Rivers, trade and the road to Kabul

Ropar, October 1831

In October 1831 Maharaja Ranjit Singh met the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, at Ropar on the Sutlej. The meeting was arranged largely by Captain Claude Wade, the Company’s political agent at Ludhiana. It was a grand occasion of reviews and ceremony that lasted about a week.

Behind the ceremony, each side wanted something. Ranjit Singh wanted the Company to accept his son Kharak Singh as his heir, and he had his eye on Sindh to the south. The Company wanted the rivers. Its officers had been surveying the Indus, and its merchants dreamed of a waterway carrying British goods from the sea into the heart of Asia. Wade persuaded the Maharaja to join the Indus navigation scheme and to give up his claim to Shikarpur and Sindh.

Opening the rivers, 1832 and 1834

The result was a treaty of 1832, concluded for Bentinck through Wade, that opened the Sutlej and the Indus within the Sikh kingdom to navigation and trade. A further agreement in 1834 replaced duties on cargo with a single fixed toll on every merchant boat, whatever it carried. In May 1839 the rates were adjusted again through the British agent George Russell Clerk.

On paper these were commercial treaties, and modest ones. In practice they turned the rivers of Panjab into highways for the Company’s trade and its information, and they did it on terms written for the boat-owner rather than for the land the rivers fed.

ਪਵਣੁ ਗੁਰੂ ਪਾਣੀ ਪਿਤਾ ਮਾਤਾ ਧਰਤਿ ਮਹਤੁ ॥

Pavaṇ gurū pāṇī pitā mātā dharat mahat.

“Air is the Guru, water is the Father, and Earth is the Great Mother of all.”

To Guru Nanak, water was a father: the source of life, owed reverence. Panjab takes its name from its five rivers. To the Company in 1832 they were routes and revenues. The difference between those two ways of seeing a river would outlast both the kingdom and the Company.

The road to Kabul

By the late 1830s London feared that Russia was reaching towards India through Persia and Afghanistan. The Governor-General, Lord Auckland, sent Captain Alexander Burnes to Kabul to seek an alliance with the Afghan ruler, Amir Dost Muhammad Khan. Dost Muhammad’s price was Peshawar, which Ranjit Singh had held since 1834. The Company could not give it to him without going to war with the Sikhs.

So Auckland chose the other path. He would remove Dost Muhammad and put the exiled Shah Shuja back on the throne of Kabul, with Lahore’s help. Burnes was withdrawn from Kabul in April 1838, and in May William Macnaghten was sent to Lahore to negotiate.

The Tripartite Treaty, 26 June 1838

Ranjit Singh signed the treaty between the Company, the Sikh state and Shah Shuja on 26 June 1838. Its main terms were these:

• Shah Shuja accepted the Sikh state’s possession, for ever, of Kashmir, Attock, Hazara, Peshawar and its dependencies up to the Khyber, Bannu, Tonk, Kalabagh and the other Waziri districts, the Derajat and Multan.
• For giving up its claim to Shikarpur, Lahore was to receive fifteen lakh rupees out of the payments due from the Amirs of Sindh, under British mediation. Shah Shuja gave up his own claims in Sindh.
• Afghanistan’s dealings with foreign powers were to be controlled jointly by the British and the Sikhs.
• Lahore was to keep an auxiliary force of at least five thousand Muslim soldiers to aid the Shah, paid for by an annual payment of two lakh rupees from him.
• Herat was to remain independent, and a British envoy was to be posted at Kabul.

Wade’s personal influence with the Maharaja was one of the factors in its ratification. The historian B. J. Hasrat concludes that a large part of the Company’s purpose was to block Sikh ambitions in Sindh. The treaty was the basis on which the Company marched into Afghanistan the next year.

Who held the pen

On its face the Tripartite Treaty was generous to Lahore. It confirmed the Sikh state’s greatest conquests. But look at what it closed. Sindh, the natural outlet of Panjab’s rivers to the sea, was taken off the table and settled by others. Lahore’s soldiers were committed to the Company’s project in Kabul. Lahore’s foreign policy towards its western neighbour was now shared with the Company. The rivers ran through Sikh land on Company terms.

Ranjit Singh died on 27 June 1839, a year and a day after he signed. The Company’s Afghan war that the treaty made possible ended in the destruction of its army on the retreat from Kabul in January 1842. Lahore, which had been asked to share the risk, was left with the consequences of a border that was now in turmoil.

The rivers are still the heart of it. Decisions about Panjab’s waters have continued to be made far from the people who farm beside them, and the long argument over river waters was among the grievances behind the Dharam Yudh Morcha of the 1980s, told in The Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Centralisation does not always come with an army. Sometimes it comes as a trade agreement, and asks only for the right to use your rivers.

Read also: Part 1: Friendship and the Sutlej line · Part 3: The Treaties of Lahore and Amritsar · Air, water and earth

Sources and further reading

• B. J. Hasrat, “Wade, Sir Claude Martine (1794–1861)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• Sikh Museum Initiative, “The Anglo Sikh Treaties” project (2015).
• B. J. Hasrat, “Tripartite Treaty (June 1838)”, The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala.
• C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, vol. 13 (5th edn, 1933), p. 205, British Library IOR/L/PS/20/G3/14, Qatar Digital Library.
• 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 8 (Japji Sahib, Salok, Guru Nanak Dev Ji), SriGranth.org.