After having dwelt, firstly, on the Samadhis of the three maharanis, and then of Maharajah Ranjit Singh and his direct family, and finally the life and end of his great granddaughter, this piece is, lastly, about the very last great Maharani of the Punjab.

In a way we will have traced the end of this great ruling family of the Lahore Darbar before the British invaded and took over our city and homeland in 1849. In case you are wondering just why did this piece come last after her granddaughter’s description of her last rites, the reason is simple that her ashes were the very last to arrive in Lahore, and of all the burials of this great family, hers was the one full of adventure, intrigue and hidden considerations. Right till the end her ashes remained a mystery, which in a way hampered our research.

But first a bit about this amazing woman. Jind Kaur belonged to the village of Chachar in Gujranwala and her father Manna Singh Aulakh was Ranjit Singh’s kennel keeper. Every time the Sikh ruler spent time with his hunting dogs the keeper would dwell on the beauty of his youngest daughter. So the maharajah after getting affirmative reports from his spies about her beauty decided that his 11th bride (he legally married 30 women) would be Jind Kaur. The ceremony was held in 1835 and on the 6th of September, 1836 she gave birth to Duleep Singh, who at the age of five in September 1843 was crowned the Maharajah of the Punjab.

After the death of Ranjit Singh’s eldest son Kharrak Singh, and immediately afterwards his eldest grandson Nau Nihal Singh, it was Duleep Singh, the youngest son of Ranjit Singh, who was the only direct heir to his throne. So de-facto from 1843 till 1849 Maharani Jindan Kaur – his mother - was the ruler of the Punjab. In December, 1847, the British East India Company declared war on the Punjab, and after defeating the Sikh Army thanks to the intrigue and betrayal of the Sikh Army chief Lal Singh and Raja Tej Singh, who refused to attack at the battle of Ferozeshah, and then burnt the critical boat bridge at Sobraon, providing the British a virtual walkover. Even till the end at the critical battle at Chillianwala, the East India Company has virtually been defeated. But betrayal by these commanders turned victory into a defeat. The traitors and their ancestors are today among the richest of the Sikhs.

Among the first acts was to remove Duleep Singh to special care ultimately transported to Britain. But Henry Lawrence saw the biggest threat in Rani Jindan. So as a first step she was imprisoned in the Lahore Fort’s Samman Tower. The Sikhs of Lahore City started shouting slogans facing the tower, so she was silently shifted to Sheikhupura Fort.

The new British administration feared a fresh uprising centred on the Rani. So she was expelled from the Punjab and taken to Chunar Fort, near Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh. All her jewellery and belongings were taken away. The Muslims and Sikhs of Lahore and Gujranwala protested against such harsh treatment of their maharani, as also did the ruler of Afghanistan.

Defiant that she was, she disguised herself as one of the servants and calmly walked out of the gates and rode and walked most of the way northwards reaching Kathmandu in Nepal. The ruler, King Rajendra Bikram Shah, was scared of offending the British, while his Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa supported her and looked after her in his own house. The new Prime Minister Jung Bahadar Rana built her a new house at Thapathali and granted her an allowance. Here Rani Jindan stayed for 11 years.

By this time Maharaja Duleep Singh had become one of the favourites of Queen Victoria, and through her offices she sent an invitation to the Nepalese prime minister to send Rani Jindan to join her son in England. The British bureaucracy in the Punjab and India declared the effort a forgery. But Duleep Singh persisted and by 1860 Sir John Login had written to the Queen that the Rani was blind and no longer a threat to the British in India.

In January 1861, she travelled to Calcutta (now called Kolkota) to join her son. It so happened that a few Sikh regiments returning from fighting in China learnt of the Rani’s presence and demonstrations broke out. The Governor General Lord Canning requested Duleep Singh to immediately take the first ship to England with his mother. So to England they both set off. An excited British Press carried the headline “The Messalina of the Punjab in London”.

Stories of her beauty spread fast, and in such circumstances the shrewd Rani got back into action. First she got all her jewellery back and from then onwards she stayed with her son and grandchildren.

Maharani Jind Kaur died peacefully in her sleep in Abingdon House, Kensington, on the Ist of August 1863. A new crisis broke out for Duleep Singh wanted her cremated, and British law did not permit it. That law was changed in 1885. Added to this was her last wish that her ashes be taken to the Samadhi of her husband, Maharajah Ranjit Singh in Lahore. To this the British did not agree for, they claimed, it would lead to a massive funeral procession and a revolt. So a compromise was reached and the dead body was not buried but put away in an underground grave room in the Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

It took Duleep Singh a whole year to reach an agreement with the British, who decided that they would build a Samadhi in Bombay (Mumbai), where they would cremate the body in a secret ceremony at night on the Godovari River. The wish to be cremated in Lahore was not allowed. A memorial was built and there lay the ashes of the last Maharani of the Punjab.

Almost half a century later Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter Princess Bamba Duleep Singh moved to Lahore and started living in Model Town’s ‘A’ Block. She worked away to get permission to shift the ashes of Maharani Jindan to where the Samadhi of Ranjit Singh, as was her last wishes. This brought forth considerable problems for the Punjab government.

The first problem was that the Samadhi was approachable from the mosque side and this could lead to “problems” as the documents said. Then it was decided that the end wall of the mosque would be so designed that the Samadhi virtually disappears in the construction of both the mosque and the main Samadhi. This engineering trick was managed.

So it was that Princess Bamba with the ashes of Maharani Jindan Ranjit Singh came to Lahore in 1924 – 63 years after her death - and in this corner a reasonable space had been set up and the ashes interned. No plaque was allowed and within the north-eastern end of the Badshahi Mosque, or the south-western end of the main Samadhi, the ashes lie. Amazingly, all record of the incident, or the ashes, or the agreement, were removed from the files of the Punjab government.

In my long search for them my special thanks to Prof. Nadhra Sarfaraz of LUMS, to Asjad Ghani for getting the ETPB to dig up decaying records, to Fakir Aijazuddin for adding to my curiosity. My biggest disappointment was that the Sikh organisers of the Samadhi had no idea what I was talking about. Little do they know that the marble lotus over Ranjit Singh’s ashes have been thrown outside among the flower pots. But then that is, sad as it is, their business. In the end it was an effort worth the outcome.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2021