The Lahore Sales
Between 1850 and 1851 the contents of the Sikh treasury were sold at public auction in the Lahore Fort, in at least eight sales held over a matter of months. Two catalogues survive. This is what they say, and what the missing six imply.
Lattey Brothers & J. Hayes, Auctioneers · The Seesh Mahal, the Citadel, Lahore1850 – 1851
I · Introduction
Six Catalogues That Cannot Be Found
Most of what this site studies is metal that survived. This page is about the opposite: a body of material that was deliberately dispersed, and a documentary record that is missing most of its pages.
After the annexation of the Punjab in 1849 the greater part of the jewels, plate, furniture and other property of the Lahore court was retained by the British government. Duleep Singh, then ten years old, was permitted to take only a small portion with him to Fatehgarh. Of what was kept, the principal jewels went to England soon afterwards along with the Koh-i-Noor, some of them shown in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Everything else was put up to auction at Lahore.
There were at least eight sales. The earliest surviving catalogue is headed as the seventh public sale, which means six had already been held; the second surviving catalogue, two months later, appears to be the final one. Nothing is known of the intervening sales, if there were any. And no catalogue of the first six has ever been located.
II · The Document
A Reprint Ordered by the Dispossessed
The source for this page is a volume printed in 1885 under the title A Reprint of Two Sale Catalogues of Jewels & other Confiscated Property belonging to His Highness the Maharajah Duleep Singh, which were put up to auction and sold at Lahore, in the Years 1850 and 1851, by the Government of India. With Introductory Remarks.
Its provenance is the first thing worth noticing. It was reprinted by order of Duleep Singh himself. By 1885 he was deep in the campaign that would end with his flight from England, his detention at Aden and his fruitless approaches to St Petersburg — and this volume is part of that campaign. It is not a piece of antiquarian publishing. It is a brief, assembled by a man building a case against the government that had raised him, and it should be read as one: accurate on the documents it reproduces, and argumentative in the pages around them.
The introduction states plainly that considerable difficulty was met in obtaining any particulars of the sales, that searches in several quarters failed, and that the two catalogues turned up only in the course of that year. Marginal glosses were added to explain the Punjabi and Persian terms — choga, rezie, mussullund, kimcob, chillumchee — for English readers who would not know a great coat from a quilt from a cloth of gold.
III · The Sales
Ten Days in the Sheesh Mahal
The second and larger of the two catalogues gives the arrangements in full, and they repay reading slowly. The Grand Public Sale of the Lahore Confiscated Property was conducted by Messrs. Lattey Brothers and Mr. J. Hayes, auctioneers. It opened on Monday 10 February 1851 and ran for nine succeeding days, Sundays excepted, beginning at half past eleven each morning. The catalogue was printed by Charles de Rozario at the Chronicle Press.
The venue is given as the Seesh Mahal, the Citadel, Lahore.
The conditions of sale are those of any commercial auction of the period, and that is precisely their force. Cash payable on or before delivery. A deposit of a quarter of the value at the fall of the hammer, if required. Three days to clear, failing which the lot would be resold at the defaulter’s risk and his deposit forfeited. Descriptions believed correct but not warranted — lots to be taken with all faults and errors. No removals during the sale.
There is no ceremony anywhere in the document, and no acknowledgement that the goods were of any different order from a deceased estate in Calcutta. That flatness is the most eloquent thing about it.
IV · The Clause That Belongs on This Site
Condition Five
Among the conditions printed at the head of the February 1851 catalogue is one that does not appear in the earlier list, and that no general history of the annexation has any reason to notice. It stipulates that all lots are to be sold and paid for in Company’s Rupees only.
Consider what that sentence does. The Nanakshahi rupee had held a weight of 11.0 to 11.35 grams from VS1856 to the last issues before annexation; it was the coin of Lahore and Amritsar, struck in the name of the Gurus, and it was still in every purse in the city in February 1851. It was not acceptable payment for the property of the house that had struck it.
A currency does not die when the last die is destroyed. It dies when it stops being accepted, and the clearest way to see the death of the Sikh coinage is not in a mint record but in an auctioneer’s conditions of sale. The treasury of the Sikh state was liquidated in the coin of the state that had taken it. On the coinage itself see Coin, Commerce & Control and the reign of Duleep Singh.
A second detail of the same kind runs through the later lots. Weights are noted in the margin in tolas — the Indian unit — against gold and silver items. The measure of the metal stayed Indian; the money that bought it did not.
V · The Lots
What Was Actually on the Table
The two catalogues together run to well over two thousand lots. The bulk of them are textiles and household goods, listed in the numbing repetition of any auction inventory: Lahore silks by the piece, remnants of satin by the forty, Kashmir shawls square and long, Multan table covers, quilted rezies in crimson and green and canary, embroidered velvet saddle cloths, cloth of gold from Benares. Then carved crystal and jasper — cups, trays, teapots, sword handles, desk seals, an agate mouthpiece, six crystal spoons.
Then a long run of firearms, and here the character of the collection starts to show: fowling pieces and rifles by Manton, Westley Richards, Nock and Bond of London, Lepage and Jover and Roberts of Paris, Chabey of Bordeaux, a Kendall pea rifle from Windsor, a self-charging Collier, howdah guns of large bore, Kashmir matchlocks mounted in gold. This is not a state arsenal. It is a sporting collection, assembled by men with money and taste and a great deal of shooting to do.
And then, scattered among the thousands, the lots that make the whole document painful to read.
