Jind Kaur
Jind Kaur (aka Rani
Jindan, c. 1817 – 1 August 1863) was regent of the Sikh Empire from
1843-1846. She was the youngest wife of the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Ranjit Singh,
and the mother of the last Maharaja, Duleep Singh.
She was renowned for her beauty, energy and strength of purpose. However, her
greatest accomplishment was the fear she installed in the British in India, who
described her as "the Messalina of
the Punjab", a seductress too rebellious to be controlled.
Jind Kaur Aulakh was born in Gujranwala,
the daughter of the overseer of the royal kennels. Her father praised Jind Kaur's beauty and
virtues to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who summoned her in 1835. They were married
the same year and she gave birth to her only child, Duleep Singh, in 1836.
Following her husband’s death, Jind
Kaur and her son lived in relative obscurity until her son was pronounced
Maharaja in 1843 following the assassination of his three predeccesors.
Initially, the new vizier largely ignored the young ruler and his mother.
However, Jind Kaur fiercely defended her rights and those of her son: 'who is
the real sovereign, Duleep Singh or Hira Singh? If the former, then the Khālsā
should ensure that he was not a king with an empty title.' She gained the support
of the council and the military, and gradually emerged as the symbol of sovereignty.
She took control of the government with the approval of the army and cast off
her veil. As Regent, she reconstituted the Supreme Council of the Khalsa and
restored a balance between the army and the civil administration. She held
court, transacted State business in public and reviewed and addressed the
troops.
The young Maharani (wife of Maharaja)
was faced with many problems on assuming control. Her son’s half brother sought
to usurp him, feudal chiefs wanted a tax reductions and reinstating of land
grants, the military wanted a payrise, and the cost of civil and military
administration was rising. She also had to contend with the power struggle
between the various Sikh factions, some of whom were secretly negotiating with
the British East India Company forces amassing on the
border. In 1845, her brother was stabbed to death infront of her.
Contemporary sources note his bravery
and ferociousness in the face of these tests – becoming widely known as the “Lionness
of the Punjab”. She also had the advice and support of the newly appointed
council of elder statesmen and military leaders. To strengthen her power base,
Jind Kaur betrothed Duleep Singh to the daughter of Chatar Singh Atarivala, the Governor
of Hazara province and a powerful and
influential member of the Sikh nobility, army pay was increased and she
replaced her traitorous vizier.
On 13 December 1845 the British declared
war on the Sikhs, who were seen as a military and economic threat. The Sikhs
lost the war, due, they claimed, to the treachery of their commander-in-chief
who failed to attack when the British were at his mercy and later sank the Sikh
bridge of boats. The terms of the Treaty of Lahore,
signed in March 1846, were punitive but the seven-year-old Duleep Singh
remained as Maharaja and Jind Kaur was allowed to remain as regent. However, in
December, she was replaced by a Council of Regency, controlled by a British
Resident, and awarded an annual pension of 150,000 rupees.
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After the war, the British rewarded
the leaders who had helped them. When in August 1847 Duleep Singh refused to
invest Tej Singh,
the British abettor, as Raja of Sialkot, the British Resident imprisoned Jind
Kaur in the Samman Tower of the Lahore Fort and,
ten days later, moved her to the fortress in Sheikhupura and
reduced her pension to 48,000 rupees. Given her fearsome reputation, they
worried that she was both smart and powerful enough to unite Sikh resistance to
the British once more. Most punishingly, they separated her from her young son.
She wrote to the British begging to be reunited: "He has no sister, no
brother. He has no uncle, senior or junior. His father he has lost. To whose
care has he been entrusted?" Her plea was ignored, and she did not see her
son again for thirteen and a half years.
The following year, the new British
Resident described her as "the rallying point of rebellion" and
exiled her from Punjab. She was stripped of her jewellery and imprisoned. The
British’s treatment of her caused deep resentment among Sikhs, and also among
neighbouring Muslim rulers who called her treatment ‘objectionable to all creeds.’
The British responded with a smear campaign which labelled her as a sexual
deviant who beguiled men with her beauty. She responded, by disgusing herself
as a servant and escaping her fort. Thus she endured an 800-mile journey to
Kathmandu in Nepal, where she sought sanctuary on arrival in April 1849.
United by their common enemy, the
British, Nepal's Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa and Maharaja Ranjit Singh had forged
a secret alliance against the British. However, after Ranjit’s sudden death and
the Sikhs first went to war with the British, the Sikhs had asked Nepal for
help but they had divided loyalties and did not provide adaequate aid. Lahore
sent for help to Kathmandu, but the court in Kathmandu was divided and King
Rajendra Bikram Shah did not respond positively. However, it was Jind Kaur’s
chance of rescue. Initially, she stayed at the residence of Amar Bikram Shah,
son of an ex-prime minister of Nepal who had been key in forging an alliance
with the Sikhs. Here she was with facilitisies and dignity befitting of royalty
– although she was always introduced to visitors as a “maid from Hindusthan”. After
a few months in hiding, she decided to approach the then Prime Minister Jung
Bahadur Rana.
