BY SHIV KUNAL VERMA

The Treaty of Amritsar, between the East India Company and the
Dogra ruler, Raja Gulab Singh on 16 March 1846 was a watershed,
for it not only created the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir under
the suzerainty of the British Indian Empire, it also virtually defined
the southern, eastern and western boundaries of a new political
creation that elevated the Dogra’s into being the key players
controlling northern India. The war indemnity to be paid on behalf on
the defeated Lahore Durbar was reduced from the original Rupees 1
crore to Rupees 75 lakh because the British wanted to retain strategic
control on the territory between the Beas and the Ravi, which
included the Kangra district of the Punjab because of the strategic
value of Nurpur and Kangra forts. The territories over which Gulab
Singh then had control as an independent ruler also included the area
between the Jhelum and the Indus in which Rawalpindi and
Islamabad, the capital of present day Pakistan, are situated. Since this
area was too far removed from Jammu, Gulab Singh approached the
British to exchange it for certain plain areas near Jammu. This
resulted in the Jhelum instead of the Indus River becoming the
western border of this kingdom. But the treaty left to further
negotiation the actual boundaries of the state as well as the exact
relationship J&K would have with British India. This ambiguity was
every now and then exploited by both sides.

Lal Singh, the former commander of the Sikh army whose betrayal of
the Khalsa had led to the Sikh defeat, had been rewarded by the
British by being appointed the wazir to the post-war Henry Lawrence
Lahore Durbar. An incredulous Lal Singh could hardly believe what
was happening as Gulab Singh had emerged from the entire fiasco of
the first Anglo-Sikh War like a cat that had swallowed the cream. In a
desperate bid to thwart the Dogra’s, the Sikh Governor of Kashmir,
Shaikh Imam-ud-Din, was asked by Lal Singh not to hand over the
Kashmir Valley to Raja Gulab Singh. As the vanguard of the Dogra
army reached the valley, it met with stiff armed resistance from the
Sikhs, resulting in the death of one of Gulab Singh’s senior generals.
Only after the British leaned on the Lahore Durbar, instituted a court
of enquiry against Lal Singh and a new army was dispatched could
Gulab Singh obtain possession of the Valley.

There was also a stipulation in this Treaty that catered for the British
keeping a Resident or if necessary, an army in Jammu & Kashmir.
The Maharaja however, recognised the suzerainty of the British
Government in token of which he was to present annually to the
British Government one horse, 12 hill goats and three pairs of
Kashmiri shawls. Henceforth, the British Government of India
concentrated on trying to reduce the Maharaja to the status of other
princely rulers in British India, while the Dogra rulers of Jammu and
Kashmir did their utmost to extend their territory, especially in the
north western and north eastern regions of the state.

After Shaikh Imam-ud-Din’s resistance fizzled out (he was arrested

but exonerated after he produced letters from Lal Singh ordering him
to resist the Dogras), Colonel Nathu Shah, who controlled Gilgit on
behalf of the Lahore Durbar, also transferred his allegiance to the
Dogras. By 1850, the Jammu and Kashmir kingdom included Jammu,
the entire Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, Baltistan and the Gilgit region.
Gulab Singh’s carefully crafted boundaries now extended from the
Punjab (British India) in the south to Tibet in the east, Sinkiang and
Russia across the Karakorum and the Pamirs to the north while on the
western flank the state bordered Afghanistan.

The confused state of affairs where the history of the Dogra’s and the
Sikhs ran parallel, combined with the multiple machinations of the
first Sikh War, Raja Gulab Singh’s role has been somewhat glossed
over. Perhaps the very fact that Gulab Singh’s life was divided into
two parts—the first in the shadow of the great Maharaja Ranjit Singh,
while the second half blended with the expansion of the British
Empire, has somehow given him the tarnished reputation of a
manipulator who “bought” himself a kingdom. In reality, nothing
could be further from the truth and the grant of de jure recognition as
the master of Jammu and Kashmir can hardly be referred to as a “Sale
Deed”. The fact is that Raja Gulab Singh was already in control of
most of the area and would have in all probability fought for the
territory if the British had tried to implement the Treaty of Lahore that
preceded the Treaty of Amritsar. It is worth remembering that the
British had actually approached him with the offer of granting him
complete control of Jammu and Kashmir even before the negotiations
had begun.

