Empire of the Sikhs

by Patwant Singh

  Ranjit Singh attributed his own achievements to the grace of the Sikh scriptures. This acknowledgement of the wisdom of the Gurus and his unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the Granth Sahib were in many ways a radical departure from the prevailing practice of his time – and indeed long before it. In other countries, particularly Western, in any conflict between the monarch and the church, even senior members of the clergy were often overruled in favour of the monarchical view. In marked contrast to this, the absolute ruler of the Sikh state had once accepted a sentence of public lashing pronounced by the Golden Temple’s clergy for a transgression it had viewed with disfavour even if the sentence was never carried out.

  It is all the more surprising, therefore, that given the extent of his reverence for the tenets of Sikhism Ranjit Singh openly flouted one of them by setting himself up as a monarch with absolute authority over the affairs of the state and over all Sikhs resident in it. He thereby ignored the republican tradition which Guru Gobind Singh had established.

  The tenth Guru had left no room for any ambiguity regarding the republican underpinnings of the Sikh religion. ‘Wherever there are five Sikhs assembled who abide by the Guru’s teachings,’ he had told his followers, ‘know that I am in the midst of them … Read the history of your Gurus from the time of Guru Nanak. Henceforth the Guru shall be the Khalsa and the Khalsa the Guru. I have infused my mental and bodily spirit into the Granth Sahib and the Khalsa.’7 Another verse by him conveys this message:

  The Khalsa is a reflection of my form,

  The Khalsa is my body and soul,

  The Khalsa is my very life.

  Dasam Granth

  Ranjit Singh made the grievous mistake of ignoring the essential meaning of these words, which unequivocally spell out the purpose of the Khalsa and that its goals should be reached through the collective will of its constituents. For each member of the Khalsa to survive and fulfil the aim of his life, he had to view his fellow religionists as representing the Gurus – and in particular the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, who had founded the Khalsa – as his ‘form’, as his ‘body and soul’, as his ‘very life’. To try to dominate the Khalsa was tantamount to trying to dominate the Guru. Decisions had to be arrived at by members of the Sikh faith, collectively and by mutual consent, not by diktat.

  Monarchs, since they are by definition sole and absolute rulers, are anathema to the ideals of a faith – like the Sikh – which requires equal representation in all major decisions. For such decisions a large gathering of the Sikhs – a Sarbat Khalsa – would pass a gurmatta or a collective resolution on the course to be taken. This is what was done in 1760 and 1765 when the Khalsa assembled at the Durbar Sahib to decide on annexing Lahore from the Afghans. The panj piyare, the five chosen ones, could also take decisions on behalf of the panth, the Sikh community.

  Even though he held these guiding principles of Sikh beliefs in high regard, Ranjit Singh failed to foresee the disastrous consequences his monarchy would have on the Sikh state. He had, obviously, hoped that his successors would be as skilful as he in warfare, statesmanship and general qualities of leadership and would ensure the continuity and growth of the Sikh empire he had built with such confidence and skill. This was not to be. But he also ignored the fact that ‘it is the self-respect, the awareness of his own ultimate significance in the creation of God, which imparts to a Sikh of Guru Gobind that Olympian air and independence which fits ill with a totalitarian or autocratic monarchical system of organization of power’.8

  In his well-researched book Parasaraprasna, the Sikh scholar Kapur Singh, in a chapter ‘How a “Sikh” Is Knighted a “Singh”‘, graphically recreates the momentous events which took place at Anandpur Sahib on 30 March 1699, when Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa and provided a new dynamic for a fledgeling faith. One of the cardinal conditions underscored for observance by all new entrants into the Khalsa was that its members must henceforth clear their minds of all previous traits, beliefs, superstitions, loyalties and such and believe solely and exclusively in one formless and unchanging god who dwells in each human being.

