The Wallace Collection’s exhibition “Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King” is the first major show of its kind in London since the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms” was put on in 1999. Among Punjabi Sikhs, the Maharajah Ranjit Singh remains known as “the Lion of the Punjab.” He was a teenager during the 1790s, when he won his first military victories; by the time he reached early middle age he had managed to unify the Punjab region into an empire that, alas, did not survive long after his death. Those who compare Ranjit Singh to his approximate contemporary Napoleon are not necessarily exaggerating, at least where battlefield prowess is concerned.
This is a small exhibition, featuring some very interesting arms and armor, a certain amount of jewelry, some textiles, Ranjit Singh’s famous golden throne (on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum), and a selection of rare pictures that are not necessarily impressive in artistic terms, but reward scrutiny for what they reveal about the history and society of the Punjab. Immigrants from this part of the Indian subcontinent have arrived in English-speaking countries in some number since the end of the Second World War; their culture is worth exploring, not least on account of its growing political importance in the West.
The watercolors and gouaches that were produced for Punjabi courtly and aristocratic circles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries share a visual language with pictures from the Mughal Empire, which was founded in 1526 by Babur, who was descended from Tamerlane on his father’s side and Genghis Khan through his mother. This empire dominated the Punjab, and much of northern India, for two centuries, until it collapsed, and faded slowly into irrelevance over a period of more than a hundred years; the last Mughal emperor went quietly into exile in October 1858. Satyajit Ray’s 1977 film The Chess Players offers a glimpse of this civilization in its final decadent phase.
Mughal painting may be compared to medieval French manuscript illumination: the best examples are refined and intricate, often boasting exquisite coloring; yet particularly where basic draughtsmanship is concerned, even the very finest of them are primitive by the standards of pieces from ordinary Sienese or Florentine workshops of the early fifteenth century, to say nothing of the art of the High Renaissance. To say this isn’t to denigrate the Mughals’ pictures; they are simply the product of a culture in which artistic technologies never developed beyond a certain point.
Antique Sikh paintings, like their finest Mughal antecedents, are generally small, with few of the finest examples larger than a legal-sized or ledger-sized piece of paper. When you compare them to products of the Mughal tradition, you instantly notice a slight deterioration: the pigments and other materials remain of relatively high quality, for the most part, but artists have lost both skill and ambition compared to their seventeenth-century counterparts. Compositions are notably less sophisticated. Painters working for Sikh courts rarely have a knack for visual narrative or guiding the eye around an image in any particular order. At least there is brilliant color. Even so, these artists’ pictures indirectly reflect the persistent instability that arose throughout the Punjab in the eighteenth century.
Punjabi art does not lend itself to contemplation over long periods of time. There is simply not that much to interpret in the way of visual information; instead, much of the modern viewer’s pleasure arises from treating a given work of art as an artifact of history, or even a puzzle. But much of the most relevant information about these images cannot simply be extrapolated from these objects themselves. Connoisseurs of Sikh art need to know the history of the Punjab uncommonly well to be able to make sense of artifacts such as an extraordinary little gouache, nine by twelve inches, of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s funeral, that is currently held by the British Museum. Those who understand how to examine it will find it inexhaustibly interesting.
