by Anand, Anita
It was now that the East India Company sensed its moment to act, having watched palace events with great interest. The Punjab was a coveted prize, yet with Ranjit Singh on the throne the British had found the north impregnable. Now they began increasing troop reinforcements close to the Sikh Kingdom and sent spies to secretly approach those closest to the throne. Their aim was to identify courtiers whose ambition outweighed their sense of loyalty. Promising kingdoms in a carved-up Punjab to those who were prepared to help them, the British then waited until the time was right.
Their efforts paid off within three months. Marching units of sepoys from as far as West Bengal more than a thousand miles away, the British were able to amass a sizeable army on the Punjab borders. The Sikhs took the unconcealed troop build-up as an act of aggression and on 11 December 1845 sent a contingent of riders south over the Sutlej River to confront the forces. With that move the first Anglo-Sikh War had begun. It would continue for months and claim thousands of lives.
As the battles raged, neither Rani Jindan nor Duleep Singh knew that two of the most powerful men at court had already struck deals with the East India Company. Lal Singh, the new vazir, had passed key military intelligence to the British, including gun positions, the numbers of troops and even the plan of attack. He would also later abandon his troops in the field at a crucial stage of the fighting, leaving them to be slaughtered. The treachery of Tej Singh, the commander of Duleep’s armies, was more damaging still. The battle of Ferozeshah on 21 December 1845 was one of the hardest ever fought by the British; after long and brutal clashes, the British had all but resigned themselves to defeat. The turning point came after what India’s Governor General, Sir Henry Hardinge, described as ‘a night of horrors’.10 From the midst of the battlefield, surrounded by Sikhs, Hardinge was so convinced of his army’s imminent defeat and his own death that he ordered the burning of all state papers and gave his most precious possession, a sword which once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte, to his aide-de-camp.
As Tej Singh and his troops approached from the west, the Company armies, out of ammunition and exhausted, waited to be overrun. Under cover of darkness the Sikhs should have been handed a decisive victory; instead Tej Singh ordered his forces to pull back. The Sikh army which had fought so hard at Ferozeshah was mown down by British reinforcements with superior artillery. Tej Singh’s withdrawal had given these fresh troops vital time to reach their stricken British comrades. Tej Singh would later claim that his decision had been a strategic one and an attempt to outflank his enemy, but most Sikhs saw his actions for what they truly were: the Maharajah’s commander had been guilty of the worst betrayal.
So it was that the great army founded by Ranjit Singh met its end at a final battle on 10 February 1846. Following the heavy defeat at Ferozeshah, the Sikhs withdrew across the Sutlej River at every point except Sobraon, a settlement on the shores of the river some forty miles south-east of Lahore. There they dug in on the river bank, and from these defensive positions crossed bridges over the river, challenging the British to meet them in hand-to-hand combat. The formerly beleaguered troops of the British Army had been reinforced with fresh men and munitions. With superior numbers and firepower the British attacked the main Sikh bridgehead but found themselves fighting men who simply refused to give up. The warriors of the Lahore army wove their way through the endless barrage of cannon and gunfire, engaging the British soldiers and their sepoys with their swords. It was at this point that the bridges across the Sutlej collapsed. Eyewitnesses at the time swore that the traitor Tej Singh had ordered them to be destroyed. Without hope of reinforcements, the commander had trapped all his men on the wrong side of the river, but not before he himself had fled north to safety.
Despite the hopelessness of their plight not one Sikh soldier surrendered that day. With their backs to the swollen river, they fought until British firepower brought silence to the banks of the Sutlej. Sikh dead and injured are said to have numbered around 9,000.
The defeat at Sobraon effectively broke the Sikh army for ever. After their decisive victory, the British imposed peace terms on the Punjab which reduced the army to a nominal force. Knowing they did not have the martial strength to hold the kingdom if the Sikhs rose up against them, the British claimed to have acted out of friendship for Duleep Singh, protecting the boy-king from opportunistic attacks from rivals. The Maharajah’s enemies now posed as his guardians. Signing the Treaty of Bhyroval with the child, they vowed to protect him until he reached the age of sixteen, at which point he would be old enough to govern for himself. Then they would leave as friends.
