Royals and Rebels by Priya Atwal

Author:Priya Atwal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Dynasty Divided: The Battle for Control of Lahore

If we are to see royal deaths as crucial turning points, then the untimely loss of Maharajahs Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh within just five days of each other in November 1840 was at least as devastating as the demise of Ranjit Singh, if not more so. We can get an impression of the sadness and confusion that their deaths caused from this evocative passage by Suri, which we looked at earlier in Chapter 2:

At that sad moment there was not a single eye which had not become fraught with disgust and sorrow. The ashes of the father and son [Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh] were made to depart by the way leading out of the gate under the city wall … and such a huge crowd of the people residing in Lahore was witnessed there at that time that the people, having closed the shops in the town, were weeping and crying … In seventeen months [after the first Maharajah’s death], not a single trace was left of his dynasty, which was a decoration for the kingdom … [and] an imparter of comfort and convenience to the world and its people…20

The double death of the second and third Maharajahs was indeed a source of great disruption, for their successions had gone rather smoothly after Ranjit Singh’s demise on 27 June 1839. Despite the speculations of many British officers that a power struggle would erupt between the Maharajah’s eldest sons, Kharak Singh and Sher Singh, the order of succession was widely considered as settled within the Punjab itself. Kharak Singh had first been marked as his father’s successor back in 1816. This decision was re-affirmed while Ranjit Singh was on his deathbed. For a very short while, Sher Singh seemed as though he might be moving to stir up a rebellion, but he quickly dropped these intentions and rather easily fell into line behind his brother and nephew. Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh in turn made a concerted effort to treat Sher Singh with ample generosity, to ensure that he would have no cause for complaint against them.21

Thus, contrary to British colonial expectations, there was no great princely battle for power in 1839 as there had been for generations of Mughal princes in the Punjab; and, ironically, the Sikh succession followed a model of primogeniture similar to that of the British royals. It was therefore accepted that the royal stewardship of the Empire was a fixed matter, and it was hoped that it would pass without incident from Ranjit Singh to Kharak Singh, and from Kharak Singh to Nau Nihal Singh. For this reason, the two heirs’ early—and particularly in Nau Nihal Singh’s case—startlingly sudden deaths turned upside-down the relative sense of stability and continuity that their successions had previously provided.

There has since been a lot of conjecture about the untimely ends of the two new Maharajahs. As we know, even if there was no succession struggle between Kharak

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