This picture is usually described as a cremation scene, or a depiction of a funeral. It must have been produced not long after Ranjit Singh’s death in June 1839. Even so, it isn’t particularly realistic, or attractive, and it’s hard to tell just how stylized the scene is or what exactly is going on. There are gray storm clouds at the top of the frame; it takes some time for Ranjit Singh himself to catch your eye, and it isn’t instantly obvious that he is dead or why there are women kneeling around his body; there is some action in the foreground with various bearded men dressed in white. William Godolphin Osborne, who served as military secretary to his cousin the governor-general of India, fills in the necessary background for interpreting this image in a letter that he wrote on July 12, 1839, and included in his memoir The Court and Camp of Runjeet Sing:
His four wives, all very handsome, burnt themselves with his body, as did five of his Cachmerian [Kashmiri] slave girls, one of whom, who was called the Lotus, or Lily, I often saw last year in my first visit to Lahore. Everything was done to prevent it, but in vain. They were guaranteed in their rank and all their possessions, but they insisted upon it; and the accounts from the European officers who were present describe it as the most horrible sight. The four wives seated themselves on the pile with Runjeet Sing’s head upon their laps; and his principal wife desired Kurruck Sing, Runjeet’s son and heir, and Dheean Sing, the late Prime Minister, to come to her upon the pile, and made the former take the Maharajah’s dead hand in his own, and swear to protect and favour Dheean Sing as Runjeet Sing had done; and she made the latter swear to bear the same true allegiance to the son which he had faithfully borne to his father. She then set fire to the pile with her own hands, and they are dead—nine living beings perished together without a shriek or a groan. Dheean Sing threw himself twice on the pile, and said he could not survive his master, but was dragged away by main force. You have no idea what a sensation the poor old man’s death has caused.
The depiction does not quite match the surviving accounts of the cremation, which in any case don’t fully agree on every particular detail. Osborne was not present at the scene: he was in Simla at the time of Ranjit Singh’s funeral. In any case, this is all very alien to the modern Westerner for any number of reasons.
Punjabi Sikh art is a tricky subject not least because of all the controversies involved with the relevant aspects of Punjabi history. Also, the Sikh religion remains closely related to the culture in which it arose, and thus can baffle the theologian or philosopher who fails to take various anthropological and linguistic peculiarities of the Punjab into account. Many Sikhs today use the terms “Sikh” and “Punjabi” interchangeably in conversation, which gives you an idea of how they conceive of themselves, despite having always been a minority in their place of origin, whose sheer size and geographic diversity is not obvious from a map.
The Punjab is a region roughly the size of France that is located in the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent. Its geographical boundaries are determined by the routes of five great rivers: the Indus, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, and the Sutlej. This is the part of the world that Alexander the Great invaded with his armies in 326 B.C. He knew the Jhelum as the river Hydaspes and fought one of his most famous battles along its banks. Any military leader seeking to invade India from the northwest will inevitably sweep through the Punjab with his forces on his way to Delhi. This fact has determined much of Punjabi history over the past millennium.
The Sikh religion was born in this part of the world over five hundred years ago. A “Sikh” is simply a “disciple” of this faith’s founders—holy men who conceived of God as an impersonal, eternal, universal, transcendent force. They developed doctrines in a poetic language that sometimes resists interpretation; as a result, to define the Sikh religion too strictly is to risk protracted disputes about theology, culture, and language, as well as historiography. Sikhism fundamentally involves a series of practices and disciplines that are determined by the teachings of ten recognized gurus, the last of whom died in 1708. The eleventh guru is considered to be the Adi Granth, or Guru Granth Sahib, which is a collection of texts that has the status of a sacred scripture, as should be obvious from the great respect with which physical copies of the Guru Granth Sahib are treated even in private homes.
If you enter a Sikh temple, you remove your shoes, wash your hands and feet, cover your head, and prepare yourself to approach the holy book, which is enthroned in the main prayer room under a baldaquin. Then you get down on your knees and reverence the physical text precisely as you would a maharajah before settling down to listen to the book’s wisdom, which you hear being read out loud by a Sikh priest who is referred to as a granthi: his main duty throughout the day is to read out the Guru Granth Sahib in an appropriately solemn, dignified manner. Many of the ceremonies with which Sikhs demonstrate their respect for the written wisdom of the gurus are an adaptation of ancient courtly rituals; those who seek to “reform” the religion tend to misunderstand these traditions radically.
