It is remembered as the battle of the guns, and the name is exact. At Gujrat, on the plain between the Chenab and the Jhelum on 21 February 1849, the artillery did the work. The infantry that had bled so appallingly at Chillianwala five weeks earlier waited while nearly a hundred British guns and around sixty Sikh ones argued it out at long range for the better part of three hours. When the Sikh batteries fell silent — not beaten so much as emptied — the road was open, and with it closed the last chapter of the state that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had built.
How the Second War Began
The Sikh Empire had survived the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46 in name only. The Treaty of Lahore stripped it of territory and burdened it with an indemnity it could not pay; a British Resident sat at the Lahore court; a young Maharaja Duleep Singh reigned under an arrangement that satisfied nobody.
The second war began in April 1848 at Multan, where the governor Diwan Mulraj rose after two British officers sent to supervise a handover were killed. What might have stayed a provincial revolt became a national one. In the north, Sardar Chattar Singh Attariwala raised the Hazara country; his son, Sher Singh Attariwala, was commanding Sikh troops in the field on the British side at Multan when in September 1848 he took his men over to the rebellion. Much of the old Khalsa Army followed, and an Afghan contingent sent by Dost Mohammad Khan of Kabul joined the Sikh side in the hope of recovering Peshawar.
Ramnagar, Chillianwala, and Gough's Reputation
The campaign that followed did the British commander-in-chief, Sir Hugh Gough, no credit at all. At Ramnagar in November 1848 he lost cavalry to no purpose. At Chillianwala on 13 January 1849 he attacked through dense scrub without properly preparing the ground with artillery, and the result was among the bloodiest days the East India Company's army had experienced — regiments cut up, colours lost, guns abandoned, and no clear result to show for it. Sher Singh held the field that night. The news reached London badly, and orders went out for Sir Charles Napier to replace Gough. They had not arrived when Gough got his second chance.
Both armies then sat still for five weeks. Sher Singh moved north-west toward Gujrat to link with his father's force coming down from Hazara and to cover the Jhelum crossings. Gough waited for his siege train and for the troops released by the fall of Multan in January, and by the third week of February he had something like twenty-four thousand men and, crucially, close to a hundred guns. Sher Singh's army was larger in men — figures of fifty to sixty thousand are commonly given, though these are estimates rather than returns — but had roughly sixty guns and, by this stage of the war, a serious shortage of powder and shot.
The Morning of 21 February
The armies faced each other on open cultivated plain south of the town of Gujrat, cut by two dry nalas. Gough advanced at first light in a broad, deliberate line, and then did the thing his critics had spent years asking him to do: he stopped, and let the artillery work.
The bombardment opened at around nine in the morning and went on for roughly two and a half hours. The Sikh gunners, whose skill was respected by everyone who had fought against them, replied as long as they had anything to reply with. But the British had more pieces, heavier metal and, decisively, plentiful ammunition. Battery by battery the Sikh guns were dismounted or ran dry.
Only then did Gough send the infantry forward. The centre took the villages of Bara Kalra and Chota Kalra in hard close fighting; the horse artillery moved up with the advance and kept firing over open sights; the cavalry on both wings turned the Sikh flanks. The Afghan horse on the Sikh right withdrew rather than be enveloped. By early afternoon the Sikh army had broken and the pursuit began, and this time the British followed for miles rather than letting a beaten enemy walk away. Sikh casualties were heavy; British losses were, by the standards of Chillianwala, remarkably light. Fifty-three Sikh guns were taken on the field or in the pursuit.
The Surrender at Rawalpindi
The pursuit continued north-west for three weeks under Sir Walter Gilbert. There was no second army to fall back on and no fortress to hold. Near Rawalpindi in the second week of March — Britannica gives 12 March 1849 — Sher Singh and Chattar Singh surrendered, and the remaining troops of the Khalsa Army laid down their arms. Contemporary accounts of that morning describe soldiers placing their weapons on the growing pile and speaking of the Khalsa as finished, though the precise words attributed to them vary between tellings and should be treated as remembered rather than recorded. Gilbert's column drove the Afghan force back through the Khyber and the war was over.
On 29 March 1849 the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, annexed Punjab. Duleep Singh, then ten years old, signed away his sovereignty and the Koh-i-Noor with it, and was in time sent to England. Punjab passed to a Board of Administration, and a province that had governed itself for half a century became the north-western frontier of British India.
What Gujrat Changed
The consequences ran a long way forward. The annexation brought under one administration the whole of the region from the Sutlej to the Khyber, and it was this British Punjab — canal colonies, railways, recruitment, a single revenue system — whose partition in 1947 would divide the land again along a line drawn in six weeks. The direct route from Gujrat to Partition is not a short one, but it is continuous.
For the Khalsa Army itself, the reputation survived the defeat. Within a decade, Punjabi soldiers were being recruited in large numbers into the same army that had beaten them, and Sikh regiments became a permanent feature of Indian military history. Gujrat is remembered on both sides less as a rout than as the end of a contest between two of the most formidable armies in Asia — decided, in the end, by which of them still had shot in the limbers when the sun was high.