Gulab Singh’s stand of neutrality during the first Anglo-Sikh War has
also cast a shadow over his reputation. Had he intervened militarily,
there can be little or no doubt that the British would have lost the war,
for despite various other cross-over artists, the Sikhs put up an
extremely tough fight and it was touch and go for the British. Gulab
Singh, however, as the Governor of Peshawar and the commandant of
the Sikh forces in the first Anglo-Afghan War had seen the British
operate at close quarters. Even though he militarily did not get
involved, it was an open secret as we have noted earlier that he was
advising the Lahore Durbar—advocating that the Sikhs do not get
involved in a set piece ground battle but make a dash for Delhi itself.
This advice was ignored by the other factions in the Lahore Durbar.
Besides, the assassination of Gulab Singh’s brothers and family
members just prior to the outbreak of hostilities was bound to embitter
and distance the man himself from the Lahore Durbar.

The second Anglo-Sikh War took place in 1848 and 1849; beyond a
point this had little impact on Jammu and Kashmir, even though
Gulab Singh once again chose to remain neutral though he allowed
his Sikh troops to fight for the Lahore Durbar. It resulted in the
subjugation of the Sikh kingdom, for on 30 March 1849, Duleep
Singh held his last court at Lahore, at which he signed away all claims
to the rule of the Punjab. A proclamation by the Governor General of
India, Lord Dalhousie, annexing the erstwhile remaining Sikh
kingdom, was then read out. The annexation of the Punjab and what
subsequently became the North-West Frontier Province by the East
India Company was then complete.

Given the fractured state of affairs in the post-Ranjit Singh period, the
Sikh defeat and disintegration of their empire was almost inevitable.
Even Ranjit Singh had guessed that the British would strike after he
was gone, and it is perhaps Gulab Singh’s abilities as both a military
leader and a statesman that he managed to not only carve out a
substantial amount of the area for himself but also created the
foundation for it to remain free of the British yoke for the next
hundred years. The immediate causes for the Sikh defeat, apart from
the machinations of various vested parties in the Lahore Durbar, was
the collapsing administrative system of the Sikhs, which resulted in
large armies without proper logistical support. Also, the British
played the Muslim card to perfection, especially in the frontier
districts where they began their own recruitment, constantly playing
on the fact that the Khalsa had subjugated them at the turn of the
century. This led to a large number of Punjabi Muslims willingly
fighting under British officers against the Sikhs. Finally, the British,
having consolidated their hold over most of the country by then, also
brought to bear overwhelming force against the Sikhs.

Before we leave the Sikhs and move our focus back to Jammu and
Kashmir, it is worth dwelling on the effects of the Sikh War for just a
while longer. Within a short span of time, the sepoys of the Bengal
Army, until then the iron fist of the East India Company’s armies in
India, rebelled. The British called it a mutiny, the Indians the war of
independence. For the Punjab, however, it was a chance to avenge the
defeat inflicted by the sepoys on them during the Anglo-Sikh Wars
and furthermore, the choice of Bahadur Shah Zafar as the symbolic
leader, brought back painful memories of the earlier Mughal-Sikh
clashes. The end result was that the Sikhs and the Gorkhas, perhaps
the last two bastions to fall before the British held complete sway
over most of India, ironically rallied to the rescue of their recent foe.
Without the Sikhs and the Gorkhas on their side, it is unlikely that the
British would have survived 1857 and then carried on for another 90
years.