Although Sikh teachings reject distinctions of caste and creed, the religion as it is lived by most of the faithful is strongly influenced by the culture of the Jat caste of the Punjab, which is made up of farmers, landowners, and soldiers. Jats have long dominated Sikhism even though the gurus themselves came from a variety of backgrounds. The religion’s founder, Guru Nanak, was born in 1469 to a Hindu family; he was a wandering mystic who preached that there is one God, who is an impersonal god. Guru Nanak famously taught that “there is no Hindu, there is no Mussalman”; even the folk legends that have grown around him emphasize a kind of radical equality tempered by hard-headed common sense.
Initially the Sikhs were not regarded as particularly dangerous by the Mughals; indeed, Akbar the Great, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, was generally courteous in such dealings as he had with the gurus. But then, he was unusually tolerant and curious about spiritual matters. The fourth guru, Ram Das, founded the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in 1574; his successor, Guru Arjun, was anointed there in 1581, not without controversy, and even bad blood, among rival claimants to spiritual authority. There is some dispute as to the circumstances of his death. He is known to have been in trouble with Akbar’s successor Jahangir for having held an audience with the emperor’s rebellious son; according to Sikh tradition, Guru Arjun is the first martyr for the faith. His son Guru Hargobind, who was still a child when his father died in 1606, began in earnest to militarize the Sikh nation, evidently as a means of ensuring the survival of the faith.
The ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur, was beheaded on the orders of the Emperor Aurangzeb in 1675. His son Guru Gobind Singh initiated the Sikh formal rite of baptism in 1699. Since then, baptized adult male Sikhs have always been easily identified by their turbans and beards, as well as the steel bracelets they wear around their right wrists, and the daggers that they visibly carry. Outside the Punjab, most of these are blunt and purely ceremonial; but devout Sikhs ideally ought to keep them sharp and should know how to use them. Sikh gentlemen self-consciously avoid mere bellicosity and unprovoked aggression. After all, Guru Gobind Singh was famously clement off the battlefield, and seems to have maintained a friendly attitude even towards the Afghan assassins who stabbed him to death in 1708, one of whom he managed to kill whilst his bodyguards finished off the other.
Punjabi Jats, regardless of their religion, tend to be cynical, skeptical, suspicious, pessimistic and irreverent—in other words, they are peasants; their ideals are naturally closer to Hesiod’s than those of the Homeric heroes. And yet many of them came to adopt the austere, ascetic moral disciplines of the Sikh gurus. Of course, they were forced to as a matter of survival. Even today, Jat culture bears the unmistakable imprint of the violence and chaos of the Punjab during the eighteenth century, after Guru Gobind Singh’s military successor Banda Singh Bahadur was captured by the Mughals and executed at Delhi in 1716. From then on, Sikhs were often compelled to go underground as guerrilla fighters, often surviving as highwaymen, bandits, horse thieves, and cattle rustlers. More settled Punjabis who chose not to resist their rulers did not necessarily enjoy an easier life: eighteenth-century Mughal rule was not obviously enlightened or tolerant.
The Sikhs emerged from a generation in the wilderness in the wake of Nadir Shah’s invasion of India in 1739. Nadir Shah’s men were amazingly cruel during their stampede through the Punjab on their way to Delhi, where, in March 1739, they cut down around twenty thousand men, women, and children in the space of five or six hours, enslaving another ten thousand women and children and they sacked and looted the city. They took so much booty that their baggage train was overloaded and moved dangerously slowly on the way back through the Punjab to Persia. En route, bands of Sikh warriors emerged from hiding to rob Nadir Shah of much of his plunder and free most of the slaves that had been taken at Delhi.
At this time there were no more than one hundred thousand or so Sikhs at the utmost. But together they formed the only effective organized resistance in the Punjab during repeated Afghan invasions from the late 1740s until 1769 or so. The Sikh chiefs formed a defensive alliance made up of a dozen military fraternities called misls, each led by a commander known as a misldar. The system was effective when it came to repelling Afghans and Marathas; less so in terms of ensuring a stable, peaceful, orderly Punjab. Even so, a sharp-eyed English traveler, George Forster (later a civil servant of the East India Company), noted in a letter to a friend in 1785:
Should any future cause call for the combined efforts of the Sikhs to maintain the efforts of empire and religion, we may see some ambitious chief led on by his genius and success and, absorbing the power of his associates, display, from the ruins of their commonwealth, the standard of monarchy.