The ink was still wet on the treaty when the British began to garrison soldiers in Lahore, ostensibly ‘for the Maharajah’s protection’. This was a masterstroke. The boy’s continued presence on the throne legitimised British control, ensuring the loyalty of potential resisters in the army and among the general populace. Ferocious Sikh warriors who had survived the war had no reason to rebel if Duleep was still on the throne. Slowly but steadily, the British began to infiltrate the whole of the Sikh empire, laying the ground for a final takeover. Anybody who showed a hint of defiance was removed – quietly, but permanently.
One of those was the Sikh regent, Duleep Singh’s own mother, Rani Jindan. Enraged by the build-up of foreign troops and the erosion of her son’s authority, she began to accuse the British of seizing the Punjab by stealth and talked openly of pushing out the usurpers. And it was not just the British who attracted her fury: she took the bangles from her wrists and hurled them at her own military generals, cursing them for acting like eunuchs and taunting them for their weakness and stupidity.
For his treachery, Tej Singh was richly rewarded by the British. They had promised him a kingdom of his own and drew up papers to grant him the throne of Sialkot, a district at the foot of the Kashmir hills. Yet for the gift to be recognised in the Punjab, it was still necessary for Duleep Singh, as Maharajah and supreme leader, to give his blessing. All the boy had to do to ratify the treacherous commander’s new title was to place a mark of saffron and carmine on his forehead. But Jindan had other ideas. She told her son to refuse no matter what his new British advisers told him; at no point should he touch the traitor’s skin. Obeying his mother, Duleep snubbed Tej Singh at the public ceremony which had been organised to ratify his accession. The child’s defiance left his former commander humiliated and the British fuming. Henry Lawrence, the new British Resident of Lahore, blamed Jindan, whom he described to the Governor General as having ‘turned vindictive . . . during the last day or two her whole energies have been devoted to win over the sirdars of high and low degree, and unite them all together in a scheme of independent government, of which she herself was to be the head’. The Punjab would be ‘perfectly tranquil’ he noted but for the ‘perilous passions of the Queen-Mother’.11 It was clear that the mother had to be dealt with.
On 14 August 1847, when Duleep was barely nine years old, Jindan was torn screaming from his side and banished from the palace.12 She fought as she was pulled away, begging the Sikh men around her to wake up and fight, not just for her and her son but for the very survival of the Punjab itself. Not one man lifted a finger to help her.
Jindan was imprisoned first in Lahore Fort and later moved to a fortress in Sheikhupura, some twenty-five miles from the city. She was reduced to begging for the return of her only child. From her prison cell she wrote letters to General Lawrence, pleading for mercy: ‘Why do you take possession of my kingdom by underhand means? Why do you not do it openly? . . . You have been very cruel to me! . . . You have snatched my son from me. For ten months I kept him in my womb.’13 . . . ‘In the name of the God you worship and in the name of the King whose salt you eat,’ she implored, ‘restore my son to me. I cannot bear the pain of this separation. Instead you should put me to death.’14 Jindan promised Lawrence anything for the return of her only child: ‘My son is very young. He is incapable of doing anything. I have left the kingdom. I have no need of the kingdom
. For God’s sake, pay attention to my appeals. At this time I have no one to look to. I raise no objections. I will accept what you say. There is no one with my son. He has no sister, no brother. He has no uncle, senior or junior. His father he has lost. To whose care has he been entrusted?’15
Lawrence was made uneasy by her accusations. He had signed a treaty to protect Duleep’s interests. Could the British really argue that it was best for Duleep to be kept from his own mother, miles away?
