Before we leave the Sikhs and move our focus back to Jammu and Kashmir, it is worth dwelling on the effects of the Sikh War for just a while longer. Within a short span of time, the sepoys of the Bengal Army, until then the iron fist of the East India Company’s armies in India, rebelled. The British called it a mutiny, the Indians the war of independence. For the Punjab, however, it was a chance to avenge the defeat inflicted by the sepoys on them during the Anglo-Sikh Wars and furthermore, the choice of Bahadur Shah Zafar as the symbolic leader, brought back painful memories of the earlier Mughal-Sikh clashes. The end result was that the Sikhs and the Gorkhas, perhaps the last two bastions to fall before the British held complete sway over most of India, ironically rallied to the rescue of their recent foe. Without the Sikhs and the Gorkhas on their side, it is unlikely that the British would have survived 1857 and then carried on for another 90 years.
Yet survive they did, and in the huge reorganisation that followed, not only did the British take Akbar’s land administrative methods and hone them into a new system under the Civil Service, they reorganised their army on Ranjit Singh’s methods as well, almost to the extent that even the colour scheme of uniforms for some regiments was taken from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army. The loyalty and bravery of the Sikh and Gorkha troops who fought with the British in 1857 was rewarded by declaring these two regions as being “martial races”. The exalted status of the high caste Hindu troops of the Bengal army, recruited from what is now Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar, who had in reality captured and handed the British most of their Empire, was consigned to the dustbin of history.
The events of 1857 saw Raja Gulab Singh send his son Ranbir Singh with 2,000 foot soldiers, 200 cavalry and six heavy guns to help the British in the siege of Delhi. Even though Gulab Singh himself died in August 1857, Ranbir Singh kept the British appeased by sending a large amount of money to Punjab for the troops whose pay was in arrears. The “mutineers” were also forbidden to seek asylum in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. A grateful Queen Victoria conferred on Raja Ranbir Singh the title of the “Most Exalted Order of the Star of India” while at the same time his gun salute was raised from 19 to 21, thereby making him a Maharaja in every sense of the word.
Gulab Singh, having learned from the havoc that followed Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death, had personally handed power to his son and heir, Ranbir Singh, in 1856 while he himself decided to live out the rest of his years as the Governor of Kashmir.
From Gulab Singh’s point of view, Gilgit remained a problem area for him during his lifetime. In 1851, with the Rajas of Yasin, Hunza and Nagar, there was a major uprising in Gilgit, which resulted in the entire Dogra garrison stationed there being massacred, save a single survivor, a Gorkha woman, who swam across the Indus to tell the story of the disaster. This limited Gulab Singh’s frontier during his own lifetime to the Indus River, which flowed east to west in the region, after which it looped around the Nanga Parbat mastiff and entered the plains of the Punjab.
The equations were changing rapidly at all times. Having subjugated the Punjab by 1849, quite a few British officials now began to look at Kashmir with fresh eyes. The Governor General, Lord Henry Hardinge, considered to be the chief architect of the Treaty of Amritsar, was increasingly under attack from his own ilk for having “sold” Kashmir to the Dogra chief. Sir Charles Napier, who subsequently was to become the Commander in Chief, scathingly criticised the decision: “What a king to install! Rising from the lowest foulest sediment of debauchery to float on the highest surge of blood, he lifted his besmeared front and England adorned it with a crown? Cramming down the throats of the Cashmerian people a hated and hateful villain.” Others, equally scathing in their opinion, were also giving voice to the opposition to the treaty. Herbert Edwards, a British officer who served as an ADC to General Gough, wrote vis-à-vis Raja Gulab Singh: “He has the cunning of the Vulture. He sat apart in clear atmosphere of passionless distance, and with sleepless eye beheld the lion and the tiger contending for the deer, and when the combatants were dead, he spread his wings, sailed calmly down, and feasted where they fought.” The prose and sentiment, so typical of the British at that time, unfortunately seems to have been bought by most historians.
Pressure began to be put on Raja Gulab Singh to accept a British Resident as was the case with most other Indian princely states, but Gulab Singh held firm. The British once again decided to play the wait and watch game, hoping that like in the case of Ranjit Singh, Gulab Singh’s successors too would provide them to implode the state from within. But if Raja Gulab Singh had proved to be a tough “vulture” for the British to crack, Maharaja Ranbir Singh had further evolved into a “lammergeier”—the Dogras were there to stay.
After the First Sikh War the British annexed Sikh lands east of the Sutlej and the areas in between it and the Beas; Jammu and Kashmir was detached and the size of the Sikh army limited. After the Second Sikh War the boy-king, Maharaja Duleep Singh was dethroned by Lord Dalhousie and the Punjab was annexed to the British Empire.
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Shiv Kunal Verma is the author of the highly acclaimed 1962: The War That Wasn’t and The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why.
This is the seventh part of a series on Kashmir. The sixth part, Stones of silence: Ladakh and beyond was published on 27 September 2020.
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