HARKING BACK: Royal space for ‘samadhis’ with a unique history

Fate takes strange twists. A once beautiful Mughal garden was used in the Sikh era to build the ‘Samadhis’ of their royalty, only for the British to hand it over to a Hindu trust, and when Pakistan came about a Muslim religious organisation took over.

Opposite the office of the Superintendent of Lahore’s police is the Islamia College Civil Lines. Till a few years ago on top of the main building, written in chaste Hindi script, were the words ‘Dayanand Anglo Vedic College, Lahore’. The original name of the college was recently erased and the Anjuman Himayat-e-Islam, who own the three Islamia colleges of Lahore, preferred that an empty space carry the Islamic ‘kalima’. But this place has a very interesting history. In this piece our interest is the three Sikh ‘maharanis’ whose ‘samadhis’ exist on the college premises, laced with a brief mention of the place itself.

The records tell us that the original garden of which the Chauburji Gateway was just one of many, was part of the garden of the Mughal princess Zebunnisa, the daughter of the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan. If you approach the gateway you can read on the gateway the words “Sahib-e-Zebunnisa Begum-e-Dauran.” This is one of the major ‘lost gardens’ of Lahore which extended from Nawankot to the edge of the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh, with the ‘tibba’ of Baba Farid being a respected place serving as the northern tip. To the West this garden stretched from the banks of the River Ravi till the edge of Mozang village.

In Mughal days this was the recreational area of the rulers and their families. The constant floods and the ravaging Afghan invasions saw a lot of the area and its monuments being damaged. In the garden also sat the alleged tomb of Anarkali. With the coming of Ranjit Singh a set of bungalows were built by the French generals of the Khalsa Army around this tomb, which today serves as the Punjab Secretariat. A word about Anarkali is in place.

The tomb was surely built by Jahangir for his beloved wife Sahib-e-Jamal, the exceptionally beautiful Turkish daughter of the religious sage Khawaja Hasan of Herat. Sahib-e-Jamal died in Lahore in 1599 and the marble used on the grave has the 99 names of Allah inscribed on them. Experts believe this is ‘the finest marble work in the world’ – a rather tall claim. But in the secrecy of the myth of Anarkali the attributes of the tomb have been lost as has the story of the beautiful Sahib-e-Jamal.

As the Sikh period started and once Ranjit Singh was in power, this portion of the garden was set aside for the ‘future samadhis’ of the royal women, while the area to the north of the Badshahi Mosque was set aside for the royal males. The second wife of Ranjit Singh was a Nakai princess Raj Kaur. She had to change her name as the mother of Maharajah Ranjit Singh had this name. So she came to be called Rani Datar Kaur, who the maharajah lovingly called ‘Mai Nakain’. She was the mother of Maharajah Kharak Singh and grandmother of the Sikh ‘hotspur’ Prince Nau Nehal Singh.

The Nakai Misl was one of the most powerful of the Sikh confederacy. Till a few years ago the Pakistani Punjab had a chief minister by the name of Arif Nakai, whose family claim direct lineage to that Sikh royal family. Mai Nakain died on the 20th of June, 1838, and the maharaja himself monitored the building of her ‘samadhi’ at the edge of the remaining garden next to the ‘tibba’ of Shah Fareed, whose simple structure the maharajah also got built out of reverence. That was damaged badly by the British as they set off to build their police lines next to the District Courts of Lahore.

The next to pass away was the wife of Maharajah Kharak Singh, Maharani Chand Kaur. She was a powerful woman who sought power as the ruler after the mysterious death of her husband, who experts believe was poisoned by the powerful Dogra chief Dhian Singh. As Chand Kaur’s son Nau Nihal Singh was returning from the cremation of his father to claim the throne, another mysterious incident took his life when the archway of the Roshnai Gate fell on him.

So Chand Kaur took over power on the premise that her daughter-in-law was expecting the next true maharajah. On this the crafty Dogra went into action and on the pretext of helping her got a few women from his Jammu hometown to help her. They smashed her head on the 11th of June, 1842 and threw her from the balcony of the Haveli of Nau Nihal Singh, today known as the Victoria School inside Bhati Gate. She was cremated near the ‘samadhi’ of her mother-in-law.

As fate would have it, her daughter-in-law, Sahib Kaur, an Attari Jat chief’s daughter and wife of Nau Nihal Singh, had a miscarriage and lost her son on the basis of which she was a ‘maharani’. She also died in a conspiracy by the Dogra family.

All the three maharanis of Sikh royalty were cremated on the grounds of the famous gardens and their ‘samadhis’ built next to one another. Once the British took over this place was initially protected, and with time they started building administrative offices between the French-built secretariat and the ‘three samadhis’. By this time the Hindu religious organisation, the Arya Samaj, organised under Dayanand Saraswati, who learning from how Sir Syed was organising the Muslim Anglo Oriental College at Aligarh, set up in 1886 the first Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) College in Lahore.

This remained so and would have continued had not 1947 come about, when the DAV College shifted to Ambala in Indian Punjab, where it has since expanded and done well for itself. In Lahore, the Khalifa Hamiduddin-inspired Anjuman Hamiyat-e-Islam had set up the Islamia College on Railway Road. They moved the government to hand over the vacated DAV College, including the ‘samadhis’ of the three Sikh royal ladies within an enlarged space. That is where they remain, only that now they serve as a badly-maintained dispensary.