  ’Your previous race, name, genealogy, country, religion, customs and beliefs, your subconscious memories and pre-natal endowments, samskaras, and your personality-traits have today been burnt up and annihilated. Believe it to be so, without a doubt and with the whole of your heart. You have become the Khalsa, a sovereign man today, owing allegiance to no earthly person, or power. One God Almighty, the Timeless, is the only sovereign to whom you owe allegiance.’9

  How deeply this idea is ingrained in the minds of Sikhs can be judged by the degree to which they have always asserted themselves in whatever task they have undertaken, whether on the battlefield, in occupations requiring a tough physique such as agriculture or, more recently in industry, transport and much else. So it is not difficult to understand why the monarchical idea thrust on them did not succeed after Ranjit Singh’s death and why, when the monarchy collapsed, it brought down with it everything he had built with such flair and faith in his own sense of destiny.

  The Gurus had underscored the importance of giving practical form and substance to an idea, not leaving it as an idea in the abstract. That is how Sikhism became a live and vibrant reality. They wanted every Sikh to have a practical bent. In this context Ranjit Singh’s contribution was the specific form he gave to a commonwealth of the Sikhs. Before him the misls and other groups of Sikhs had more often than not been in conflict with each other. He forged them all together and gave them a sense of pride and power because of the inspiration they received from their religious beliefs.

  The resilience and ruggedness of the Sikh faith and its followers, and their resolve and spirit of independence, were and are continuously nurtured by the Guru Granth Sahib and its evocative, balanced, rational and realistic view of life. It has sustained the Sikhs in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Not long after Ranjit Singh’s death even the British acknowledged the quality of principled self-confidence he saw in them. In a letter to Ellenborough, Henry Hardinge, his successor as governor-general, wrote: ‘The Sikh soldiers are the finest men I have seen in Asia, bold and daring republicans.’ His letter is dated 19 March 1846 – less than three years before the end came for the Sikh empire.

  Ranjit Singh achieved his goals because of his uncanny understanding of how to handle the Khalsa’s sense of pride and independence and how to motivate each individual to strive for his goals whatever the odds. His iron will inspired his men, held them together and brought out the best in them. He needed men of talent and experience in his government, and because Sikhs accounted for a very small percentage of Punjab’s population he had no hesitation in bringing in anyone of merit, whatever his background or faith, to serve the state. He was confident that in the final count he could control them. In the execution of this policy, however, he allowed a split to open up between the phenomenal achievements of his lifetime and his inability to ensure continuity after his death.

  After extending Punjab’s borders into far-away lands, breaking the Afghan stranglehold on India and knitting together the many culturally diverse religious, ethnic and linguistic groups in his realm, Ranjit Singh diluted the sustainability of what he had created. Had the hill Dogras Dhian Singh and Gulab Singh – whom he raised ‘almost from the gutter’, as Kapur Singh puts it, to the highest positions in his realm – been the only ones of their ilk, Ranjit Singh’s legacy might conceivably have survived. But there were others whose true capacities for bringing down the edifice their sovereign had built were revealed only after his death, and among these the two that stand out are Tej Singh, an ‘insignificant Brahmin of the Gangetic-Doab’, in Kapur Singh’s words, and another Brahmin, Lal Singh; after Ranjit Singh’s death the last two were promoted to the top commands of the Sikh army.

  To suggest that Ranjit Singh was not a good judge of men is unfair to him. He made sure that the men he chose from different faiths, beliefs and persuasions served him well. His personal
ity and iron will ensured that his writ would prevail throughout his empire, no matter how far the territories of the Sikh state extended, and seldom in his lifetime did anyone have the courage to cross his path.

  Although the terms ‘kingdom’ and ‘empire’ have been used freely throughout this book they jar with the republican ideal of the Sikh faith. Guru Gobind Singh, foreseeing the pull that India’s feudal traditions, nurtured further by its caste system, would exert on Indian minds conditioned to accept hierarchies, emphasized his idea of an ‘aristocracy’. It could not be by right of birth. ‘Such an aristocracy [had to be] dedicated and consciously trained … an aristocracy … grounded in virtue, in talent and in the self-imposed code of service and sacrifice, an aristocracy of such men should group themselves into the Order of the Khalsa.’10 The translator of Guru Gobind Singh’s concept of ‘an aristocracy’ appears to have used this word unwittingly, whereas meritocracy is what Guru Gobind Singh always emphasized as the ideal of the Khalsa. The same ideal was to prove central to secularism, too.