Cat. 1 · 615
A faithful likeness of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, in a light silver setting. His portrait, sold by lot number.
Cat. 2 · 186
A gold-mounted double-barrelled gun, recorded in the catalogue as having been Ranjit Singh’s favourite fowling piece.
Cat. 2 · 220
A jewelled Damascus sword whose hilt and gold scabbard mountings are studded with four hundred and sixty-one white diamonds, fifty-three emeralds and seventy small rubies. Among the arms the introduction identifies as personally worn by Ranjit Singh.
Cat. 2 · 305
A jewelled Damascus sword, fifty-four large diamonds and forty-seven smaller in the hilt, a hundred and five more on the scabbard mounts. Prepared for Maharaja Kharak Singh shortly before his death, and — the catalogue notes — never worn.
Cat. 2 · 306
The companion sword: gold buckle, scabbard mounts and handle, two hundred and twenty-five diamonds and numerous small rubies. Made for Duleep Singh. He was ten when it was sold.
Cat. 2 · 61
A jewelled dagger with an enamelled gold sheath inlaid with diamonds and rubies and hung with pearl tassels, recorded as formerly the property of Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk — one of nine lots the introduction traces to the jewels the Afghan king surrendered to Ranjit Singh along with the Koh-i-Noor.
Cat. 2 · 207
Identified in the introduction as a pearl necklace worn by one of Ranjit Singh’s queens.
Lot 306 is the one to hold onto. A sword made for a child, sold at public auction in his father’s palace while he was still a child, by a government that had appointed itself his guardian, and catalogued between a sword made for his dead half-brother and the next lot in the sequence.
VI · The Word “Confiscated”
The Argument in the Introduction
Both catalogues are headed “Lahore Confiscated Property,” and the 1885 introduction devotes itself to attacking that description. The argument runs as follows, and it is a lawyer’s argument.
The Treaty of 1849 confiscated the property of the State of Lahore. But the treaty’s third article deals with the Koh-i-Noor separately, requiring the Maharaja personally to surrender it to the Queen. If the stone had been State property it would already have been confiscated by the second article and no third article would have been needed. Its separate treatment therefore concedes that it was the Maharaja’s own. And the jewels that came from Shah Shuja are of the same class as the Koh-i-Noor, having arrived by the same transfer — a point the introduction reinforces by noting that an emerald engraved with Ahmad Shah’s name, and a saddle pommel cut from a single emerald, both from that source, were among the items Duleep Singh was allowed to keep as private property.
The introduction then turns to the character of the goods themselves. Shawls, wearing apparel, household furniture, harness, and a very large collection of English and French sporting guns are not the property of a state. Lot 615 is a portrait of the owner’s father. These are the contents of a household, and no reading of the treaty reaches them.
VII · The Money
One Figure, and What Can Be Built On It
No record of the total realised by the sales could be found in 1885, and none is known now. The catalogues do not print prices. Exactly one figure survives, and every estimate of what the Lahore treasury fetched rests on it.
The arithmetic deserves a closer look than it usually gets, because it cuts in an unexpected direction. Ninety-five items realising Rs 1,89,287 average almost Rs 2,000 apiece. Applied across 952 items that average would give something near nineteen lakh for the second catalogue — roughly double the introduction’s own estimate of ten lakh.
The introduction is therefore being conservative, and evidently assumes the 95 recorded items were among the more valuable. That is a reasonable assumption, and it means the figure of half a million pounds for the whole dispersal is a floor built on a deliberately cautious reading rather than a rhetorical maximum. It is the estimate of an interested party, and it is a restrained one.
The final observation in the introduction is the one an auctioneer would agree with. Property of this quality, sold at a place as remote from the market as Lahore, in a rapid series of sales held within months of one another, cannot have made anything like its value. The dispersal was not merely a transfer of wealth. It was a transfer conducted in the way most likely to destroy value in the process.
VIII · What Is Missing
The Six Catalogues
Six catalogues of the first six sales were printed. They were commercial documents, produced in quantity by a Lahore press for distribution to bidders, and they were not secret. In 1885 the Maharaja’s advisers looked for them in several quarters and found none. So far as this site is aware, none has surfaced since.
What they would contain is the earlier and probably richer part of the dispersal — the sales held before the seventh, when the pick of the collection would still have been on the table. Any one of them would be among the most important documents for the material history of the Sikh court, and there is no obvious reason why a copy should not be sitting unremarked in a family papers deposit, a regimental collection, or an auction house’s own bound files.
If you have seen one, this site would like to hear about it.
Sources
Sources and Further Reading
- A Reprint of Two Sale Catalogues of Jewels & other Confiscated Property belonging to His Highness the Maharajah Duleep Singh, which were put up to auction and sold at Lahore, in the Years 1850 and 1851, by the Government of India. With Introductory Remarks. 1885. The whole basis of this page: the Catalogue of the Seventh Public Sale, the Grand Public Sale of 10 February 1851, the conditions of sale, and the introduction setting out the Maharaja’s case.
- Treaty of Lahore, 1849, articles 2 and 3 — the confiscation clause and the separate surrender of the Koh-i-Noor.
- Peter Bance. Sovereign, Squire and Rebel: Maharajah Duleep Singh. For the 1880s campaign of which the reprint forms part.
- F. A. Khan. The Princess Bamba Collection Catalogue: Antiquities of Sikh Period. Department of Archaeology, Lahore, 1961. For what of the Sikh court’s material eventually returned to Lahore.
- On the coinage the sales refused to accept, see this site’s Coin, Commerce & Control and The Sikh Empire.