SikhCoins.in  ✿  The Anglo-Sikh Wars

The First Anglo-Sikh WarDecember 1845 – March 1846

The war the Khalsa nearly won. At Ferozeshah, the British army came closer to catastrophic defeat than at any engagement since Waterloo. The difference was not courage — the Khalsa possessed that in abundance — but the treachery of its own commanders.

4 Battles  ·  3 Months  ·  2 Treaties  ·  1 Betrayal

I  ·  Introduction

A War Engineered and Then Betrayed

How the most powerful army in Asia was defeated without being beaten

The First Anglo-Sikh War lasted barely three months — from the crossing of the Sutlej on 11 December 1845 to the Treaty of Lahore on 9 March 1846. In those three months, the British East India Company fought four major engagements against the Khalsa army: at Mudki, at Ferozeshah, at Aliwal, and at Sabhraon. They won all four. But the manner in which they won, and the evidence that accumulated in the years that followed, established beyond serious scholarly dispute that the war was lost by the Khalsa's own commanders before it was lost on the battlefield.

The Khalsa army of 1845 was the finest fighting force on the Indian subcontinent. Reorganised over two decades by French and Italian veterans — Allard, Ventura, Court, Avitabile — it possessed a disciplined infantry, a professional artillery that was in several respects superior to the British, and a cavalry that had operated across the entire subcontinent without a defeat in the field. Its soldiers were veterans of campaigns from Kashmir to Sindh, from Peshawar to the Sutlej. They fought at every engagement of the First War with extraordinary courage and effectiveness, and at Ferozeshah they came within one failing of destroying the British army in India.

That failing was not theirs. Lal Singh, the Commander-in-Chief, was in communication with the British camp before the first shot was fired. Tej Singh, the second-in-command, would sabotage the pontoon bridge at Sabhraon before the battle, drowning thousands of Sikh soldiers in the Sutlej as they attempted to retreat. Both men were subsequently rewarded by the British: Lal Singh was made governor of Kashmir (briefly); Tej Singh was confirmed as chief of Sialkot. The pattern was set from the beginning.

II  ·  Background

The Road to War

British provocation, the Sutlej frontier, and a court without a government

The conditions that produced the First Anglo-Sikh War were the deliberate creation of the British political establishment in India, accelerated by the collapse of Lahore's governing authority after Ranjit Singh's death in 1839. The two processes reinforced each other: the weaker the Lahore court became, the more aggressively the British pressed on the Sutlej frontier; the more aggressively the British pressed, the more the Army Panchayats demanded war as the only answer to the creeping encirclement.

Major George Broadfoot, appointed British Political Agent on the Sutlej frontier in 1844, pursued a deliberate policy of provocation. His dispatches to Calcutta consistently exaggerated Sikh aggressive intent and minimised British frontier violations. He refused to acknowledge Sikh jurisdiction over islands in the Sutlej. He encouraged the Cis-Sutlej chiefs — already under British protection — to treat the river as a British border rather than the boundary fixed by the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809. When the Khalsa army eventually crossed the river, Broadfoot's dispatches framed it as unprovoked aggression against British territory. He died at Ferozeshah, killed by Sikh artillery.

On the Sikh side, the Army Panchayats — the democratic soldiers' councils that had filled the political vacuum left by the succession crisis — had by late 1845 concluded that war with the British was inevitable and preferable to the slow strangulation of the frontier policy. The court under the child Maharaja Dalip Singh and the regent Maharani Jindan was too weak to restrain them, and too divided to govern them. The Dogra ministers — Lal Singh and Tej Singh, both in secret communication with the British — encouraged the army's war fever precisely because they knew the war would be lost, and that its loss would be their reward.

The British had not defeated us at the point of the sword. We were conquered by the gold of the enemy, which had corrupted and purchased our own leaders. — Sohan Singh Seetal, How Fell the Sikh Kingdom (1970)
III  ·  11 December 1845

Crossing the Sutlej

On the night of 11 December 1845 the Khalsa army crossed the Sutlej at Hari ke Pattan in force, formally beginning the First Anglo-Sikh War. The crossing itself was the subject of immediate controversy. Lal Singh, even before the army had completed the crossing, sent a message to Captain Nicholson — British Charged Affairs at Ferozepur — informing him of the army's movements, its strength, and its direction of march, and asking for instructions.

