Place · battle · Pakistan
Chillianwala
The 13 January 1849 battle at Chillianwala in Jhelum district, Punjab, Pakistan, where Hugh Gough's British force fought the Sikh army of Sher Singh Attariwalla in the Second Anglo-Sikh War — a bloody tactical draw with over 3,000 casualties on each side. The battle so shocked the British East India Company that the Lahore political residents accelerated the Punjab annexation. The decisive Battle of Gujrat on 21 February 1849 under Hugh Gough ended Sikh resistance. The Punjab was annexed on 29 March 1849 by Dalhousie, the Lahore Darbar formally terminated, and the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh dispossessed. The Koh-i-Noor was transferred to Queen Victoria in 1850 as part of the annexation terms.
- Date
- 1849 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.660, 73.610
Connections (5)
- Power passed toLahore Fort & Shalimar
Chillianwala in 1849 was a bloody draw that shook British confidence badly — colours lost, guns abandoned, a public outcry in London — and the annexation of Punjab followed within months after Gujrat. Lahore, the Mughal north-western capital and then Ranjit Singh's, passed to the Company, and the Koh-i-Noor went with it to Queen Victoria.
- Power passed toTower of London
The Koh-i-Noor was surrendered under the Treaty of Lahore in 1849 by Duleep Singh, then eleven, after the annexation of Punjab that followed Chillianwala and Gujrat. It was shipped to London in 1850, cut down by nearly half at Prince Albert's direction because the Indian cut did not sparkle under gaslight, and set in a crown. India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have all asked for it back.
- CampaignJames Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie
Dalhousie arrived in 1848 committed to annexation and got his first war within months. Chillianwala was close enough to a defeat that questions were asked in Parliament, but Gujrat followed in February 1849 and the Punjab was annexed in March, with the Koh-i-Noor surrendered under the treaty by Ranjit Singh's eleven-year-old son. The last large independent Indian state was gone.
- Power passed toMahārāja Ranjīt Singh
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.
- Succession in timeAssaye
Assaye in 1803 and Chillianwala in 1849 are the beginning and the end of the Company's conquest of northern India, and both were expensive. Between them the Marathas, the Pindaris, the Gurkhas, the Burmese, the Sindhis and the Sikhs were all defeated, and the map of British India was complete eight years before the rebellion that changed who administered it.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
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