IN FEBRUARY 1835, the Presbyterian missionary John C. Lowry, from Philadelphia, was invited by Maharaja Ranjit Singh to an evening entertainment in Lahore with the Nach dance troupe girls. The Padre Sahib made his excuses, having first presented the illiterate monarch with a copy of the Bible and Gurmukhi translation of the Pentateuch. But he did join the ruler on a hunt a few days later and recorded admiringly how the maharajah ran his kingdom on the hoof.
Lowry was one of many Farangis, foreigners, at the Punjab court in what is now northern India and Pakistan, including Napoleonic military, a Hungarian doctor, and Iraqi Jewish refugees. “Collectively they gave rise to what was almost certainly the most cosmopolitan court in the world at that time,” William Dalrymple says.
“Ranjit Singh: Sikh Warrior King” lifts the curtain on the Sikh empire that flourished in the 19th century’s first four decades and its ruler. “Neither saint nor villain, Ranjit Singh was a force of nature that danced everywhere in between,” according to the guest curator, Davinder Toor.
After cabinets of jewels, textiles, and armour, including an 18th/19th-century steel and iron cuirass bearing a portrait in gold of Guru Nanak, the first of ten spiritual teachers of the Sikh faith, comes the troubling story of Duleep Singh, Ranjit’s youngest son. Born in 1838, a year before his father’s death, Duleep ascended the throne at the age of five, his mother Maharani Jind Kaur acting as regent. In the first and second Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1845 and 1848-49, the Punjab was annexed by the East India Company. Duleep was separated from his mother, who was banished to British India, and put in the care of the Company surgeon John Login. As a teenager, Duleep converted to Christianity and looked to devout Login and wife Lena as parental figures.
Famously, Duleep captivated Queen Victoria when he settled in England. She commissioned a portrait in 1854 of Punjab’s last maharajah and a marble bust two years later. Portrait Bust of Maharaja Duleep Singh (1859-60) is a likeness made by John Gibson in white marble, commissioned by Duleep on a visit to Rome. The Koh-i-Noor, transferred to the Governor-General Lord Dalhousie by Duleep, formed part of the Queen’s regalia. A gouache and gold painting by an unknown court painter, Maharaja Duleep Singh and Lord Dalhousie (1849-50), shows a sombre child in pearl-decorated turquoise turban, sitting opposite Dalhousie wearing a black frock coat and wing collar. The flattening, linear style of the painting captures both figures’ full facial expression. Duleep was reunited with his mother in Calcutta in 1861. They lived in London for the final two years of her life.
In 1886, Duleep set sail for India, hoping to regain his kingdom and make good the broken promises of the 1846 Treaty of Lahore. At Aden, he was denied onward passage to India by the British authorities, and arranged a Khalsa initiation ceremony to return to the Sikh faith. Duleep died alone and penniless in 1893 in a Paris hotel room.
To borrow Nan Goldin’s phrase, the Wallace show is beauty and bloodshed. The enchantment of the Lion of the Punjab’s golden throne in the shape of a lotus flower and covered in scrolled gold leaf, made by the Muslim goldsmith Hafiz Muhammad Multani (1820-30) has to be set beside the horror of The Cremation of Maharaja Ranjit Singh with Four Queens — and Seven Maidservants (c.1840), by an unknown Kangra artist. In schematic style in gouache and gold on paper, the maharaja’s bearded, elongated corpse lies above a lit sandalwood funeral pyre. In the background, 11 brightly dressed female figures curve around the corpse, about to be cremated alive. One of the maidservants was said to be 12.
“Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King” is at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1, until 20 October. Phone 020 7563 9500. www.wallacecollection.org