Nicholson's reply, preserved in the British records and quoted in detail by Sohan Singh Seetal, was unambiguous: do not attack Ferozepur; lead the army away from the garrison; meet the Commander-in-Chief who is coming from Ambala. Lal Singh did exactly this. He dampened the ardour of the Khalsa at the decisive moment before Ferozepur by assuring the soldiers — falsely — that four Indian battalions of the British army would defect to the Sikh side. The Khalsa, which had 60,000 men to the British garrison's 6,000, did not attack. The opportunity was lost.

Governor-General Sir Henry Hardinge, writing privately after the war, acknowledged that the Sikh failure to press the attack on Ferozepur before the main British force arrived was the single act that saved the British position in the Punjab. He did not — could not — publicly acknowledge why it had happened. His successor Dalhousie, writing in private letters collected by J.G.A. Baird, recorded the broader strategic picture with unusual candour: the slow, deliberate failure of Sikh commanders at every critical junction was the thread that connected each engagement of the war, and that thread led to Lahore.

IV  ·  First Battle

Mudki

18 December 1845  ·  Late afternoon, fought in dust and failing light

Battle of Mudki

British tactical victory

The opening engagement of the war, fought late in the afternoon as the two forces stumbled upon each other near the village of Mudki. The British force under General Sir Hugh Gough, accompanied by Governor-General Hardinge, had been marching since dawn and was exhausted. The Khalsa cavalry under Lal Singh attacked as Gough's column was still deploying.

The battle was confused, fought largely in clouds of dust thrown up by the cavalry. The Sikh artillery — directed by European gunners — inflicted severe casualties on the British. Two British major-generals and several colonels were killed or wounded. Gough's infantry eventually pushed the Khalsa artillery back, but the Sikh withdrawal was orderly, not a rout. Lal Singh had again failed to press what tactical advantages existed.

British casualties: ~900 killed and wounded  ·  Sikh casualties: estimated 500–800

V  ·  Second Battle — The Crisis

Ferozeshah

The night the British army nearly ceased to exist

21–22 December 1845  ·  Two days of the most intense fighting of the war

Battle of Ferozeshah

British pyrrhic victory — Khalsa held the field at nightfall on Day 1

Ferozeshah is the battle that defines the First Anglo-Sikh War. On the evening of 21 December, Gough launched an assault on the heavily entrenched Sikh camp at Ferozeshah — against the advice of Hardinge, who wanted to wait for Littler's column from Ferozepur. The assault went in at dusk into prepared Sikh positions defended by 108 guns.

The British attack was shattered. Regiment after regiment broke against the Sikh entrenchments. The British artillery — outranged and outgunned by the Sikh heavy guns — could not suppress the Sikh batteries. By nightfall, the British force had lost cohesion entirely. Officers and men were intermingled, ammunition was running low, and the Sikh army held the camp. Hardinge, believing the battle lost, sent his personal papers to the rear and prepared a despatch acknowledging defeat.

The morning of 22 December was the crisis. As the British reorganised for a final assault — with what ammunition remained — Tej Singh arrived with a fresh Sikh army from the south. Had he attacked at this moment, the British force, exhausted and disorganised, would have been destroyed. Tej Singh did not attack. He withdrew his fresh army, claiming his guns had run out of ammunition — a claim disproved by subsequent examination of the ground. The British, given this reprieve, pressed a desperate final assault on the weakened Sikh position and took the camp.

I have never been in such a personal danger before and never expect to be so again. It was a very near thing. Our troops behaved magnificently but the Sikh artillery is the finest in Asia. — Governor-General Sir Henry Hardinge, private letter after Ferozeshah, December 1845

The chaos of the Ferozeshah night is recorded with vivid immediacy by G.A. Henty in Through the Sikh War: regiments fighting front, flanks, and rear simultaneously in the darkness; the Governor-General himself riding forward to call the 80th Regiment to its feet — "My lads, we shall have no sleep until we take those guns" — because no staff officer remained able to carry orders. Every political agent had been killed or wounded except one. The Sikh artillery at Ferozeshah was, by the testimony of every British officer who faced it, the finest in Asia; the earthwork protection of the Sikh guns meant they could not be silenced by counter-battery fire, and the British infantry had to take the batteries at bayonet point in the dark.

