The Sikh Empire

The year 1799 marked a turning point in the history of the Sikhs. On 6 July of that year, Ranjit Singh — barely nineteen years old and Sardar of the Sukerchakia misl since 1792 — rode into Lahore and ejected the three fractious Bhangi chiefs, Chet Singh, Sahib Singh and Mohar Singh, who had long shared its misrule. He had obtained the grant of the city from Shah Zaman, the Durrani ruler of Afghanistan, and now made it his capital and the seat of an emerging Sikh polity.

On 12 April 1801 — the first day of Baisakhi — Ranjit Singh was proclaimed Maharaja of the Punjab, by Sahib Singh Bedi, a direct descendent of Guru Nanak, placing the tilak on his forehead. His government was known as the Sarkar Khalsa and his court as the Durbar Khalsa. He never sat upon a throne; his ordinary chair was his throne and his turban his crown. His coins, like those of the Dal Khalsa before him, bore no royal name or portrait — only the religious couplets that invoked the sovereignty of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh.

When his minister Raja Dhian Singh once remonstrated with him for dressing as a humble servant, Ranjit Singh replied with the question: "In whose name are the coins struck?" Dhian Singh named Guru Nanak, and the Maharaja explained that he in whose name the coins were issued was the true ruler — and he himself merely the Guru's servant. This story, recorded by Bhagat Singh, goes to the heart of the political theology of the Sikh state: the Maharaja ruled as viceregent of the Khalsa, not as sovereign in his own right.

The Sarkar Khalsa was a multi-religious polity in which Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs served at every level. Ranjit Singh's most able diplomat was the Muslim Fakir Azizuddin; his chief administrator for much of the empire's western province was the Hindu Diwan Sawan Mal of Multan. His army — the Fauj-i-Khas — was trained by officers of the former Napoleonic armies: Generals Allard, Ventura, Court and Avitabile. It fought under regimental colours combining the Tricolore with the likeness of Guru Gobind Singh, and received all its commands in French.

The administrative coherence of the Sikh Empire rested on a system of record offices — Daftars — that Ranjit Singh allowed the Brahmin and Khatri communities virtually to monopolise. Their generations of experience in the Mughal and Kabul governments made them, as the thesis of Rajinder Kaur (Punjabi University, 2011) demonstrates, the only pool of trained administrative talent available to him at speed. The resulting Central Secretariat, known as the Darbar-i-Mulla, was built incrementally from 1803 onward by four principal officers whose careers interlocked across forty years.

Diwan Bhawani Das, arriving from Kabul service in 1808, found no regular treasury and no departmental accounts in Lahore. He organised both within a decade. He established twelve Daftars covering every category of state income and expenditure, appointed finance minister in 1811, with a total state income at the time of approximately thirty lakh rupees. When he died in 1834 the secretariat he had created was the most sophisticated administrative machine between Delhi and Kabul. Diwan Ganga Ram, invited by Bhawani Das in 1813 and placed in charge of military accounts, also became keeper of the royal seal — the critical office through which every pay order passed. He simplified the record-keeping system and organised the Abkari (excise) system covering opium, bhang and spirits. On Ganga Ram's death in 1826, both offices passed to Diwan Dina Nath, who had arrived in 1815 at Ganga Ram's own recommendation. On Bhawani Das's death in 1834, Dina Nath assumed the Finance Ministry too, becoming by the final years of the reign the single most indispensable man in Lahore — so deeply embedded in the machinery of state that the early British administrators after 1849 kept him on as the only man who understood the accounts.

The pay order process illustrates how tightly the system was integrated. Every order from the Maharaja — given verbally in Punjabi — was transcribed into Persian by a Munshi, then sealed twice: once with the Akal Sahai Ranjit Singh seal in Gurmukhi and once with Mulahiza Shud in Persian. The sealed document then passed in sequence through the Sarishta-i-Hazur, the Daftar-i-Devi Das, the Daftar-i-Bhawani Das, the General Secretariat, and finally the Naqal Daftar (copying office). Not a single pie could be disbursed from the state treasury without completing this chain. The Toshakhana — the royal treasury — held three keys simultaneously: one with Misr Beli Ram, the Chief Toshakhania; one with Fakir Nur-ud-Din, incharge of the fort; and one with Sardar Hukam Singh, Thanedar of Lahore. All three keys were required to open it.

From the proclamation of Ranjit Singh in 1801 to the annexation of the Punjab by the British in 1849, five maharajas sat on the Lahore masnad. Only the first of them — the Lion of Lahore — ruled with undisputed authority. The four who followed him were swept away by the palace intrigues and army insubordination that the Lion had kept in check through the force of his personality.