Yet survive they did, and in the huge reorganisation that followed, not
only did the British take Akbar’s land administrative methods and
hone them into a new system under the Civil Service, they
reorganised their army on Ranjit Singh’s methods as well, almost to
the extent that even the colour scheme of uniforms for some
regiments was taken from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army. The loyalty
and bravery of the Sikh and Gorkha troops who fought with the
British in 1857 was rewarded by declaring these two regions as being
“martial races”. The exalted status of the high caste Hindu troops of
the Bengal army, recruited from what is now Uttar Pradesh and parts
of Bihar, who had in reality captured and handed the British most of
their Empire, was consigned to the dustbin of history.

The events of 1857 saw Raja Gulab Singh send his son Ranbir Singh
with 2,000 foot soldiers, 200 cavalry and six heavy guns to help the
British in the siege of Delhi. Even though Gulab Singh himself died in
August 1857, Ranbir Singh kept the British appeased by sending a
large amount of money to Punjab for the troops whose pay was in
arrears. The “mutineers” were also forbidden to seek asylum in the
state of Jammu and Kashmir. A grateful Queen Victoria conferred on
Raja Ranbir Singh the title of the “Most Exalted Order of the Star of
India” while at the same time his gun salute was raised from 19 to 21,
thereby making him a Maharaja in every sense of the word.

Gulab Singh, having learned from the havoc that followed Maharaja
Ranjit Singh’s death, had personally handed power to his son and
heir, Ranbir Singh, in 1856 while he himself decided to live out the
rest of his years as the Governor of Kashmir.

From Gulab Singh’s point of view, Gilgit remained a problem area for
him during his lifetime. In 1851, with the Rajas of Yasin, Hunza and
Nagar, there was a major uprising in Gilgit, which resulted in the
entire Dogra garrison stationed there being massacred, save a single
survivor, a Gorkha woman, who swam across the Indus to tell the
story of the disaster. This limited Gulab Singh’s frontier during his
own lifetime to the Indus River, which flowed east to west in the
region, after which it looped around the Nanga Parbat mastiff and
entered the plains of the Punjab.

The equations were changing rapidly at all times. Having subjugated

the Punjab by 1849, quite a few British officials now began to look at
Kashmir with fresh eyes. The Governor General, Lord Henry
Hardinge, considered to be the chief architect of the Treaty of
Amritsar, was increasingly under attack from his own ilk for having
“sold” Kashmir to the Dogra chief. Sir Charles Napier, who
subsequently was to become the Commander in Chief, scathingly
criticised the decision: “What a king to install! Rising from the lowest
foulest sediment of debauchery to float on the highest surge of blood,
he lifted his besmeared front and England adorned it with a crown?
Cramming down the throats of the Cashmerian people a hated and
hateful villain.” Others, equally scathing in their opinion, were also
giving voice to the opposition to the treaty. Herbert Edwards, a British
officer who served as an ADC to General Gough, wrote vis-à-vis Raja
Gulab Singh: “He has the cunning of the Vulture. He sat apart in clear
atmosphere of passionless distance, and with sleepless eye beheld the
lion and the tiger contending for the deer, and when the combatants
were dead, he spread his wings, sailed calmly down, and feasted
where they fought.” The prose and sentiment, so typical of the British
at that time, unfortunately seems to have been bought by most
historians.
Pressure began to be put on Raja Gulab Singh to accept a British
Resident as was the case with most other Indian princely states, but
Gulab Singh held firm. The British once again decided to play the
wait and watch game, hoping that like in the case of Ranjit Singh,
Gulab Singh’s successors too would provide them to implode the state
from within. But if Raja Gulab Singh had proved to be a tough
“vulture” for the British to crack, Maharaja Ranbir Singh had further
evolved into a “lammergeier”—the Dogras were there to stay.

After the First Sikh War the British annexed Sikh lands east of the
Sutlej and the areas in between it and the Beas; Jammu and Kashmir
was detached and the size of the Sikh army limited. After the Second
Sikh War the boy-king, Maharaja Duleep Singh was dethroned by
Lord Dalhousie and the Punjab was annexed to the British Empire.

