej River belonged to Ranjit Singh. The rest of India was up for grabs.
Although Ranjit’s numerous conquests brought him ever more wealth, the greatest prize in his toshakhana, his treasure house, was the Koh-I-Noor, a 186-carat diamond. When a Persian potentate named Nadir Shah seized the gem from the Mughals in 1739, one of his consorts claimed: ‘If a strong man should take five stones, and throw one north, one south, one east, and one west, and the last straight up into the air, and the space between filled with gold and gems, that would equal the value of the Koh-I-Noor.’9 The stone was also said to carry an ancient curse which condemned any man who owned it to a life of destitution, possible madness and the certainty of a terrible death. Women, however, were said to be immune to its dark power. As if to spite fate, Ranjit Singh wore the Koh-I-Noor as an amulet on his arm. His disregard of the superstition made him seem superhuman to his foes.
With a combination of martial dominance and good governance, by 1839 the Maharajah possessed lands and riches greater than any Punjabi before or since, and the mythology surrounding his name was such that his subjects believed he could not die unless he himself chose to do so. So it was on 27 June, Maharajah Ranjit Singh passed away peacefully in his sleep. At the age of fifty-nine, having ruled for almost forty years, he had brought peace and prosperity to the people of the five rivers.
Hours after his death, on the morning of 28 June, the funeral cortege of the Maharajah processed through Lahore, passing crowds of mourners, to the site that had been readied for his cremation. Here, four of the Maharajah’s twenty wives and seven of his concubines, who had also been given royal titles, burned themselves alive on his funeral pyre. The ritual of sati, where living women would sit with their dead husbands while the flames rose to burn them both, was against Sikh teachings, yet still took place in some families. It was said to be the ultimate sign of fidelity because it meant that couples might be reincarnated as lovers again in their next life. Pressure on a woman to submit could be fierce and the honour granted to a sati’s family could be great. Not all satis went voluntarily to the flames.
One who refused to take part was the most recent of the Maharajah’s wives, Maharani Jind Kaur, or Jindan, as she was affectionately know by the people of the Punjab. To any who dared to question her, she would simply say she owed a greater duty to her only son than to her dead beloved. Her steel prevented any further discussion and betrayed a rebellious spirit which was to define her in the years to come.
It was remarkable that one who had come from such humble beginnings as Jindan was prepared to defy those with power in the Lahore court. Born in 1817, she had been brought up in the palace kennels where her infant cries had competed with howls and barks. Her father, Manna Singh Aulakh, was the servant in charge of the Maharajah’s hounds. Almost from the time of her puberty he had thrust Jindan at the Lion of the Punjab. A wily and ambitious man, Aulakh begged the ageing one-eyed king to take Jindan as his wife, tempting and teasing him with the prospect of a passion which might rejuvenate his old age. Despite resisting for some years, in 1835, when Ranjit Singh was fifty-five, and Jindan eighteen, he gave in and married the girl.
Jindan was a striking beauty. Fair in complexion with an oval face, strong aquiline nose, and large, intense, almond-shaped eyes, she moved with the grace of a dancer. By the time of their marriage, war and the pressures of kingship had taken their toll on the Maharajah: his long hair and chest-length beard were snowy white, and his tanned and pockmarked face was deeply scored with wrinkles. Jindan’s youthful looks and his gnarled old age made the pair an incongruous couple, but there was a lot more to his youngest queen than appearances alone.
On 6 September 1838, Jindan gave birth to a son, Duleep. The Maharajah already had seven sons by his four senior queens. Though appearing to coexist peacefully, they were constantly plotting against one another. Vicious rumours, no doubt promulgated by the Maharajah’s other queens, suggested Jindan’s child could not have been fathered by the old man. To silence his court, the Maharajah publicly claimed Duleep as his own and elevated Jindan’s position to that of one of his senior wives. The boy never got to know his father, however, for just nine months and twenty-one days after his birth, Ranjit Singh died.