His superior, Sir Henry Hardinge, had no such misgivings. He warned everyone to harden themselves against the deposed regent: ‘We must expect these letters in various shapes, which a woman of her strong mind and passions will assume as best suited either to gratify her vengeance or obtain her ends.’16 He then wrote to Lawrence to congratulate him:
Nothing can be more satisfactory than the manner in which you have carried the removal of the Maharanee into execution. I entirely approve of the judicious terms in which the proclamation was worded. Her Highness’s seclusion at Sheikhopoorah is, in my view, preferable to a more distant banishment. It avoids the national affront of parading the mother of all the Sikhs through Hindustan, and will reconcile the Sikh people to the step; and as we cannot publish all we know of her misconduct, but must justify the step on the expediency of the separation, the less any of the measures taken have the appearance of punishment the better. In this sense don’t reduce her pension too low. It was granted at the time the treaty was signed . . . The resolution should not deprive her of any comforts and luxuries to which, as the Prince’s mother, she may be entitled; on the other hand, she should not have the means of offering large bribes. Her Highness must be warned that on the first occasion of her entering into intrigues other and more serious steps must be taken.17
A year later, Lawrence was rewarded with a knighthood from Queen Victoria and replaced by Sir Frederick Currie, who was as little troubled by Jindan’s plight as Hardinge. Currie decided that the Rani should be removed from the Punjab altogether and transferred her to Chunar Fort, hundreds of miles away in the north-western provinces of British India. By now the British had also realised that the old treaty left them vulnerable to challenge: they needed to free themselves of the promise to return Duleep’s kingdom to him. Only a total and lasting annexation of the Punjab would do.
Jindan’s treatment was beginning to cause agitation in Lahore. Her suffering had even moved some of those traditionally hostile to the Punjab and her rulers. Dost Mohammad Khan, the Muslim Emir of Afghanistan, openly condemned the British for their cruelty and petitioned for Jindan’s release. The Governor General responded with a campaign intended to discredit the Maharani. She was a woman of low birth and even lower morals; he referred to her in his diplomatic despatches as no more than a whore, calling her the ‘Messalina’ of the Punjab, a reference to the third wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius who had a reputation for promiscuity.
By 1848, a year after they had disposed of Jindan, the British were ready to complete their formal annexation. The majority of the Sikh soldiery and senior nobles in outlying areas of the empire hated the spread of foreign control. Jindan’s treatment and her dire warnings augmented their dismay. The British then provocatively increased taxes in the name of the boy-king Duleep, sparking insurrection in Multan, one of the Punjab’s largest and oldest cities. When Sikh soldiers then began to defect from Lahore to join rebel armies in Multan, the British finally had the excuse they had been looking for. Declaring the uprisings in Multan acts of war against Duleep Singh’s rightful sovereignty, the British retaliated with overwhelming force.
Troops from all over India converged upon Punjab. Too late the Sikh nobles realised their empire was being seized right out from under them. During the second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–9), Sikh armies were routed as British reinforcements continued to pour into the region. Confident in their power over the boy, the British then forced a new legal document on Duleep. According to the Treaty of Lahore, the child was told he must sign over his kingdom and his fortune if he wished his British guardians to save his life from the violence threatening to engulf his palace. And so it was that with no one to counsel him, the Maharajah, aged eleven, signed away his kingdom, his fortune and his family’s future.