In fact, the “ambitious chief” whose rise Forster predicted had already been born, on Tuesday, November 13, 1780. Ranjit Singh’s great-great-grandfather Budh Singh, the founder of what became the Sukerchakia misl, had been baptized by Guru Gobind Singh himself. Ranjit Singh’s grandfather Charhat Singh formally established the misl, and was killed in the 1770s when his matchlock musket exploded in his hands during a raid. When Ranjit Singh was ten years old, his father, Maha Singh, brought him along to help besiege the fortress of a feudal lord who had neglected to pay protection money to the misl. Maha Singh fell ill during the siege, anointed his son’s forehead with saffron paste to consecrate him as misldar of the Sukerchakias, then went home to die. Before he drew his last breath, he received the good news of his prepubescent son’s first military victory.
Ranjit Singh married his first wife at the age of fifteen, his second at eighteen, and ended with between seventeen and forty-six wives, with most commentators settling on a figure of around two dozen. As a misldar, he quickly rose above his peers, who were terrified of an invasion by the Pashtun chieftain Zaman Shah Durrani. Aged sixteen, Ranjit Singh led the military resistance, initially commanding five thousand undisciplined men against the enemy’s invading force of thirty thousand or so, and repeatedly humiliated the Afghans so brutally that he ended up frightening his own allies as well. On July 7, 1799, Ranjit Singh made the entire Punjab his when he entered the ancient city of Lahore, occupied it with his forces and made it his capital, all without firing a shot. The people already loved him. In American terms, he was not yet of legal drinking age.
Ranjit Singh’s main adversary at the time, the jealous misldar Gulab Singh Bhangi, plotted to overthrow him and eject him permanently from Lahore, but accidentally drank himself to death during a party. That was the end of any serious opposition. As Major John Collins of the East India Company wrote in June 1800:
At present this chief is regarded throughout Hindustan as the protector of the Sikh nation; it being generally believed that were it not for the fortitude and excellent conduct of Ranjit Singh, the whole of the Punjab would ere this have become a desert waste since it is the boast of these northern savages [the Afghans] that the grass never grows where their horses have once trodden.
On April 12, 1801, he was anointed on the forehead with saffron paste by Sahib Singh Bedi, a direct descendant of Guru Nanak’s, and invested formally with the title of Maharajah. Even so, he refused to wear the emblem of royalty on his turban, and ordered coins to be struck that bore not his own effigy but that of Guru Nanak. He was not particularly vain about his appearance, being just over five feet tall, pitted with smallpox scars, and blind in one eye. Also, he realized that it would be foolish to do anything to inspire further envy among the misldars and all the other unruly feudal lords under his command.
He convinced his subjects that he aimed to rule not a Sikh kingdom but a Punjabi commonwealth in which Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims alike were equal before the law, enjoyed the same privileges, and were subject to the same duties. This apparent cosmopolitanism was based on the reality that of his twenty-three million subjects, under two million were Sikhs; a little over nine million were Hindus, and the remainder were Muslims. Even in districts such as Ludhiana, Firozpur, and Amritsar, where concentrations of Sikhs were heaviest, they never amounted to more than a quarter of the population. Also, their numbers were not necessarily stable.
Until the 1870s, with the advent of various reform movements within Sikhism, it was often the case that, while the male head of a given Punjabi household might be an observant Sikh, his wife often remained, for all intents and purposes, Hindu. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, the boundary between these two religious identifications often seemed porous to outside observers. As Sir Lepel Griffin noted in his biography of Ranjit Singh: “To choose between Hinduism and Sikhism was for [Punjabi women] as if English women were asked to choose between a ball-room and a Quaker meeting.” Sikhism has always had a reputation as a masculine, soldierly religion. But these questions of identification and orthodoxy are too complicated to discuss here.
