Diwan Bhawani Das

He left Kabul service in 1808. The reason given in the encyclopaedia tradition is personal: he had been badly treated at the Kabul court and went to Lahore in disgust. A second version has Ranjit Singh hearing of his reputation and inviting him to take charge of the state’s finances. These are not incompatible — a senior revenue officer who is known to be available and known to be good is exactly the sort of man a court sends for — but they are different emphases, and the page keeps both rather than choosing.

What he found on arrival is the part that should interest anyone reading the coinage. Ranjit Singh had been Maharaja for seven years. He held Lahore and, since 1805, Amritsar. He was striking rupees at two mints. And he had no regular treasury and no departmental accounts. The revenue of an expanding state was coming in and going out through the hands of individual officers, with no central record of the flow.

Bhawani Das organised both within a decade. He was formally appointed finance minister in 1811, at which point the total state income stood at something in the order of thirty lakh rupees. By the time he died in 1834 the secretariat he had built — the Darbar-i-Mulla — was the most sophisticated administrative machine between Delhi and Kabul. The structure is set out on this site’s page on the Sikh Empire, under the civil administration.

Finance ministers do not normally appear in the order of battle. This one does. Twice, in 1816 and 1817, Bhawani Das commanded a division of the Lahore army in the Multan expeditions, and he took part in the expeditions to Peshawar and into the Yusufzai country as well. He also served the Darbar diplomatically: he was among the Maharaja’s counsellors at the negotiations with the British envoy Charles Metcalfe, the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Amritsar of 25 April 1809 and fixed the Sutlej as the limit of Lahore’s expansion eastward — the subject of this site’s Cis-Sutlej pages.

The Multan service is the striking one, because of where he had been before. Multan and the Derajat were the districts whose Durrani customs revenue he had spent years assessing. When the Lahore army went there in 1816 and again in 1817, it went with a divisional commander who knew, to the rupee, what that country yielded and how its trade was taxed. The citadel finally fell on 2 June 1818, after six previous campaigns, with the Afghan governor Muzaffar Khan killed in the storming; Diwan Sawan Mal was installed to govern it.

The temptation at this point is to close the loop and say that he directed the monetary settlement of the conquered frontier. There is no evidence for that, and this page does not say it. No document known to me connects Bhawani Das to the opening of the Multan mint, to the choice of couplet at Derajat and Mankera, or to any decision about the standard those issues were struck on. What can be said is narrower and still worth saying: the Lahore state absorbed a frontier revenue system it did not build, at a moment when its finance ministry was headed by the man who had run that system for its previous owners. Whether that shaped what was struck there is an open question. It is the sort of question the accounts, rather than the coins, would have to answer.

The Punjab was annexed in 1849 and the paper of the Lahore state passed with everything else to the British, who put it into storage in the vernacular office of the Civil Secretariat and left it there. What happened next is the reason this page exists.

Sita Ram Kohli, then lecturing in history at Government College, Lahore, worked through the surviving mass — on the order of three hundred thousand documents, dated between 1811 and 1849, tied up in red-cloth bundles at the Tomb of Anarkali. He catalogued them in two volumes: the first, in 1919, covering the military department, the Daftar-i-Fauj; the second, in 1927, covering the revenue, jagir and toshakhana departments. Those two volumes are the door through which almost everyone since has entered the fiscal history of the Sikh Empire.

Note where the surviving series begins. 1811 — the year Bhawani Das was made finance minister. The catalogue itself does not explain the date, and there is more than one possible reason for it: it may reflect the point at which systematic record-keeping started, or simply the point from which paper happened to survive. The honest position is that the coincidence is striking and unproved. But it is at least consistent with the obvious explanation, which is that a bureaucracy cannot leave an archive before it exists.

It is worth being exact about what that catalogue does and does not cover, because the limits define what this arc can claim. Kohli’s own introductory note describes the record as consisting of a set number of bundles — and those bundles are accounts. He mentions, separately and in passing, a small group of leather-bound volumes holding retained copies of orders issued outward to government officials, which he found decayed past use, and a voluminous correspondence between Ranjit Singh and the British agencies at Ludhiana and Ambala. Neither was catalogued. The political and diplomatic paper of the Sikh state was never brought into the catalogue at all, and what has been worked on for a century is the fiscal series and almost nothing else.

Which is the point. This is not a mint archive and it is not a chancery archive. It is the fiscal and mercantile traffic within which the coinage circulated — and that traffic is precisely the material from which the working value of a currency is recovered. A catalogue of accounts is a poor substitute for a history of the Darbar. It is the best evidence there is for the money.

What such records actually yield, when you get at them, is concrete and small-grained: a dated grain price expressed against the Lahore rupee; a revenue payment made in the coinage of a named foreign mint; an allowance, an assessment, a platoon’s pay. None of it is dramatic on its own. Collectively it is the only evidence there is for what the coinage did between leaving the mint and reaching the cabinet.