The years that followed the Maharajah’s death were marked by turmoil, murder, the break-up of his kingdom and the exile of his heirs. One by one, his family schemed to kill each other in an attempt to get their hands on the throne. First kingship passed to Ranjit’s oldest son, thirty-nine-year-old Kharak. A notorious alcoholic and opium addict, he was cruel and debauched and despised in the realm. Having spent his four-month reign largely drunk, Kharak was poisoned with mercury by nobles of the Sikh court. When Kharak’s son, a fine warrior and favourite of the Sikh troops, came to Lahore for his father’s cremation, a large block of stone fell mysteriously from the palace archway, striking him on the head. Although apparently not badly hurt, and able to walk away from the scene unaided, two days later Nanihal Singh was found dead in the palace with his skull caved in. The explanation given was that he died from complications from the archway ‘accident’.
The Sikhs then proclaimed another of Ranjit Singh’s sons, Sher Singh, to be Maharajah, but it was not long before he too fell prey to the murderous ambitions of others. While he inspected his troops, a relative asked permission to show him how to fire a new gun. Sher Singh was later found riddled with bullets in what was claimed to be another tragic accident. Soon after, his ten-year-old son was found dead in a pool of blood outside the palace grounds. And so the violent assassinations went on, as one claimant after another was poisoned, stabbed or bludgeoned to death.
The resulting power vacuum created a climate of great instability in which the nobility and the army vied for control. After the last heir fell prey to yet another murderous plot, Jindan’s infant son Duleep returned to Lahore. As the last one standing in 1843, the boy was placed on the throne and the steely Jindan, at just twenty-three years of age, was appointed regent of the greatly weakened state. At first, the powerful aristocrats of the Sikh Kingdom thought they could control Rani Jindan and play the child-king as they wished. However, it became clear that Jindan had ideas and advisers of her own, and murderous dissent began to ferment in the Lahore court once more. Controversially Jindan chose to leave the purdah of the women’s quarters, where she had lived since the time of her marriage, and govern with her own voice. She sat in the throne room, with her child beside her, and formulated laws while surrounded by the fearsome generals of Ranjit Singh’s army and those members of Duleep’s extended family who had been lucky or clever enough to avoid being assassinated during the previous five years.
Jindan proved to be a controversial ruler. Her decision to raise the army’s pay proved popular, as did the diplomatic truce which she negotiated between factions within the court. Others caused deep consternation, none more so than her decision to appoint her own brother, Ja
wahar Singh, as prime minister, or vazir. With his new powers Jindan’s brother hoped to firm up Duleep’s reign, and his own position, by neutralising potential rivals. His intrigues were tolerated for a while, but Jawahar Singh went too far when he decided to target a prince of the royal blood. The kennel-keeper’s boy would pay dearly for his audacity.
Prince Pashaura Singh was Ranjit Singh’s son. Although older than Duleep, his claim to the throne was weak. His mother Daya Kaur was one of Ranjit’s nine chadar andazi wives; these were royal or aristocratic widows taken into the harem after the death of their husbands. A simple ceremony conferred rank and protection on the women who were otherwise left destitute by widowhood. A sheet was held over the woman as prayers were recited, symbolising the shelter her new lord would provide. Chadar andazi marriages were not deemed to be as significant as the traditional Sikh marriages. Only Kharak Singh and Duleep were the product of such traditional unions, and one of them was dead.
Pashaura Singh had attempted to take the throne from Duleep by force, but his army had been routed by Jindan’s troops. A treaty was agreed between the victorious queen and her nephew. If he kept to his lands, he would be allowed to live in comfort, but Jawahar Singh wanted a more reliable arrangement. On 11 September 1845, Jindan’s brother had the prince lured from his bodyguard and strangled to death. The act provoked outrage among the nobility.
Just ten days later, Jawahar Singh and Rani Jindan were summoned to a meeting of the Sikh council of elders. As they made their way to the appointed place, a group of soldiers surrounded Jawahar Singh’s elephant, pulled the vazir to the ground and hacked him to death as he begged for mercy. Spattered in his uncle’s blood, seven-year-old Duleep, who had been sitting on Jawahar Singh’s lap, saw every brutal blow. The screams of his mother ripped through the air and mingled with his own. With the deed done, the soldiers bowed calmly before the hysterical child and vowed never to let any harm come to him. Memories from that day would haunt Maharajah Duleep Singh for the rest of his life. Despite her grief, Jindan agreed to continue as regent, acting with the counsel of the very men who had slaughtered her brother before her eyes.