The Prime Minister of Nepal granted
her full asylum, bestowing her with dignity as a Queen consort of Maharaja Ranjit
Singh. She was bequeathed a new residence and an allowance. During
the eleven years she spent in Nepal, she was kept under the eye of the British
Resident in Kathmandu who believed she was still agitating to revive the Sikh
dynasty.
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In November 1856, a letter was
intercepted from Duleep Singh to his mother suggesting that she came to England
but was dismissed as a forgery. Soon after, Duleep Singh commissioned Pundit Nehemiah
Goreh to visit Kathmandu on his behalf and find out how his mother was
managing. However, the Pundit was forbidden to contact Jind Kaur, so Duleep
decided to go himself. In 1860 he wrote to the British Resident in Kathmandu,
enclosing his letter in one from Sir John Login to avoid interception. He received a report in return stating that
his mother was ‘much changed, was blind and had lost much of the energy which
formerly characterised her.' Consequently, the British decided that she was no
longer a threat and on 16 January 1861 she was permitted to join her son in
Calcutta. Unfortunately, this coincided with the return of several Sikh
regiments via Calcutta at the end of the Chinese war. The presence of Sikh
royalty in the city thus became a cause for joy and celebration. The royals’ hotel
was surrounded by thousands of armed Sikhs and the Governor-General requested
Duleep Singh, as a favour, to leave for England with his mother by the next
boat so as not to become a rallying point for Sikh nationalism.
During the passage to England, Duleep
Singh wrote to Sir John Login, who had been his guardian throughout his
adolescence in British hands, asking him to find a house for his mother
near Lancaster Gate. Soon after her arrival, she was
visited by Lady Login, who had had heard tales of the Maharani's beauty,
influence, and strength of will and was curious to meet the woman who had
wielded such power. Her compassion was aroused when she met a tired half-blind
woman, her health broken and her beauty vanished. "Yet the moment
she grew interested and excited in a subject, unexpected gleams and glimpses
through the haze of indifference and the torpor of advancing age revealed the
shrewd and plotting brain of her, who had once been known as the 'Messalina of
the Punjab'."
While in India, Duleep Singh had
negotiated the return of his mother’s jewellery. On its arrival, Jind Kaur’s delight
was so great that "she forthwith decorated herself, and her
attendants, with an assortment of the most wonderful necklaces and earrings,
strings of lovely pearls and emeralds."
For a while Duleep Singh moved with
his mother to Mulgrave Castle in Yorkshire. Attempts
were made to arrange a separate establishment for her on the estate, but she
was determined never again to be separated from her son. She dedicated the remaining
two years of her life to re-educating her son on his Sikh heritage and the
empire that had once been his, sowing the seeds that twenty years later led him
to research for weeks and petition Queen Victoria, hoping naïvely to remedy the
injustice he and his mother had suffered.
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Jind Kaur died peacefully in her sleep
on 1 August 1863, aged 46. Until 1885, cremation (as per the Sikh custom) was
illegal in Britain and Duleep Singh was refused permission to take his mother's
body to the Punjab. Thus, her body was held temporarily in Kensal Green Cemetery. In the spring of 1864,
her son finally obtained permission to take the body to India, where it was
cremated, and he erected a small samadh in memory of his mother on the Panchavati side
of the Godavari River. Jind Kaur's wishes to be
cremated in Lahore had
been denied by British authorities. The memorial in Bombay was maintained
by the Kapurthala State Authorities until 1924, when her grandaugher Sofia
Duleep Singh (an amazing figure who I cant wait to share with you all) moved
her remains and the memorial to Lahore. In 1997, a marble headstone with
her name was uncovered during restorations at the Dissenters' Chapel in Kensal
Green and in 2009 a memorial to the Maharani was installed at the site.
Jind Kaur is a forgotten hero of the
already overlooked Sikh Empire. First and foremost, she disproves the
stereotype that women – especially Asian women – are oppressed and powerless,
incapable of ruling or of using their own agency. While the “martial prowess”
of Sikh Punjabi men was widely lauded in colonial India, Jind Kaur outlasted most
of her male predecessors and was more successful in uniting the Sikhs
politically and militarily. Her reign was plagued by difficulties, all of which
she dealt with effectively. The victory of the British over the Sikhs cannot be
attributed to a lack of male leadership, and the fact that Jind Kaur remained
respected by both sides following the war shows that she was not held responsible
for the humiliation of the Sikhs. Her treatment at the hands of the British
show her power, as one woman was believed to be a threat to the ever growing British
colonial interest – more so than armies of native men. Her tenacity is also
attested to by the fact that she managed to escape British imprisonment and to
seek asylum with a government who had been less than supportive of her male
predecessors. Despite her failing health in her later years, her passion for
her heritage and her love for her son and her country lived on in him and his
own daughter, Sophia, who became an absolute powerhouse of both British and
Indian politics largely thanks to her grandmother’s legacy. When I think of the
British conquest of India (which I do a lot, given it was the topic of my
masters!) I don’t picture British armies or Indian merchants – I picture Jind
Kaur, majestic and fearless, addressing her troops laughing in the face of the
world’s biggest empire.
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