The Anglo-Sikh treaties

Ink before iron

The East India Company was a trading company that governed India through paper. It made war when it had to, but it preferred the treaty: a document that fixed a border, named a price, placed a garrison or appointed an adviser, and that could be read back later as proof that the other side had agreed.

Its first agreement with the Sikhs was signed on 1 January 1806, when a defeated Maratha chief, Jaswant Rao Holkar, fled into Panjab with the Company’s army behind him. Three years later, on 25 April 1809, the Treaty of Amritsar made the river Sutlej the edge of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom. He kept faith with it for thirty years and turned his armies north and west instead. Within six years of his death, the same treaty would be read back to his son as proof of Sikh bad faith.

ਸਚ ਕੀ ਬਾਣੀ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਆਖੈ ਸਚੁ ਸੁਣਾਇਸੀ ਸਚ ਕੀ ਬੇਲਾ ॥

Sach kī bāṇī Nānak ākhai sach suṇāisī sach kī belā.

“Nanak speaks the Word of Truth; he proclaims the Truth at this, the right time.”

Guru Nanak spoke these words about the violence of his own age, and they set the task for anyone who reads these treaties now. Every one of them carries two stories. One is the state narrative written into its preamble: friendship, protection, order. The other is the people’s truth that lies underneath: who was not asked, what was taken, and who paid. To read the treaties honestly is to bear witness to both.

Four stages

Friendship, 1806–1809. The Company needed Lahore’s goodwill and offered a promise not to enter Sikh lands. Then, fearing Napoleon and wanting a buffer, it sent Charles Metcalfe to fix a frontier. The Treaty of Amritsar drew the line at the Sutlej and left the Sikh chiefs south of the river under British protection. Part 1 tells this story.

Commerce and strategy, 1831–1838. The Company came back with boats and maps. After the meeting at Ropar in 1831, treaties in 1832 and 1834 opened the Sutlej and the Indus to its trade. In 1838 the Tripartite Treaty bound Lahore to the Company’s plan to put Shah Shuja on the throne of Kabul. Part 2.

Conquest by treaty, March 1846. After the First Anglo-Sikh War, the Treaty of Lahore of 9 March 1846 took the Jalandhar Doab, demanded a war indemnity of one and a half crore rupees, capped the army and took Kashmir and Hazara in place of money Lahore could not pay. On 16 March the Treaty of Amritsar sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh of Jammu for seventy-five lakh rupees. Part 3.

Protectorate and annexation, 1846–1849. The Treaty of Bhyrowal of 16 December 1846 put a British Resident in charge of every department of the Lahore state. On 29 March 1849, a ten-year-old Maharaja signed away his sovereignty, the state’s property and the Koh-i-Noor. Part 4.

The treaties in dates

What the paper did not say

Put the treaties side by side and one movement runs through them. Decisions that had been made in Lahore were made, step by step, somewhere else. In 1809 the Company fixed the kingdom’s southern border. In the 1830s it set the rules for its rivers and chose its friends abroad. In 1846 it fixed the size of its army, took its richest lands and controlled the tolls on its ferries. By the end of that year a British officer was directing its government. In 1849 sovereignty passed to Calcutta and London.

That is what centralisation looks like from the inside. It rarely announces itself. It arrives as an agreement, then a clause, then an exception to a clause. Each step is described as protection. The structure of a people’s existence, the power to decide for themselves, is taken apart one article at a time.

The Company’s own final word, Lord Dalhousie’s proclamation of 29 March 1849, claimed that the British had kept every treaty and the Sikhs had broken them. The historian B. J. Hasrat, writing in Punjabi University’s Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, found that charge unsustainable on the facts. Sir Henry Lawrence, who had served as British Resident at Lahore, called the annexation “unjust and impolitic.”

Promises that outlive their signers

A treaty is a promise between peoples, and promises outlive the people who make them. Canada, too, was built on treaties, and the work of honouring them is still unfinished. For Panjabis, the question these treaties raise, who decides for a people and on what terms, never went away. It came back in 1973 in a different form, when the Anandpur Sahib Resolution asked for a truly federal India, with power returned to the regions.

Read also: Part 1: Friendship and the Sutlej line · The Sikh Empire, 1799–1839 · The Anandpur Sahib Resolution

Sources and further reading

• B. J. Hasrat, “Anglo-Sikh Treaty (1806)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• B. J. Hasrat, “Anglo-Sikh Treaty (Amritsar, 1809)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• “Treaty of Amritsar”, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Sikh Museum Initiative, “The Anglo Sikh Treaties” project (2015).
• B. J. Hasrat, “Tripartite Treaty (June 1838)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• B. J. Hasrat, “Anglo-Sikh Treaties (Lahore, 9 and 11 March 1846)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• B. J. Hasrat, “Anglo-Sikh Treaty (Bhyrowal, December 1846)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• B. J. Hasrat, “Proclamation (1849)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• B. J. Hasrat, “Annexation of the Punjab”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• J. D. Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs, from the Origin of the Nation to the Battles of the Sutlej (first published 1849; 1918 edition), Internet Archive.
• Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 723 (Raag Tilang, Guru Nanak Dev Ji), SriGranth.org.