The Empire in
Popular Culture

The earliest and most unusual screen treatment of the Sikh court came not from India but from France. Le soleil se lève à l'est — "The Sun Rises in the East" — was a six-episode television mini-series made in 1974, directed by François Villiers, with the celebrated actor Saeed Jaffrey as Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Its premise is precisely the territory of this site's Foreign Officers page. Two veterans of Napoleon's armies, cast adrift at the fall of the Empire, make their way east to the kingdom of the Punjab, where its king — seeking to remake his cavalry into a modern army — takes them into his service as generals. The series centres on Jean-François Allard, the French cavalry officer who really did rise to command the Fauj-i-Khas, and carries his story all the way to the quiet of Saint-Tropez, his birthplace. A Honigberger figure even appears in the cast, and the series came with a theme song performed by the rock star Johnny Hallyday. It now streams through the French national audiovisual archive (INA's madelen), with the episodes also circulating on YouTube and Dailymotion under the English title.

For a numismatic and historical site its value is double: it is both a genuine period curiosity and a dramatisation of the very Europeans whose careers are documented elsewhere here. Bobby Singh's later English-language novel of the same name, The Sun Rises in the East, retells the same Allard story for modern readers — a separate work, not the original.

Everything above concerns one man. But the cinema that has grown up around Sikh history over the last twenty years is drawn overwhelmingly to a different century — that of the Gurus, the persecutions and the misls, which is to say the period before Ranjit Singh rather than his own.

That is worth noticing. The empire produced the coinage, the treaties and the state; the eighteenth century produced the martyrdoms. Popular memory has consistently preferred the second. Where the Maharaja gets television serials, Banda Singh Bahadur and the Sahibzadas get feature films — and the films reach far larger audiences.

Two further strands sit just outside this page's period. Guru Nanak Jahaz (2025), again from Sharan Art and Tarsem Jassar, treats the Komagata Maru; and a substantial body of work — Saka: The Martyrs of Nankana Sahib, Sajjan Singh Rangroot, Subedar Joginder Singh, Kesari, Sardar Udham — deals with the colonial and post-annexation Sikh experience rather than the sovereign one.

The pattern across all of it is the same one that governs the Ranjit Singh material above. Where the record is thin, the screen fills it in; where the record is full, the screen tends to stay away. There is no feature film about the Lahore mint, the Bhairowal settlement or the recoinage of 1847 — and there is unlikely ever to be one.

Every dramatisation must simplify, and most must invent. The serials compress decades into seasons; the novels supply the romance the record withholds; the legends keep what the documents cannot. Against all of it stands the quiet, dateable evidence this site is built on — the Nanakshahi and Gobindshahi rupees, the mint-names of Lahore and Amritsar, the Vikram Samvat years struck into the metal, the first sovereign Sikh coins of Banda Singh Bahadur.

The coins do not tell a romance. But they tell the truth about who ruled, where, and when — and so they are the surest check on every story told above. Read the films and the novels for the spell of the empire; read the coins for its reality.