Hardinge's private letters after Ferozeshah are the most revealing documents of the First Anglo-Sikh War. He acknowledged freely in private what official dispatches could never say: that the Khalsa had fought superbly, that the British position had been desperate, and that the outcome had turned on factors he could not explain publicly. The Sikh artillery at Ferozeshah was, by the testimony of every British officer who faced it, superior in range, accuracy, and volume to anything the British possessed in India. The gunners — many of them trained by French and Italian officers — handled their pieces with professional competence that drew reluctant admiration from their opponents.

The British casualty figures at Ferozeshah — over 2,400 killed and wounded in two days — represented a rate of loss that had not been sustained in any British engagement in India since the battle of Assaye in 1803. The scale of the disaster was deliberately minimised in official dispatches to prevent a collapse of confidence in London and Calcutta.

"We have gained a victory but, I repeat, another such would ruin us."

— Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, private letter to a friend, January 1849, after Chilianwala — echoing Hardinge's own words after Ferozeshah in December 1845

VI  ·  Third Battle

Aliwal

28 January 1846  ·  A British set-piece victory

Battle of Aliwal

Decisive British victory

After the mutual exhaustion of Ferozeshah, operations on the Sutlej were reduced for several weeks to manoeuvre and skirmishing. The Battle of Aliwal was fought to the south of the main Sikh position, where a Sikh force under Ranjodh Singh Majithia had crossed the river to threaten the British line of communications.

Sir Harry Smith — commanding a British division in one of the more straightforwardly conducted engagements of the war — attacked the Sikh position at Aliwal with infantry and cavalry in a co-ordinated assault that broke the Sikh force and drove it back across the Sutlej. The battle is remembered in British military history principally for the charge of the 16th Queen's Lancers against the Sikh infantry squares — a charge that broke them. Aliwal was the cleanest British victory of the war, fought against a Sikh commander who had not been purchased.

British casualties: ~580 killed and wounded  ·  Sikh casualties: ~3,000 killed, wounded and drowned in the Sutlej

VII  ·  Fourth Battle — The Final Act

Sabhraon

The martyrdom of Sham Singh Atariwala — and Tej Singh's final treachery

10 February 1846  ·  The decisive and final engagement

Battle of Sabhraon

British victory — secured by Tej Singh's sabotage of the Sikh bridge

By February 1846 the main Khalsa army had withdrawn into a fortified bridgehead on the south bank of the Sutlej at Sabhraon, connected to the north bank by a pontoon bridge. The British — reinforced and resupplied — assembled the largest force yet deployed in the war for the final assault.

Before the battle, Tej Singh — commanding the Sikh force — had secretly weakened the central section of the pontoon bridge. This was not discovered until the battle was over. On the morning of 10 February, Gough launched a massive artillery bombardment followed by an infantry assault on the Sikh entrenchments. The Khalsa fought with the desperation of men who understood that this was the last battle. The Sikh artillery, which had devastated British formations at Mudki and Ferozeshah, had been provided with ammunition boxes filled with sand by Tej Singh — packed under his personal order to sabotage the Sikh fire.

When the British broke through the Sikh lines, the army attempted to retreat across the bridge. The weakened section collapsed. Thousands of Sikh soldiers drowned in the Sutlej — not defeated in battle but killed by their own commander's treachery.

British casualties: ~2,400 killed and wounded  ·  Sikh casualties: estimated 8,000–10,000 killed, wounded and drowned

Sardar Sham Singh of Atari — seventy years old, long retired, a veteran of every major campaign of the empire — rode into the battle of Sabhraon when the Khalsa lines began to break. He wore white: white dress, white beard, a white horse. Sohan Singh Seetal, who dedicated his entire history of the fall of the kingdom to his memory, describes him appearing among the breaking lines like a heavenly angel, rallying men who had lost heart, leading a final charge against the British positions. He did not return from it. His body was found on the battlefield. He is the only commander of either side who died at Sabhraon fighting without reservation for the cause he served.

Last Stand of Sham Singh Atariwala at Sabhraon
Last Stand  ·  Sabhraon, 10 February 1846 Sardar Sham Singh of Atari, seventy years old, on his white horse amid the breaking Khalsa lines — rallying the army of the Khalsa for a final charge against the British positions. He did not return.

