By the annexation of Pegu the eastern frontier of the British Indian Empire was extended up to the banks of the Salween. British control was established over the whole of the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, and access to the sea was closed to the attenuated Burmese kingdom. Major (afterwards, Sir) Arthur Phayre was appointed Commissioner of the newly acquired British province extending as far north as Myede, fifty miles beyond Prome, and with the co-operation of Captain (afterwards General) Fytche he tried to introduce necessary administrative reforms.
British Relations with the Sikhs and Annexation of the Punjab
Rise of the Sikh Power
The Sikh struggle for independence from 1708 to 1716 under the temporal leadership of Banda came to a disastrous end by the year 1716. Banda was tortured to death and his followers were sub- jected to relentless persecution at the hands of the Mughuls. But the repression could not kill, out and out, the military spirit of the Khalsa. Rather, the growing weakness of the Delhi Empire gave the Sikhs an opportunity to reorganize themselves. The invasion of Nadir Shah in 1739, and the first three Abdali inroads (1748-1752), by enfeebling Mughul hold on the Punjab and throwing this province into confusion, enabled the Sikhs to enrich themselves and to enhance their military power as well as political influence. In the course of the next few years they “passed through a series of reverses to complete victory”. They baffled all the attempts of the Abdali invader to crush them, and defied him even after his victory at Panipat. When he left Lahore for his home on the 12th December, 1762, the Sikhs pursued him, hung about his army and harassed it in every way. Their aggressions were aggravated through the inefficiency of the Abdali’s lieutenants in the Punjab, over which they began to dominate, and they occupied Lahore in February, 1764. “The whole country from the Jhilam to the Satlaj was partitioned among the Sikh chiefs and their followers, as the plains of Sarhind had been in the previous year.” They assembled at Amritsar and proclaimed the sway of their commonwealth and faith by striking coins to the effect that Guru Govind had obtained from Nanak degh, tegh, fateh, or grace, power and rapid victory. After the final retirement of Ahmad Shah Abdali from India in 1767, the Sikhs wrested his Indian conquests from his weak successor, Timur Shah; and by the year 1773, Sikh sway extended from Shahranpur in the east to Attock in the west, and from Multan in the south to Kangra, and Jammu in the north.
The independence of the Sikhs was thus realized and they formed themselves into twelve misls or confederacies: the Bhangi, the Kanheya, the Sukerchakia, the Nakai, the Fyzullapuria, the Ahluwalia, the Ramgarhia, the Dalewalia, the Karora Singhia, the Nishanwala, the Sahid and Nihang, and the Phulkia. This organisation of the Sikhs has been described as “theocratic con- federate feudalism”. But with the disappearance of a common enemy, jealousies and discords appeared among the leaders of the Sikh misls, who began to pursue a policy of self-aggrandizement at a time when British imperialism was rapidly expanding over India. To organise the Sikhs into a national monarchy on the destruction of feudalism was the work of a man of destiny, Ranjit Singh, whose rise must be briefly surveyed before we study the relations between the Sikhs and the English.
Ranjit Singh
Ranjit Singh was born on the 13th November, 1780. He was the son of Maha Singh, the leader of the Sukerchakia misl, by his wife of the Jhind family. Unlike Shivaji, Ranjit spent his early life amidst uninspiring surroundings. He was but a boy of ten when his father died in 1790; and he was then the head only of a small confederacy with a little territory and very limited military resources, while there were many other superior chiefs. But the Indian invasions of Zaman Shah of Kabul, during 1793-1798, exercised a decisive influence on his career. In return for the conspicuous services that Zaman Shah received from Ranjit, he appointed him governor of Lahore at the age of nineteen, with the title of Raja, in A.D. 1798. This grant of office by an Afghan ruler, against whose ambitious ancestor, Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Sikhs had fought stubbornly for mastery over the Punjab, marked the beginning of an “astonishingly successful military career”, whose exploits resulted in the extinction of Afghan supremacy in the Punjab and the building up of a strong Sikh national monarchy. Ranjit threw off the Afghan yoke before long, and, taking advantage of the differences and quarrels among the chiefs of the Trans-Sutlej misls, gradually absorbed them into his kingdom. In 1805 Holkar, pursued by Lord Lake, bought Ranjit’s help; but the Sikh chief did not comply with his request. Ranjit Singh was relieved of this new menace by the conclusion of the Treaty of Lahore on the lst January, 1806, which excluded Holkar from the Punjab and left Ranjit Singh free to carry on his conquests north of the Sutlej.
But Ranjit Singh aimed at supremacy over all the Sikhs. He “laboured”, writes Cunningharm, “with more or less of intelligent design, to give unity and coherence to diverse atoms and scattered elements, to mould the increasing Sikh nation into a well – ordered state, or commonwealth, as Govind had developed a sect into a people, and had given application and purpose to the general institutions of Nanak “. The realization of this aim required the establishment of Ranjit Singh’s control over the Cis-Sutlej States lying between that river and the Jumna. The chronic disorders and discords among these Cis-Sutlej States brought upon them Maratha aggressions resulting in the establishment of Maratha influence in the Cis-Sutlej Sikh country after Mahadaji Sindhia’s treaty of 1785 with the Sikhs. But subsequently the British succeeded in driving out Sindhia and in bringing the Cis-Sutlej States informally under their protection. Neither the Marathas nor the English had any sound claim upon them, but in those days of’ disorder the best claim was “that of the sword”.
