Bhyrowal and the end of the kingdom

Setting the regent aside

Maharani Jind Kaur, mother of the young Maharaja Duleep Singh and regent in his name, expected the British force in Lahore to leave at the end of 1846, as the supplementary articles of 11 March had said. Instead, British authority over the government kept growing.

Hardinge sent Frederick Currie to Lahore. Currie set about isolating the Maharani and, according to the historian B. J. Hasrat, pressed the leading sardars to ask the British for a new treaty. The request that the Company later pointed to as Lahore’s own wish had been prepared for Lahore to make.

The Treaty of Bhyrowal, 16 December 1846

The new treaty was signed at Lahore on 16 December 1846 and ratified by Hardinge on 26 December at Bhyrowal Ghat, on the Beas. Currie and Henry Lawrence signed for the British. Duleep Singh signed with a group of sardars and officials, among them Tej Singh, Sher Singh and Dewan Dina Nath.

• Article 15 of the March treaty, the promise not to interfere in Lahore’s government, was set aside.
• A British Resident, with his staff, would have full authority to direct and control every department of the state.
• A Council of Regency of eight named sardars and officials would run the government under the Resident’s control, and its members could only be changed with his consent.
• A British force, of whatever size and wherever the Governor-General chose, would stay at Lahore, and he could occupy any fort or military post in the kingdom.
• Lahore would pay twenty-two lakh rupees a year for that force, in two instalments.
• One and a half lakh rupees a year was set aside for the Maharani and her dependants.
• The arrangement would last until the Maharaja turned sixteen, on 4 September 1854.

The Sikh state was now, in effect, a British protectorate, paying for its own occupation. The nineteenth-century historian John Marshman put it in one sentence: “An officer of the company’s artillery became, in effect, the successor of Ranjit Singh.”

From protectorate to annexation

The Maharani was removed from Lahore in 1847 and sent out of Panjab the following year. In April 1848 a revolt broke out at Multan, and the Second Anglo-Sikh War followed: Ramnagar, Chillianwala in January 1849, and Gujrat in February, told in The annexation of Panjab. Under the Treaty of Bhyrowal the British were the guardians of the Lahore state. When the war ended, they treated it as a conquered enemy.

29 March 1849

On 29 March 1849 a darbar was held in the fort at Lahore on the orders of the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie. His foreign secretary, Henry Elliot, presided. Raja Tej Singh handed the paper of terms to Duleep Singh, then ten years old, and he signed. Elliot then read Dalhousie’s proclamation: the kingdom of Panjab was at an end, and its territories were part of British India.

Under the terms, the Maharaja gave up his sovereignty, and the property of the state passed to the Company. One clause dealt with a single object. The great diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, “shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.” In return he was promised a pension for life.

ਹਕੁ ਪਰਾਇਆ ਨਾਨਕਾ ਉਸੁ ਸੂਅਰ ਉਸੁ ਗਾਇ ॥
ਗੁਰੁ ਪੀਰੁ ਹਾਮਾ ਤਾ ਭਰੇ ਜਾ ਮੁਰਦਾਰੁ ਨ ਖਾਇ ॥

Hak parāiā Nānakā us sūar us gāe. Gur pīr hāmā tā bhare jā murdār na khāe.

“To take what rightfully belongs to another is like a Muslim eating pork, or a Hindu eating beef. Our Guru, our spiritual guide, stands by us if we do not eat those carcasses.”

The guardian and the ward

Dalhousie’s proclamation said the British had kept their treaties and the Sikhs had broken theirs. Hasrat, writing in Punjabi University’s Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, finds that claim unsustainable on the facts. It was not only Sikh historians who saw it. Sir Henry Lawrence, who had been Resident at Lahore, called the annexation and the deposition of the Maharaja “unjust and impolitic.” John Sullivan, a member of the Madras Council, wrote that it was perhaps the first case on record “in which a guardian has visited his own misdeeds upon his ward.”

That sentence sums up forty-three years. In 1806 the Company asked for friendship. In 1809 it drew a border. In the 1830s it took the rivers and a share of Lahore’s foreign policy. In 1846 it took land, guns and an army, then set aside its promise not to govern, and made itself the guardian of a child king. In 1849 the guardian became the owner. At every step there was a signature from the Lahore side, and at almost every step that signature was given under pressure the treaty itself did not record.

A people’s dignity and autonomy do not disappear when a treaty is signed. They wait in the record for someone to read it honestly. Duleep Singh spent much of his life trying to read it again, as told in Maharaja Duleep Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur.

Read also: The treaties at a glance · Duleep Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur · The Anandpur Sahib Resolution

Sources and further reading

• 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.
• Priya Atwal, “How Duleep Singh handed it to the Queen”, The Tribune, 21 April 2016.
• Sikh Museum Initiative, “The Anglo Sikh Treaties” project (2015).
• 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 141 (Raag Maajh, Guru Nanak Dev Ji), SriGranth.org.