The moment of Sham Singh's last stand has been commemorated in Sikh art. The painting of his final charge at Sabhraon — on his white horse, in white dress, rallying the breaking Khalsa lines — is one of the most reproduced images in Sikh historical iconography. Henty's account in Through the Sikh War records that Sikh losses at Sabhraon were caused not by enemy gunfire alone but by the collapse of the bridge: the Sikhs had fought until the entrenchments were overrun, and the retreat across the Sutlej became a catastrophe when the bridge gave way. General Sir Robert Dick, who had led the 42nd Highlanders at Waterloo, was killed in the British assault. Brigadier-generals McLaren and Taylor also fell. The Khalsa infantry, Henty concedes, had fought with complete desperation and had inflicted losses on the British out of all proportion to the final result.

VIII  ·  The Aftermath

The Treaties of Lahore and Bharowal

The Treaty of Lahore, signed on 9 March 1846, imposed terms designed not to destroy the Sikh state — Hardinge judged that premature annexation would be politically unmanageable — but to reduce it to permanent dependence. The principal terms: the Khalsa army was reduced to 20,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry; a war indemnity of 1.5 crore rupees was imposed; the Jalandhar Doab — the territory between the Beas and Sutlej rivers — was annexed to British India outright; and a British Resident was to be stationed at Lahore.

The treaty's most cynical provision was the disposal of Kashmir. Unable to pay the full indemnity, the Lahore court agreed to cede Kashmir to the British — who promptly sold it to Gulab Singh of Jammu for 75 lakh rupees. Gulab Singh had spent the war communicating with both sides while committing to neither. His reward was a kingdom. The transaction — the sale of a people and their territory as chattel between two powers that had conspired against them — was completed within days of the final battle.

The Treaty of Bharowal in December 1846 went further. It replaced Maharani Jindan's regency with a Council of Regency supervised by the British Resident. The Resident — Henry Lawrence, then John Lawrence — became in practice the ruler of the Punjab. Jindan was removed, confined, and eventually exiled to Benares. The second war had been prepared before the first had been fully digested.

IX  ·  The Numismatic Record

What the Coins Record

The coinage of the war years and its immediate aftermath

The First Anglo-Sikh War left its mark on the coinage of the Sikh Empire in two distinct ways: in the coins that continued to be struck during and immediately after the war, and in those that were extinguished by its consequences.

Lahore rupee VS 1902
Lahore Mint  ·  VS 1902 (AD 1845)

The VS 1902 (AD 1845) Lahore rupees bear the Nanakshahi couplet — Deg o Tegh o Fateh — struck in the very year of the First Anglo-Sikh War. They are coins of a sovereign empire fighting for its existence, minted while the Khalsa army was crossing the Sutlej. The Lahore mint continued through the interregnum until the final annexation; the VS 1906 issues are the last. But VS 1902 is the war year itself — the last coins of an undefeated empire before the treaties began their work.

Amritsar rupee VS 1903
Amritsar Mint  ·  VS 1903 — The Interregnum Issues

The Amritsar mint — the sacred mint of the Khalsa, struck in the city of the Harmandir Sahib — continued operating after the Treaty of Lahore. Its rupees of the interregnum period (VS 1903–1906) carry the same Nanakshahi legends that had appeared on every Amritsar coin since 1775, but now with added symbols, the period of war issues from VS1902-1903 show a Flag symbol, the ones after, dated VS1903-1906, show a parasol(chattar) above a gurmukhi 'Sat', 'Shiv' & 'Ram', symbolising the changing characters of the Regency council.

The most significant numismatic consequence of the First War was not in the coins struck but in those that could no longer be struck. The annexation of the Jalandhar Doab removed several of the smaller mints of the empire from Sikh control. The 1.5 crore rupee indemnity — much of it paid in coin from the Lahore treasury — drained the empire's silver reserves and constrained the coinage of the remaining mints in the interregnum years. The coins of VS 1904 and 1905 from Lahore and Amritsar are notably less numerous in collections than those of earlier years, a reflection of the depleted silver supply of a state stripped of half its revenues.

X  ·  References

Sources