  Ranjit Singh did in fact follow the injunction of Guru Gobind Singh by creating a meritocracy based on virtue and talent and dedication. However, the distinction between an aristocracy defined not by ‘right of birth’ but by its ‘self-imposed code of service and sacrifice’ is soon lost when upstarts with unearned titles of princes and such usurp the rights of those who have virtue and talent but are humble by birth. This is precisely what happened after Ranjit Singh’s death, and it is not surprising that the Khalsa started to revolt:

  The Khalsa is never a satellite to another power,

  they are either fully sovereign or

  in a state of war and rebellion.

  A subservient coexistence they never accept.

  To be fully sovereign and autonomous is

  their first and last demand.11

  The truth of this became evident within months of Ranjit Singh’s death. When his sons and their wives, nephews and senior functionaries of the Durbar vengefully turned against each other, the army, too, was inevitably, and irresponsibly, drawn into political decision-making. ‘Such a right is not inherent in the concept of the Khalsa,’ as one of the present authors has written elsewhere. ‘Furthermore, whilst Ranjit Singh’s leadership qualities had kept the army in line, its restiveness against his weak successors was now evident and when it spilt over, a major shift occurred from the political system created by the Gurus, in which rights had been invested in the entire Khalsa community, and not just the army. The manner of the army’s assertiveness, though not directed at the state, damaged the state’s cohesiveness since it lacked the discipline with which the Khalsa had closed its ranks against all adversaries in the past. This time it was divided both against itself and against others; an antithesis to the concept of a united Khalsa.’12

  The qualities of spirituality, self-discipline and unlimited self-confidence which the Khalsa had introduced into the Indian mosaic were fatally subverted at this time, a process aided and abetted by the elites of India’s older religious faiths, led by Hinduism and Islam, which had always at heart resented the vigorous self-assertiveness of the Sikhs. The end result was the weakening of the great legacy of the Khalsa’s founding principles, of a magnificent and unprecedented state. This was the ultimate price paid for Ranjit Singh’s error of judgement in departing from a key founding principle of his religion and creating a monarchy, even though he never behaved like most despotic monarchs have done through the ages.

  Monarchical rule had been habitual during the most significant periods in Indian history, whether Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Mughal or British. The fountainhead of power was the sovereign, not the people. If the people were restless, the rulers knew how to repress them. Those who were benign and ruled justly did so out of inner convictions, not because they were compelled to by the tenets of their faith. The emergence of the Sikh faith, committed to the republican democratic tradition, was a rare event in an environment in which authority was exercised arbitrarily and decisions in statecraft were whimsical more often than wise.

  Another point to note is that whilst all great religions have waged wars against each other in attempts to establish their primacy, the Sikhs never fought wars to establish the supremacy of their faith. Their wars were fought to restore the sovereignty of their country, not the right of their religion to dominate people of other denominations. Ranjit Singh’s critics, who rightfully criticize his monarchical bent, give him little or no credit for the even-handedness with which he applied the secular principle to the Sikh state. This quality of the man stood out in barbaric times. If the Sikh faith still has vitality and vigour, despite the setbacks it suffered as a consequence of his mis-step in establishing a monarchy, it is because the Gurus, unlike Ranjit Singh’s critics, took into account human foibles and frailties.

  8

  The Decadent and Deceitful

  Many of them, so as to curry favour with tyrants, for a fistful of coins, or through bribery or corruption, are shedding the blood of their brothers.

