Maharani Jind Kaur

For four years after Ranjit Singh’s death she and her son lived in near-obscurity, for part of that time under Dogra protection at Jammu. The throne meanwhile changed hands by violence three times: Kharak Singh confined and dead, Nau Nihal Singh killed by falling masonry on the day of his father’s cremation, Sher Singh shot along with his wazir Dhian Singh in September 1843. On 16 September the army proclaimed the five-year-old Duleep Singh sovereign, and Hira Singh Dogra took the wazirate.

Hira Singh’s calculation was the standard one: an infant on the throne and a mother of no consequence beside him. Jind Kaur broke it by going directly to the only constituency that could overrule him. She put the question to the regimental committees in terms they could not evade — whether Duleep Singh was the real sovereign or Hira Singh was, and if the former, whether the Khalsa intended to let him be a king with an empty title. The panchayats came down on her side.

For a woman in the Lahore of the 1840s this was not a gesture; it was a constitutional claim, and it was understood as one. She reconstituted the Supreme Council of the Khalsa and worked to restore some balance between the army and the civil administration — the balance that had been collapsing since 1839 and whose collapse is the real subject of this whole decade. Whatever else is disputed about her, the record that she personally conducted the business of the state, in public, is not.

It is worth being precise about the date her real power begins, because the loose formula “regent from 1843” obscures a great deal. Duleep Singh was proclaimed in September 1843, but Hira Singh held the wazirate until December 1844. It is only after his fall that Jind Kaur is governing in any substantive sense, with her brother Jawahar Singh as wazir. Her effective regency is therefore something closer to two years than three, and every judgement of her competence has to be measured against that compressed span.

The case against her can be reduced to four propositions. Taken one at a time, they do not stand or fall together.

One: that she sent the army across the Sutlej to have it destroyed. This is the serious charge, and the evidence for it is entirely inferential. It rests on a motive attributed to her — fear of what an unpaid, politically organised army might do to her son — combined with the fact that the crossing happened and the army was duly destroyed. What it lacks is a document. The strongest evidence against it is what the same army had already done to her: in September 1845 the soldiery stabbed her brother Jawahar Singh to death in front of her, for his part in the killing of Pashaura Singh. A regent who could not prevent her own wazir being murdered in her presence was not in a position to manoeuvre that army into a war of her choosing.

Two: that she was complicit in the treachery of Lal Singh and Tej Singh. Here the underlying fact is not in dispute at all. Lal Singh, the wazir, was in communication with Captain Nicholson at Ferozepur before the fighting; Tej Singh withdrew at Ferozeshah at the moment the British army was closest to collapse; at Sobraon the bridge of boats failed behind a retreating army. This site treats that betrayal as established on its First Anglo-Sikh War page. The question is whether it extends to her, and the honest answer is that the link is supplied by rumour of a personal relationship with Lal Singh rather than by any evidence of her knowledge of the correspondence. That is a thin foundation for the gravest charge that can be made against a head of state.

Three: that she was licentious and ungovernable — the “Messalina of the Punjab.” This is not a historical finding. It is a phrase from the British side, applied to a woman whose political effectiveness was the actual objection, and it did the work such phrases are designed to do: it converted a competent adversary into a scandal. It is worth noting that it was never applied to Gulab Singh, whose conduct in the same years is far better documented and far worse.

Four: that she provoked an unnecessary war. The most useful comment here comes from the British side of the line. G. Carmichael Smyth, a Company political agent, recorded his own view that the Sikhs had not made an unprovoked attack, that the British had not shown forbearance, and that if the question was who first departed from the rules of friendship, his opinion was that it was the British. That is a witness testifying against his own side’s case.

The treaty of March 1846 left Duleep Singh on the throne and his mother as regent. That arrangement lasted nine months. In December, at Bhairowal, she was replaced by a Council of Regency under the control of a British Resident and granted a pension of a hundred and fifty thousand rupees a year. The Bhairowal settlement is treated at length elsewhere on this site; what concerns this page is that the removal was not the end of the matter, because her influence did not end with her office.

The break came in August 1847. Tej Singh — whose conduct at Ferozeshah had made him the most detested man in the Punjab — was to be invested as Raja of Sialkot, a reward from the British to a man the Sikh army regarded as a traitor. The nine-year-old Maharaja refused to perform the investiture. The Resident, Henry Lawrence, held the mother responsible for the son. She was confined in the Samman Burj of the Lahore Fort, moved ten days later to the fortress at Sheikhupura, and her pension was cut from a hundred and fifty thousand rupees to forty-eight thousand.

Then they took her son. She wrote to Lawrence asking to have him back, in a letter whose force is in its plainness: the boy had no brother or sister, no uncle senior or junior, and had lost his father — to whose care, she asked, had he been entrusted? She did not see him again for thirteen and a half years.

The following year the new Resident, Sir Frederick Currie, described her as the rallying point of rebellion and exiled her from the Punjab altogether. She was taken to Chunar Fort near Benares, her jewellery was confiscated, and the pension was reduced again, to twelve thousand. The treatment was conspicuous enough to draw a protest from outside the Sikh world entirely: Dost Mohammad Khan of Afghanistan observed that such usage was objectionable to every creed.

Duleep Singh had by then been raised in British hands, converted, and settled in England. Getting to his mother took him four years and three attempts: an intercepted letter dismissed as a forgery in 1856, an emissary forbidden to make contact, and finally a direct approach in 1860 enclosed within a letter from his guardian Sir John Login so that it could not be turned aside. The Resident’s report on her decided the matter: she was much changed, was blind, and had lost the energy that had formerly characterised her. The British concluded she was no longer a threat and let him come.

They met on 16 January 1861 at Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta. The timing was an accident of empire — several Sikh regiments were passing through the city on their way home from the China war — and the result was that the hotel was surrounded by thousands of armed Sikhs celebrating the presence of their royal house. Lord Canning asked Duleep Singh, as a favour, to take his mother to England by the next boat. The judgement that she was no longer dangerous had lasted a matter of days.

She lived two more years, at Lancaster Gate and then Mulgrave Castle and finally Kensington, refusing every proposal that she be housed separately from her son. Her jewellery, recovered from the treasury at Benares, arrived at Lancaster Gate before a visit from Lady Login, and she put it on. She died in her sleep at Abingdon House on 1 August 1863, aged forty-six, having asked that her bones not be left to rot in an inhospitable country.

What she did in those two years mattered more than anything else that happened in them. She told her son, in detail and for the first time, what he had been and what had been taken. Twenty years later he was in the British Library working through the record himself and petitioning the Queen. The claim that ended in the failed rebellion of the 1880s begins in a drawing room in Kensington with a blind woman recounting an empire to a man raised as an English squire.