A SIKH TRAGEDY

Despite the summer heat enveloping the walled city of Lahore in late June 1839, a chilling sense of anxiety and grief pervaded the hearts of Punjabi ministers and courtiers gathered inside the royal chambers of the imperial palace. Their master, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, lay senseless and on the verge of death in his opulent bedchamber, inside the Lahore Fort. Countless prayers were being offered for his recovery, and vast sums of alms – gold, jewels and elephants, no less – were given away from the fabulous riches of the Sikh imperial treasury, in the desperate hope of saving Ranjit Singh’s life, or at least procuring God’s mercy for his soul.

The palatial apartments occupied by the ailing maharajah were originally constructed centuries before by the great Mughal emperors, but they had been restored to a different kind of glory by Ranjit Singh, who, as a 19-year-old, had conquered Lahore in 1799.

Famed as the ‘Lion of Punjab’, Ranjit Singh was a self-made king who established the rule of his ancestral warrior-clan, the Sukerchakia misl, at the head of a new empire in northern India. With Mughal rule entirely decimated, the Sikh king’s might came to equal that of his greatest ally and rival, the East India Company – the enormously powerful trading organisation that, by the early 19th century, was acting as an agent of British imperialism in India.

These two new powers established competing empires during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but