By K. K. Khullar
During my visit to Pakistan in 1983 I was pleasantly surprised to find that the people there regarded Ranjit Singh as “their” king in whose reign Punjab regained its lost glory. The guide at Lahore Fort described Ranjit Singh as the bravest and the most benevolent king of the 19th century. He said that the Punjab peasantry still remembered the king in whose rule the strong were just and the weak secure. A book entitled “The Real Ranjit Singh” by a Pakistani historian, Syed Fakeer Waheeduddin, the great grandson of Fakeer Azizuddin, Maharaja’s Foreign Minister, brings out the secular character of the Maharaja giving very intimate facts based on family records and archives. According to the book the Maharaja is fondly remembered by one and all, not only by people who once lived there but also by those who still reside there. Even during his conquests he was regarded more as a liberator than a conqueror as at Peshawar, Multan or Kashmir. Wherever the soldiers of Ranjit Singh went they were treated as friends, not foes. Maharaja’s standing orders to his armies were that during their movement, no religious place, no religious book, no place of learning, no standing crop was to be destroyed and no woman dishonoured.
Capital punishment was abolished. “Never was so large an empire built with so little criminality”, says Princep. The Maharaja is not known to have taken anybody’s life although his own life was attempted at more than once. His special care for the ‘Kisan’ (farmer) and the ‘Jawan’ (soldier) made Punjab a very livable place. The result was that people from Delhi, UP and Rajasthan came and settled in Punjab. George Keene, a very keen observer of the Punjab scene, states: “In hundreds and in thousands the orderly crowds stream on. Not a bough is broken of a wayside tree, not a rude remark to a woman”. Writing sixty years after the Maharaja’s death, Griffin said: ” His name is a household word in the province. His portrait is preserved in the castle and in the cottage alike.” Jacquemont, the French botanist who came from Paris to Punjab in search of roses and who met the Maharaja, said, “His conversation is a nightmare. He passes from one subject to another with the speed of a tornado. He remembers by heart the names of all the villages of his empire, the village heads, the cash crops, the flora and the fauna.” He was a modern mind unfettered by nationalities, religion and faiths, an internationalist who looked much beyond his frontiers.