The secularism of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839) needs to be

studied in the current context for the manner in which he brought
together a collection of warring misls (confederacies) to create a Sikh
Empire that stretched from the Khyber Pass in the west to western
Tibet in the east, and from Mithankot in the south to Kashmir in the
north, says US-based poet, playwright and commentator Sarbpreet
Singh in a new book.
“Ranjit Singh needs to be studied, celebrated and humanised not just
in Punjab but all over India. There are many unique aspects of his
court, most notably his insistence on meritocracy and pragmatic
embrace of true secularism, which I feel are very essential for India
given where we find ourselves today,” Singh told IANS in an email
interview on his book, The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia
(Tranqebar/pp 242/Rs 699).
Given the vastness of the subject, the book focuses on Ranjit Singh’s
cosmopolitan Sikh court in Lahore. Beginning from the repeated
invasions of Nadir Shah to the innumerable skirmishes between
Afghan and Sikh misls to the rise and consolidation of Ranjit Singh’s
Sukerchakias misl, the book brings alive the Maharaja’s tumultuous
but effective reign.
One is introduced to Akali Phoola Singh, who won Ranjit Singh some
of his most notable victories, but never fully submitted to him; the
teenaged courtesan Bibi Moran, the love of Maharajah’s life; Josh
Harlan, a Quaker from Philadelphia (who features in the title) who
became a trusted administrator but defected to the Afghans, and many
more such characters.
What could the rise of Maharaja Ranjit Singh be ascribed to? “After
the collapse of the Mughal Empire, Punjab had descended into
anarchy. The repeated incursion of Ahmed Shah Abdali further
weakened the Mughals’ hold over Punjab.
“The only resistance Abdali encountered was form Sikhs who had
consolidated into 12 misls, who were constantly jockeying against
each other, but would unite in the face of an external threat. Ranjit
Singh came from one of the smallest and weakest of the misls, the
Shukerchakias.
“Aided in no small part by his brilliant and visionary mother-in-law,
Sada Kaur, who was married into the once powerful Kahnayya misl,
the young upstart was able to seize power and get himself crowned
the King of Lahore, which had been the capital of Mughal Punjab. His
genius became apparent quickly as he started consolidating power and
through a combination of alliances and military adventures, soon
became the master of the entire Punjab.
“One of the early master strokes of his reign was a treaty with the
East India Company, which enabled him to secure his eastern border
and continue expanding elsewhere. Despite being unlettered, Ranjit
Singh was a shrewd leader, who excelled at attracting the best talent,
an attribute that played a huge role in his success. His rule was
marked by peace in the territories he controlled. While he ruled with
an iron hand and was an absolute monarch, he was known to be
scrupulously fair, never tyrannical and generous to defeated foes,” the
author explained.
But as another great writer, Khushwant Singh, has separately
recorded: “Ranjit Singh’s greatest oversight was his failure to train
any one of his sons to take his place. When he died on the evening of
June 27, 1839, there was no one fit to step into his shoes and guide the
destinies of the State.”
How is it that there was no one before or after Maharaja Ranjit Singh?
“The fiercely republican nature of Sikhs in the 18th century precluded
the rise of a ‘king’. It was only Ranjit Singh’s genius and his mother-
in-law’s foresight that made his reign possible.
“After his demise, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions played out
as every potential successor perished due to treachery or
happenstance. The result was the Empire’s collapse, aided in no small
part by the perfidy of the British and their ability to find willing
courtiers who betrayed the Empire for their personal benefit,”
Sarbpreet explains.
The author graphically explains the aftermath in the chapter titled
“The Decline And Fall Of The Sikh Empire”.
“An uneasy calm prevailed in Lahore. Tumultuous events had
unfolded and in one fell swoop almost the entire top echelon of the
legendary court...had been wiped out. The new Maharajah, Duleep
Singh, was an infant and there were constant whisperings about his
legitimacy.”
As if all this were not enough, the Empire was under threat from the
British, who were by then the undisputed masters of the Indian
subcontinent. All this laid the foundations for the first of the two
Anglo-Sikh Wars and the subsequent annexation of Punjab by the
East India Company.