From her prison cell in Chunar Fort, Rani Jindan heard of her son’s fall with impotent rage. Her separation from Duleep had hastened a rapid and dramatic collapse in her health. Yet even in a greatly weakened state Jindan managed to confound her captors. On 19 April 1849, eight months after her arrival at the British gaol, she made her escape, dressed as a beggar, in the middle of the night. Before she fled she had a last taunt for the British, throwing money over the floor of the cell with a note explaining that she was paying for their ‘hospitality’: ‘You put me in a cage and locked me up. For all your locks and your sentries, I got out by magic . . . I had told you plainly not to push me too hard – but don’t think I ran away, understand well, that I escape by myself unaided . . . don’t imagine, I got out like a thief.’18
Jindan spent the next few months on the run from the British. She gradually made her way to Nepal, over 300 miles away, where she threw herself at the feet of its ruler, Jung Bahadur, and begged asylum. Jung Bahadur agreed but on condition that she did not try to make contact with her son. With no other choice, for almost ten years she remained there, pining for Duleep, and at the mercy of Jang Bahadur, a man capable of great cruelty. The British Resident in Nepal, Colonel Ramsay, was appalled by the Maharani’s treatment at the hands of Jang Bahadur: ‘a more unprincipled scoundrel does not tread on the earth’.19 She was held as a virtual prisoner; Jang Bahadur controlled where she went and who she saw, all the while coveting the jewels he believed she had hidden during her escape. She lived in miserable isolation, fearful of her Nepalese benefactor and the white soldiers who filled the land outside his realm. Colonel Ramsay described the Maharani’s rapid decline: ‘[she is] blind and [has] lost much of [the] energy which formerly characterised her, taking apparently but little interest in what was going on’.20
Having annexed his kingdom, the British now expelled Duleep Singh from the Punjab for ever. The streets of Lahore were lined with weeping men and women, lamenting the kidnap of their young king. Frightened but without complaint he was taken to Fategarh in the north-western provinces, hundreds of miles away from the only home he had ever known. There the British placed him in the care of John Spencer Login, a well-respected Scottish doctor, and his wife Lena.
The Logins were a kindly couple who always tried to do their best for their young charge. In return, Duleep tried to be a diligent child: he studied hard, played parlour games when invited, and was quiet and courteous. Lena Login kept a meticulous diary of her time with the deposed king, and often thought about all that had been snatched from him: ‘One could not but have great sympathy for the boy, brought up from babyhood to exact the most obsequious servility.’21
It was under the Logins’ tutelage that Duleep, still wearing the heavy, embroidered silks and jewels of his native land, learned to speak and act like an Englishman. He read the Bible, learned to play cricket and studied Shakespeare and the classics. In time he even took a blade to his long hair, cutting off the waist-length, jet black tresses – so sacred to the Sikh religion of his parents. The young Maharajah began to ask whether he might be able to rid himself of his old faith entirely and, at the age of fourteen, he was given leave to convert to Christianity by the new Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie. News of his baptism broke the heart of an already grieving Punjab, and that of Rani Jindan too.
Far away in England, Queen Victoria rejoiced at the salvation of the Maharajah’s soul. From the time of his exile, she had asked for regular reports about Duleep Singh’s progress, which she had read with great care and building excitement. The more she learned about him, the more fascinated she became by the exotic young king with the impeccable English manners. Descriptions of the boy’s beauty were the most captivating thing about the correspondence. His lon
g lashes, dark eyes and strong straight nose were praised by all who saw him.
Victoria soon tired of the written descriptions and longed to see Duleep for herself. The Maharajah was also curious about the Queen across the water. When he turned fifteen, he asked his guardians if he might ever be able to visit England. Victoria enthusiastically granted permission and Duleep packed his belongings, and made the long voyage with his guardians, the Logins, by his side.
2
Do Not Be Conspicuous
From the very moment he set foot in her court, Duleep became Queen Victoria’s favourite. Her praise for him was frequent and full: ‘he is extremely handsome and speaks English perfectly, and has a pretty, graceful and dignified manner. He was beautifully dressed and covered with diamonds . . . I always feel so much for these poor deposed Indian Princes.’1
Despite, or maybe because of, her pity, the Maharajah enjoyed the status of a senior aristocrat and was invited into all homes that mattered, featuring prominently at state occasions. ‘His candour and straightforwardness made him a great favourite with Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,’ Lena Login wrote. ‘He was frequently invited to Windsor and Osborne.’2 There, in the bosom of the royal family, mutual love blossomed. The fifteen-year-old Duleep and the thirty-five-year-old Queen would sketch each other for hours, exchanging drawings they had made of one another. He dressed her children in his finest silks and jewels, and they put on plays together, filling Osborne with the sound of their laughter. When her youngest son fell behind in the games, Victoria watched Duleep scoop up her little Leopold and carry the toddler on his shoulders. She loved him for his kindness to the haemophiliac child.