The British fascinated Ranjit Singh; he spent years trying to learn the secrets of their military tactics and discipline, and sent some of his own soldiers undercover to enlist in the army of the East India Company. By 1803 he was subjecting his forces to rigorous European-style drilling. His men resisted learning infantry tactics for quite some time: Sikh warriors preferred to fight on horseback, thinking it beneath their dignity to engage in battle on foot. On the other hand, they were always eager to get their hands on up-to-date technology wherever possible. In December 1805, Ranjit Singh spent a day spying on the camp of the British Commander-in-Chief Lord Lake before being recognized and admitted to Lord Lake’s tent for an extended conversation. What they discussed was never recorded, although it seems clear that Ranjit Singh had already made up his mind to befriend the British rather than try to defeat them on the battlefield. They seem to have come to a similar decision about him.
Ranjit Singh was amused by British paranoia regarding Napoleon and the supposed possibility that the French might invade India. The French scholar Jean-Marie Lamont has written extensively on the veterans from the Napoleonic Wars who entered his service, among whom the best-known are Jean-François Allard and Jean-Baptiste Ventura, who presented their credentials to him in March 1822, and were followed shortly afterwards by Henri Court and Paolo de Avitabile. All “feringhees” (foreigners) were rewarded handsomely by the maharajah, provided that they abstained from smoking, shaving their beards or eating beef, took native wives, and swore to fight any nation against whom Ranjit Singh declared war, even if it turned out to be their own. By 1830 there were over fifty Europeans and Americans on the Sikh Kingdom’s payroll, including at least one former Philadelphian Quaker, and a Wisconsin-born adventurer and pathological liar, Colonel Alexander Gardner, who posed as a Scotsman and ended his days as an alcoholic fantasist who was sought out by travelers as a storyteller, or else sought them out himself.
Although Ranjit Singh was not a handsome man, he left an indelible impression on all who met him. William Osborne’s account of his first audience with him on May 29, 1838, is fairly typical:
Cross-legged in a golden chair, dressed in simple white, wearing no ornaments but a single string of enormous pearls around the waist, and the celebrated Koh-i-noor, or ‘Mountain of Light’, on his arm—the jewel rivalled, if not surpassed, in brilliancy by the glance of fire which every now and then shot from his single eye as wandered restlessly round the circle—sat the lion of Lahore.
Osborne paints a vivid picture of what it was like to be interrogated by the maharajah:
As this was merely an audience of introduction, the object of the mission was not touched upon, and our time was principally occupied in answering Runjeet’s innumerable questions, but without the slightest chance of being able to satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is hardly possible to give an idea of the ceaseless rapidity with which his questions flow, or the infinite variety of subjects they embrace. “Do you drink wine?” “How much?” “Did you taste the wine which I sent you yesterday?” “How much of it did you drink?” “What artillery have you brought with you?” “Have they got any shells?” “How many?” “Do you like riding on horseback?” “What country horses do you prefer?” “Are you in the army?” “Which do you like best, cavalry or infantry?” “Does Lord Auckland drink wine?” “How many glasses?” “Does he drink it in the morning?” “What is the strength of the Company’s army?” “Are they well-disciplined?” &c. . . .
After thus passing upward of an hour in desultory conversation, Runjeet Sing arose and, according to custom, having half-smothered us with sandal-wood oil, embraced and allowed us to depart with the same ceremonies which had attended our entrance.
Despite this unconventional first impression, Osborne was impressed:
Ill-looking as he undoubtedly is, the countenance of Runjeet Sing cannot fail to strike every one as that of a very extraordinary man; and though at first his appearance gives rise to a disagreeable feeling almost mounting to disgust, a second look shows so much intelligence, and the restless wandering of his single fiery eye excites so much interest, that you get accustomed to his plainness and are forced to confess that there is no common degree of intellect and acuteness developed in his countenance, however odd and repulsive its first appearance may be.
