Ranjit Singh: The One-Eyed Maharaja Who Hired Napoleon's Officers

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Ranjit Singh was born in 1780 in Gujranwala, renamed from Budh Singh to a name meaning victor in battle. Smallpox left him pockmarked and blind in the left eye, and he never learned to read. He rode into battle at 10, inherited leadership of the Sukerchakia misl at 12 when his father died, and at 13 killed Hashmat Khan, who ambushed him while riding. When the Afghan ruler Zaman Shah invaded with 12,000 troops in 1797, Ranjit Singh burned crops and raided supply lines until the army withdrew. In 1799 he and his mother-in-law Sada Kaur marched 50,000 troops on Lahore, whose mostly Muslim and Hindu residents welcomed him, and in 1801 he was crowned Maharaja.

The 1806 Treaty of Amritsar with the British East India Company fixed his southern border at the Sutlej River, freeing him to take Amritsar, Kasur, Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar. He built a paid standing army with local foundries and Napoleonic veterans such as Jean-Baptiste Ventura and Jean-François Allard, and appointed Hindu and Muslim ministers. He also turned Lahore's Badshahi Mosque into a gunpowder factory and stable. He left the jagir tax system intact, and after he died in June 1839 at 58, palace coups and two Anglo-Sikh wars ended in British annexation in 1849.

• He plated the Golden Temple at Amritsar and gave a ton of gold for the dome of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi.
• He had about 46 marriages, around 20 recognized as official wives.
• The Akal Takht summoned him over his marriage to the Muslim dancer Moran Sarkar, and he accepted a public flogging that was largely symbolic.
• His European officers had to learn Punjabi and Persian and were barred from corresponding with foreign powers.
• Four wives and seven concubines died on his funeral pyre.