THE LION OF THE PUNJAB

Maharaja Ranjit Singh has eluded capture by even the most persistent of his biographers. He has been approached on his blind side by western authors curious to find out whether the wily, wiry, lion of the Punjab was quite as bad and as wicked as he was made out to be, and from the other side by eastern authors eager with the hope of discovering some unsheathed flank of his character.

The Frenchman, Jacquemont, for instance, who visited Ranjit Singh in 1830—1831 found that ‘this model Asiatic king iss not saint: far from it’, yet advised others that in spite of all that is reprehensible in Ranjit, ‘do love him a little for my sake’. Emily Eden, writing some years later of her meeting with Ranjit Singh in the company of her brother Lord Auckland in November 1838, described her host as ‘an old mouse, with grey whiskers and one eye’; Hugel saw him no differently as ‘the most ugly and unprepossessing man I saw throughout the Punjab’; and William Osborne (Emily Eden’s and Lord Auckland’s and Lord Auckland’s nephew, and author of the book under review), thought him ‘ill-looking (but)… a very extraordinary man’.

Modern eastern biographers of Ranjit Singh such as his fellow Sikh, Khushwant Singh, who has written an explanatory introduction to his work, and Fakir Waheeduddin, a descendant of Ranjit Singh’s Muslim minister Fakir Nuruddin, have tried to correct the perspective with their more sympathetic assessments. They came from all sides, they saw but finally it was the Maharaja who actually conquered.

As Military Secretary to the Governor General (Lord Auckland), Osborne’s presence in the mission sent by the British Government in May 1938 was an opportunity for both the Sikh Maharaja and Lord Auckland to prepare by this indirect preliminary contact for their meeting later in the year. The mission was formally headed by McNaghten, the Political Secretary to the British Government, and it was he who conducted the negotiations with the vacillating Maharaja in seeking to ensure the assistance of the Sikh Durbar in the restoration by the British of Shah Shuja to the throne of Afghanistan. Osborne’s contact with Ranjit Singh was less official. While McNaghten prepared the ground for the meeting in November, Osborne paved the way for future historians by recording in his journal what he described as ‘this imperfect description of a few weeks spent in familiar intercourse with a ruler’.

It was Osborne’s first visit to the Sikh Maharaja, and his journal commenced with his journey to and his arrival at the Sikh camp at Adinangar on 28th may 1838. He stayed with them and moved with them, when the heat became oppressive, to Lahore, reaching there on 16th June in the full heat of summer. He resided, as his aunt Emily might have described it in the ‘contrasts of public grandeur and private discomfort’ at Shalimar Gardens, just outside Lahore. There he remained enduring the sun and then the monsoons until the completion of the mission in July, when he was granted permission to leave. On 13th July, he left for Simla but only after getting a glimpse of the famous Kohinoor diamond shown to him personally by a proud but unrepentant Ranjit Singh.

His account of his stay is wry, revealing and occasionally prophetic assessment of the Sikh court and its myriad personalities, of peacocks such as Sher Singh, the Maharaja’s natural second son, Suchet Singh and his equality flamboyant nephew Hira Singh who had become the old Maharaja’s young passion. Each character he comes across asserts his individuality and it is a measure of the accuracy of Osborne’s opinion of them that his journal has been regarded since its original appearance in 1840 as an invaluable source by subsequent historians writing on this period.

That Ranjit Singh was able to achieve more by will-power than force of arms, by cunning more than by intimation and by personality than by physical presence, an unquestioned authority over his people and was able to fuse them regardless of their religion into a cohesive nation has baffled those historians who would wish to regard his achievement as an isolated spurt of individual dynamism. Khushwant Singh however sees the era of Sikh glory during Ranjit Singh’s reign as the crest of a natural, forceful, flowing wave of Punjabi nationalism.

His view of Ranjit Singh as ‘God’s gift to biographers, novelists and film producers may find less popularity amongst his colleagues for it may prove more than difficult to locate a one-eyed, pock-faced diminutive Sikh with a mania for horses, to play the part convincingly. God’s own choice, by turning his physical disabilities into spurs towards greatness, played and became the part of a humane, renowned ruler of the Punjab.

This reprint of Osborne’s journal by the Oxford University Press, faithful to the spirited brevity of the original with its illustrations based upon sketches by Osborne himself, makes an interesting addition to its series of historical reprints.

Printed in OUTLOOK magazine, Karachi, 16 Feburary 1974.]