That afternoon, the maharajah sent his head man to ask Osborne whether they would like to see his dancing girls, four of whom had recently arrived from Kashmir. He was a little shocked to hear about Ranjit Singh’s misadventures as a lover, which occasionally led to breaches of protocol, if only in English eyes.
Osborne’s diary for May 30 provides a much fuller assessment of his host:
The more I see of Runjeet Sing, the more he strikes me as an extraordinary man. Cunning and distrustful himself, he has succeeded in inspiring his followers with a strong and devoted attachment to his person; with a quick talent at reading men’s minds, he is an equal adept at concealing his own; and it is curious to see the sort of quiet indifference with which he listens to the absurd reports of his own motives and actions which are daily poured into his ears at the Durbar, without giving any opinions of his own, and without rendering it possible to guess what his final decision on any subject will be, till the moment for action has arrived.
Though he is by profession a Sikh, in religion he is in reality a sceptic, and it is difficult to say whether his superstition is real, or only a mask assumed to gratify and conciliate his people.
He is mild and merciful as a ruler, but faithless and deceitful; perfectly uneducated, unable even to read or write, he has by his own natural and unassisted intellect raised himself from the situation of a private individual to that of a despotic monarch over a turbulent and powerful nation. By sheer force of mind, personal energy, and courage (though at the commencement of his career he was feared and detested rather than loved), he has established his throne on a firmer foundation than that of any other eastern sovereign, and but for the watchful jealousy of the British government, would long ere this have added Sindh, if not Afghanistan, to his present kingdom. He rules it with a rod of iron, it is true; but in justice to him it must be stated, that except in actual open warfare he has never been known to take life, though his own has been attempted more than once, and his reign will be found freer from any striking acts of cruelty and oppression than those of many more civilised monarchs.
All surviving accounts depict Ranjit Singh as difficult to like but easy to love. He was in many respects a typical Punjabi Jat, in his impulsively generous hospitality and inability to understand that not all his guests shared his preferred vices. On July 2, 1839, Osborne recorded in his diary his slight alarm that Ranjit Singh wanted to invite him and the other English officials to a royal drinking party:
At his parties he always helps you himself; it is no easy matter to avoid excess. He generally, on these occasions, has two or three Hebes in the shape of the prettiest of his Cachemirian girls to attend upon himself and his guests, and gives way to every species of licentious debauchery. He fell violently in love with one of these fair cupbearers about two years ago, and actually married her, after parading her on a pillion before himself on horseback, through the camp and city, for two or three days, to the great disgust of all his people. The only food allowed you at these drinking bouts are fat quails stuffed with all sorts of spices, and the only thing to allay your thirst, naturally consequent upon eating such heating food, is this abominable liquid fire.
The maharajah’s palate was not, even by British standards, refined. Osborne describes Ranjit Singh’s preferred alcoholic drink in some detail; it seems to have been around one hundred twenty proof, or possibly even stronger:
Runjeet Sing laughs at our wines, and says that he drinks for excitement, and that the sooner the object is attained the better. Of all the wines we brought with us as a present to him from the Governor-General, consisting of port, claret, hock, champagne, &c., the whiskey was the only thing he liked. During these potatoes he generally orders the attendance of his dancing-girls, whom he forces to drink his wine, and when he thinks them sufficiently excited, uses all his power to set them by the ears, the result of which is a general action, in the course of which they tear one another almost to pieces.
Osborne, alas, was unable to attend one of these drinking-parties: Ranjit Singh’s doctors absolutely forbade his holding one, since he was still recovering from a paralytic stroke. Also, he suffered from a liver ailment, and was in general no longer quite at his physical peak. Indeed, he died less than a year after bidding Osborne farewell, on June 27, 1839.
