The British spent eleven years taking things away from Maharani Jind Kaur, one at a time, in a sequence that reads less like policy than like people trying to find the thing that would finally make her stop.
They took the regency in 1846. They took her son the following year. They cut her pension, twice. They moved her out of Lahore, then out of Punjab, then locked her in a fort eight hundred kilometres from home. In April 1849 she walked out of it dressed as a servant, and left a letter behind telling them she had done it by magic.
A Daughter of Punjab at the Court of Lahore
She was born around 1817, the daughter of Manna Singh Aulakh, who kept the royal kennels at Lahore. That is worth stating plainly, because almost everything written about her afterwards turned on her origins: she was not from the sardar families, and her enemies at court and in the British administration never stopped noticing it.
She married Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1835, when she was about eighteen and he was in his mid-fifties, near the end of the reign that had made him the most formidable ruler in northern India. On 6 September 1838 she bore him a son, Duleep Singh. Ranjit Singh died the following June.
Mother of the Last Maharaja
What happened at Lahore over the next four years was one of the fastest dynastic collapses in South Asian history.
Kharak Singh was deposed and died in custody. His son Nau Nihal Singh was killed by falling masonry on the day of his father's funeral. Sher Singh was assassinated in 1843, along with his son, by the Sandhawalia sardars — who were killed in their turn, as were the Dogra ministers who had run the state. In six years the empire got through four rulers and most of its political class.
By September 1843 the throne went to the one surviving son of Ranjit Singh who threatened nobody: Duleep Singh, aged five.
His mother became regent. Her brother Jawahar Singh, made minister, was seized and killed by the army in front of her in 1845. From that point she governed alone, over a state whose real power was the Khalsa Army — eighty thousand men, run by elected regimental committees, whose generals she could neither command nor safely ignore.
British observers, who had every reason to belittle her, describe a woman who held court daily, dealt directly with the sardars and the army panchayats, and made her own decisions. She was twenty-six.
The Anglo-Sikh Wars
The First Anglo-Sikh War began in December 1845 when the Khalsa Army crossed the Sutlej, and was fought out at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon.
It was lost in circumstances that have been argued about ever since, because the Sikh commanders Lal Singh and Tej Singh were in communication with the British throughout and their conduct in the field is hard to explain otherwise. The fuller account is in The Anglo-Sikh Wars.
The Treaty of Lahore of March 1846 took the Jullundur Doab, imposed an indemnity the treasury could not pay — Kashmir was sold to Gulab Singh to raise part of it — and left a British force in the capital.
Jind Kaur had understood that the garrison would go. It did not. In December the Resident, Henry Lawrence, and Frederick Currie assembled the sardars and produced the Treaty of Bhairowal, signed on 16 December 1846, installing a British-controlled Council of Regency until the Maharaja came of age in 1854.
The first British condition for that treaty was her removal. Governor-General Hardinge instructed Currie that her deprivation of power was indispensable to any agreement. The sardars kept their offices. The boy kept his throne. The mother had to go.
She was pensioned off at about twenty-nine.
The Only Manly Understanding in the Punjab
She did not go quietly, and what was done next is the clearest available measure of how seriously she was taken.
In August 1847 — after the nine-year-old Duleep Singh refused to apply the ceremonial mark investing Tej Singh as Raja of Sialkot, a refusal the British laid at her door — Henry Lawrence had her imprisoned in the Samman Burj of the Lahore fort, then removed to Sheikhupura, with her pension cut to Rs 48,000 and her access to her son ended.
In May 1848, with the second war starting, she was taken out of Punjab altogether to Chunar Fort near Benares, and her pension cut again to Rs 12,000.
British writing about her ran in two directions at once. In print she was the Messalina of the Punjab — after the notoriously scandalous wife of the emperor Claudius — a charge that had nothing to do with her politics and everything to do with a young widow holding power. Privately, Lord Dalhousie wrote the sentence that has outlived every other British verdict on her: that she possessed the only manly understanding in the Punjab, and that restoring her would give a rising the one thing it lacked, namely an object and a head.
She has the only manly understanding in the Punjab.
It was written as an argument for never letting her go home.
The Escape
At Chunar, in April 1849 — within days of the annexation of Punjab and the deposition of her son — she got out.
She left dressed as a servant and covered roughly eight hundred kilometres north-east to Nepal, reaching Kathmandu on 29 April. The prime minister, Jung Bahadur Rana, granted her asylum, by his own account out of respect for the memory of Ranjit Singh rather than any enthusiasm for her cause. A court of inquiry convened at Chunar could not establish how she had done it.
She had left them a letter, and its tone is worth preserving, because it is the one place in the whole story where her own voice comes through undiluted:
You put me in the cage and locked me up. For all your locks and your sentries, I got out by my magic. I had told you plainly not to punish me too hard — but don't think I ran away. Understand well, that I escaped by myself, unaided.
She was thirty-two.
Exile
Nepal was asylum, not freedom: more than a decade at Kathmandu under close watch and on a small allowance, in a country with no interest in provoking the East India Company on her behalf.
Meanwhile Duleep Singh had been separated from her, converted to Christianity at fourteen, and shipped to England, where he became a favourite of Queen Victoria and was installed as a country gentleman in Suffolk. The two facts were connected. The British had decided that the safest place for the last Maharaja of Punjab was as far from his mother as the world allowed.
Calcutta, 1861
In January 1861 he was finally permitted to meet her, at Calcutta.
He was twenty-two and had been raised English. She was in her forties, her health broken and her sight nearly gone. She is said not to have recognised him by sight, and to have identified him by feeling his hair — which he had cut.
Whatever passed between them changed him. He brought her to England and she lived with him at Kensington for two years. From this point the son who had spent his adolescence as Victoria's protégé began asking what had been taken from him, and spent the rest of his life in an increasingly desperate campaign to get some of it back.
She died at Kensington on 1 August 1863, aged about forty-six.
The Long Way Home
Even her body was a political problem. Cremation was not permitted in England, and the British would not have her ashes taken to Punjab, where a shrine to her would have been exactly the object and head Dalhousie had warned about. She was placed temporarily at Kensal Green, and in 1864 Duleep Singh took her to Bombay and cremated her at Nashik.
Only in 1924 did her granddaughter, Princess Bamba Sutherland, carry the remains to Lahore, to lie beside the samadhi of Ranjit Singh. It took seventy-five years and three generations to complete a journey she had very nearly made herself in a fortnight, on foot, in 1849.
What She Actually Was
The standard telling makes her a tragic queen, and that is not quite right.
Jind Kaur was a woman of no particular birth who found herself governing the last independent state in the subcontinent at twenty-six, in the middle of an army she could not control and a war she had not chosen, advised by ministers who were selling her. She lost, comprehensively, and the state she was regent of no longer exists.
But the people who beat her thought her dangerous enough to strip of office, income, child, province and liberty, in that order — and after all of it she still climbed out of a fort and wrote to tell them she had managed it unaided.
The compliment they settled on was that she had a man's understanding. What they meant, and could not quite bring themselves to write down, was that they had not expected the fight to come from her.