Ranjit Singh
Ranjit Singh founded the Sikh Empire and ruled Punjab for forty years, the only power in India that the British did not attack while he lived. Born in 1780 at Gujranwala into a Sukerchakia misl family, he lost an eye to smallpox as a child, was illiterate all his life, and succeeded his father at twelve. Punjab was then divided among twelve Sikh misls, or confederacies, with Afghan and Maratha pressure from outside. He took Lahore in 1799 at nineteen, invited by its inhabitants against its unpopular Afghan governors, and proclaimed himself Maharaja of Punjab in 1801. He absorbed the other misls by conquest and marriage, took Amritsar in 1802, and pushed north and west — Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar, taking territory from the Afghans that no Indian power had held for centuries. He built a modern army, the Fauj-i-Khas, drilled and organised by European officers, many of them Napoleonic veterans such as Jean-François Allard and Jean-Baptiste Ventura, with its own artillery foundries. His state was Sikh-ruled but deliberately secular in composition: Muslims formed the majority of his subjects and many of his senior officials, his foreign minister was a Muslim, his finance minister a Hindu. He banned cow slaughter out of deference to Hindus, funded mosques and temples, and abolished capital punishment. He had the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar overlaid in gold, giving the Golden Temple its name. He signed the Treaty of Amritsar with the British in 1809, fixing the Sutlej as the boundary, and kept the peace with them. He acquired the Koh-i-Noor diamond in 1813. He died in 1839, and his empire fell within a decade.
- Lived: 1780 CE – 1839 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: maharaja