Ranjit Singh had no successor. After a series of bloody power struggles and political crises, and two Anglo-Sikh Wars, the Punjab was annexed by the British Empire in 1849. It took a bureaucracy to replace him. There has never been another unifying figure of his stature; nor is another Ranjit Singh likely to arise any time soon, at least on the Indian subcontinent. Since 1947, the Punjab has been divided between India and Pakistan. The Indian Punjab was split in half in 1966: the current state has a population of around twenty-eight million, and is roughly three-fifths Sikh, two-fifths Hindu, with a small minority of Muslims and an even smaller one of Christians; Pakistan’s Punjab province is four times the size of Punjab State in India and boasts a population of over one hundred million, which is around ninety-eight percent Muslim. Even Ranjit Singh would struggle to unite the Punjab as it now is into a new nation.
Christianity has never really flourished in the Punjab. Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were eloquent witnesses to history rather than participants. The Jesuit Fr. François-Xavier Wendel, who was born in 1732, arrived in India in 1751, and died in 1803, published a memorandum on the Sikhs, Jats, and Pathans in 1768 that remains an important resource for scholars even now. But he won few if any converts to the faith, and seems to have focused more on intelligence-gathering than evangelization. Christians only began to multiply in the region from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards; even then, numbers remain relatively small. The Catholic Church in the Punjab, both in India and Pakistan, maintains a low profile today; Christians in this part of the world come predominantly from lower-caste families. In a hierarchical, status-conscious culture, these things do not pass unnoticed, and even remain a bar to conversion in most people’s eyes.
The Europeans at Ranjit Singh’s court tended to be nominally Christian at best. Missionaries appear not to have made any impact at all on anybody. Prominent Europeans, whether officers of the East India Company or former soldiers of Napoleon’s, preferred to take advantage of the casually libertine atmosphere around them; many of them maintained harems, with the explanation that these were necessary for keeping up appearances in Lahori society. The only successful conversion in elite circles appears to have taken place after Ranjit Singh died.
Jean-François Allard had served in Napoleon’s Imperial Cavalry at Naples, Spain, and Portugal, and moved to the Imperial Guard in 1814. He missed Waterloo despite being promoted at the end of April 1815 to a captaincy in the Seventh Hussar Regiment, and narrowly escaped with his own life whilst serving as aide-de-camp to Maréchal Count Brune, who was assassinated at Avignon by angry royalists. Allard’s prospects were bleak following the Restoration; in his late thirties he traveled eastwards to seek his fortune, and ended up in Lahore in 1822, at the age of thirty-seven, after years of disappointment and wandering. Ranjit Singh was impressed with him and not only put him in charge of the Sikh kingdom’s cavalry and made him a general but also found him a wife—a Punjabi aristocrat’s daughter who was twelve years old in 1826 when the marriage took place. General Allard spent a few years back home in France to settle his affairs and obtain official papers for his family, then traveled back to the Punjab, where he died in January 1839, only five months before Ranjit Singh, who trusted him as he did no other European at his court.
General Allard had allowed his wife to remain Hindu throughout their marriage; even so, he ensured that all his children were baptized. After Ranjit Singh’s death, Madame Allard decided to move to Saint-Tropez to live alongside the rest of the Allard family. Upon arriving in France, she decided to convert to Catholicism; King Louis-Philippe and the Queen were willing to be her godparents, although they delegated Maréchal Count Gérard, minister of war, to serve in their place at Madame Allard’s baptism and confirmation, on December 22, 1841. General Ventura, who had traveled to Lahore with General Allard two decades before, arrived at the port of Marseilles in time to attend the ceremony, and enjoy a splendid reception afterwards. Madame Allard remained faithful until her death in January 1884, just shy of her seventieth birthday.
The Allard family still lives in Saint-Tropez; their story has not yet fully been told, at least by historians—there is a recent historical novel in French written by one of the general’s descendants. Ranjit Singh has received surprisingly little attention of this sort; so far, all of the films, T.V. series, and historical novels devoted to his life have been mediocre. Where is the artist or writer who will create something worthy of his memory?