  EMILIANO ZAPATA

  Within days and months of Ranjit Singh’s death his empire began to flounder – something that would have been unlikely to happen had the republican character of the Sikh state remained unchanged. Ranjit Singh’s successors were unable to carry their fellow Sikhs with them because the Durbar’s intrigues left many of them utterly disenchanted at the spectacle of all major decisions being taken by a few courtiers who lacked any integrity and moral vision. Such men no longer enjoyed the confidence or respect of the fearless and resolute Sikh troops on whom the power of the Sikh state had always rested. That power was now being destroyed from within.

  The poet George Herbert writes that ‘storms make oaks take deeper root’. Just the opposite happened when Ranjit Singh died. Prince Kharak Singh, who succeeded him as the Maharaja, was no oak, and the storms that began blowing after his father’s death destroyed whatever roots he had. He was weak and ineffectual, with neither the charisma nor the qualifications to hold together the extraordinary legacy with which he had been left. He was incapable of dealing with external or internal threats, and it was the latter that put an end both to his rule and to his life. Some contemporaneous historians have their own agendas for holding that he was not as much of a weakling as he has been made out to be and that Dhian Singh ran him down to his father. ‘It will readily be acknowledged by all who knew anything of Kurruck Sing’, writes one such English historian, ‘that in the early part of his life he gave the promise of, or in reality possessed, all the abilities requisite for a sovereign of the Punjaub; with perhaps one exception, viz. that while not so crafty as the minister, Dhian Singh, he was more religiously and peacefully inclined, and far less ambitious. Yet though peaceful, he proved when roused to energy that he possessed no small share of personal bravery, activity, and determination.’1 It has at least to be admitted that in the immediate aftermath of Ranjit Singh’s death and during the brief period in which he was still active Kharak Singh did score victories with the occupation of the hill states of Mandi, Saket and Kulu in 1840 – the same year in which he died, on 5 November.

  His son, Nau Nihal Singh, was of a different mettle altogether. To begin with, because he was bright, alert and immensely proud of the legacy of which he was a part, Ranjit Singh saw him as a person who had the necessary energy and enthusiasm to continue the tradition of strengthening the foundations of the Sikh nation he had founded. But that promise remained unfulfilled, in part because of his early end and also because he lacked the humane instincts and wisdom that had set his grandfather apart. He had certainly started out in his footsteps, joining family tradition in being barely thirteen in May 1834 when he fought in the battle in which the Sikhs annexed Peshawar: both his grandfather and great-grandfather had gone out to battle before they were ten. So both at Peshawar and then among the Sikh soldiers who quelled a revolt at Dera Ismail Khan and Tonk, Nau Nihal Singh proved that the blood of his forefathers coursed richly through his veins.
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br />   What he completely lacked were scruples of any kind. He was incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, which was in all likelihood responsible for his early end. While, for example, on the one hand he loathed Dhian Singh – and with considerable justification – he connived with him in crudely removing his father from power and exercising all the ruler’s powers himself. On 8 October 1839 he also connived with Dhian Singh in the killing of Chet Singh, his father’s closest adviser. It was a chilling and brutal murder, carried out in the presence of a very sick Kharak Singh. Nau Nihal Singh himself, it has been written, was present. According to some accounts Dhian Singh stabbed Chet Singh ‘twice through the stomach with a long knife’.2

  Kharak Singh declined rapidly, both in body and mind, after witnessing the brutal end of his friend and the callous disregard for his own dignity and sensitivity. The eighteen-year-old Nau Nihal Singh viewed his father’s sad state as an opportunity to take over as virtual Maharaja of Punjab – a position to which he failed to bring any of his grandfather’s qualities of statesmanship and leadership. ‘His virtual assumption of power in the name of the titular monarch in December 1839’, writes a modern historian, ‘was characterized with unwise political steps … he prevented the British political agent Wade from meeting the Maharaja in December 1839, and made an attempt that Sir John Keane, the British general, should not have an interview with the Maharaja. He was also responsible for the recall of Wade from Ludhiana for the latter’s alleged overbearing and obnoxious conduct towards him and the minister Dhian Singh.’3