Person · Sikh maharaja · India
Mahārāja Ranjīt Singh
The ruler who made a single Sikh state out of the Punjab misls by 1801, held it against the Afghans and the Company for nearly forty years, employed European officers to build an army the Company seriously respected, and extracted the Koh-i-Noor from the exiled Shah Shuja in 1813 as the price of the refuge he had already given.
- Date
- 1780–1839
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 31.582, 74.315
Worth knowing
He wore the stone on his arm at durbars and willed it to the Jagannatha temple at Puri, which the Company's officers disregarded. His state survived him by ten years; the Punjab was annexed in 1849 and the stone was surrendered under the Treaty of Lahore by his eleven-year-old son.
About the place
Placed at Lahore, the capital he ruled from and where his samadhi stands beside the fort.
Connections (7)
- PatronageHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)
Ranjit Singh gilded the Harmandir Sahib — the gold that gives it its English name is his, applied in the 1830s — and endowed gurdwaras across Punjab, while running a state whose army and administration were largely staffed by Muslims and Hindus and whose senior European officers were French and Italian veterans of Napoleon's wars. He willed the Koh-i-Noor to a Hindu temple at Puri, which tells you something about how he understood his own kingship.
- Succession in timeBhagat Singh
Lahore was Ranjit Singh's capital and then, after annexation, a Company and Crown city — and it is where Bhagat Singh shot Saunders in 1928, was tried, and was hanged at the Central Jail in 1931, eighty-two years after the Punjab was taken. The Sikh kingdom's capital became the centre of the province's revolutionary movement, and both stories end at the Sutlej a few miles apart.
- Power passed toChillianwala
Ranjit Singh's Sikh state was the last Indian power the Company treated as a military equal, with French and Italian officers, its own artillery foundries and a frontier on the Indus. It survived him by ten years. Chillianwala and Gujrat in 1849 ended it, and the Treaty of Lahore took the Punjab and the Koh-i-Noor from his eleven-year-old son Duleep Singh.
- AnalogueAhilyabai Holkar
Ahilyabai gilded and rebuilt; Ranjit Singh plated the Kashi Vishwanath dome in gold in 1835 and willed the Koh-i-Noor to Jagannatha at Puri, which his officers and the Company disregarded. Two eighteenth and nineteenth-century rulers with no claim on the Gangetic plain both spent heavily on its shrines, and the giving is the politics.
- Samadhi atSamādhi of Ranjīt Singh, Lahore
Ranjīt Singh was cremated on this spot beside the Lahore Fort in June 1839, and his son Kharak Singh began the memorial over it; it was finished in 1848 under Dalip Singh, by which time the kingdom had one year left. A marble lotus holds his ashes. Smaller urns set around it are for the four ranis and seven attendant women who burned on the pyre with him, which makes the building the best-documented sati memorial in Sikh history as well as the tomb of the state's founder.
- PatronageAmritsar
Maharaja Ranjit Singh made Amritsar a major religious, political and commercial centre of the Sikh Empire. He strengthened the city’s fortifications, including Gobindgarh Fort, and contributed extensively to Harmandir Sahib, including its marble work and gilded exterior. Amritsar also became an important centre of trade and administration under his rule.
- Power passed toKoh-i-Noor
Maharaja Ranjit Singh took the Koh-i-Noor from the deposed Shah Shuja Durrani in 1813 at Lahore. Shah Shuja's memoirs state that Ranjit Singh extorted the diamond by having his son tortured in front of him; another account says Ranjit Singh demanded it in return for Shuja's safe hospitality in the Sikh Empire. Ranjit Singh had the stone examined by Lahore jewellers for two days before paying Shuja 125,000 rupees. The jewellers of Amritsar declared the diamond's value 'far beyond all computation'. Ranjit Singh then paraded on an elephant with the diamond affixed to his turban. He wore it as an armlet during Diwali and Dussehra and kept it under elaborate security at Gobindgarh Fort.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ranjit Singh”. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (2017); the Treaty of Lahore, 1849.
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