Maharaja Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh was born in 1780 at Gujranwala, the son of Mahan Singh, chief of the Sukerchakia misl, one of the dozen Sikh warbands that had carved up Punjab after the collapse of Mughal and Afghan authority. Smallpox cost him an eye in childhood. His father died in 1792, and under his mother and then his mother-in-law Sada Kaur of the Kanhaiya misl he learned the politics of the confederacies.

In 1799 the Afghan ruler Zaman Shah, retreating from Punjab, confirmed him in possession of Lahore, which he had taken in July with Sada Kaur's help. In 1801 he was proclaimed Maharaja. Amritsar followed in 1802, and over the next two decades he absorbed the misls north of the Sutlej one by one, by marriage, purchase, pressure or force.[EoS][Grewal]

The Treaty of Amritsar with the East India Company in 1809 fixed the Sutlej as his southern boundary and left the cis-Sutlej Sikh states under British protection, so he expanded north and west instead: Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, Peshawar and the Afghan frontier through the 1820s and 1830s, Ladakh in 1834. The army, reorganised with French and Italian officers from 1822, became the strongest native force in India.

He ruled through a council that included the Dogra brothers from Jammu, the Muslim Fakir family of Lahore, and Hindu and Sikh generals and ministers; the kingdom was Sikh in its symbols and its ruling elite but not in its policy towards other communities. He commissioned the marble and gold-leaf facing of the Harmandir at Amritsar that gives the Golden Temple its name, and the Sikh sacred sites received endowments. He kept the title Sarkar Khalsa Ji for the government rather than claiming personal sovereignty.[EoS][EoS][EoS]

He died at Lahore in June 1839 after a series of strokes. Four of his widows and seven other women died on his pyre. In the ten years that followed, three of his successors were murdered, the army and the court fought for control, and two wars with the British (1845-46 and 1848-49) ended in the annexation of Punjab in March 1849. His youngest son Duleep Singh was taken to England.[EoS][Grewal]