Maharaja Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh was born in 1780 at Gujranwala, the son of Mahan Singh, chief of the Sukerchakia misl. Smallpox took the sight of his left eye as a child. His father died when he was twelve, and he took control of the misl at seventeen, with his mother-in-law Sada Kaur at his side.

In 1799 he entered Lahore, invited by its citizens, and in 1801, on Vaisakhi, he was proclaimed Maharaja of the Punjab. Over the next four decades he united the warring misls and conquered Amritsar in 1802, Kasur in 1807, Kangra in 1809, Attock in 1813, Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar in 1834, while his Dogra generals took Ladakh. His kingdom, the Sarkar-i-Khalsa, ran from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej and from Tibet to Sindh. In 1809 he made a treaty with the British at Amritsar fixing the Sutlej as the border, which he kept for the rest of his life.

He ruled in the name of the Khalsa and struck coins in the name of the Gurus, not his own. He covered the upper storeys of the Harmandir Sahib in gilded copper, which gave it the name the Golden Temple, but also gave to mosques and temples. His ministers included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs: the Muslim Fakir brothers, the Hindu Dogras and Misr Diwan Chand, the Sikh Sandhawalias. He built a modern army trained by European veterans of Napoleon's wars, among them Allard and Ventura, and equipped it with artillery cast in Lahore.

He wore the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which he took from the fugitive Shah Shuja in 1813. He drank hard, rode hard and was famous for his curiosity, questioning every visitor for hours. He was illiterate but had an extraordinary memory, and was said never to have signed a death warrant.

He died in Lahore on 27 June 1839. Four of his queens and seven slave girls burned on his pyre. Within ten years of his death the kingdom was torn apart by court intrigue and handed to the British. His samadhi stands beside the Lahore Fort and the Badshahi Mosque, and Sikhs remember him as Sher-e-Punjab, the Lion of the Punjab.

Contemporaries found him unimpressive to look at, small and pockmarked, and dressed more plainly than any of his courtiers. Colonel James Skinner, an early biographer, described a young man obsessed with horses, musketry, swords and drill; a British officer wrote that he often led storming parties himself and was the first into the breach. In 1785, when Ranjit Singh was five, the traveller George Forster had predicted that a single Sikh leader would one day absorb all the misls. At his death his kingdom was about the size of modern Germany, and his arsenal held more than five hundred guns. Alfred de Dreux's portrait of him on horseback hangs in the Louvre.