Lehal Library

Maharajah of the Punjab 193 afternoon the young Maharajah rode on his elephant, showering gold and silver coins on jubilant crowds of his subjects. In the evening, all the homes of the city were illumined. Ranjit Singh's political acumen is well illustrated in the compromise he made between becoming a Maharajah and remaining a peasant leader. Although crowned King of the Punjab, he refused to wear the emblem of royalty in his simple turban. He refused to sit on a throne, and continued as before to hold durbar seated cross-legged in his chair, which looked more like a bathtub than a fauteuil, or, more often, received visitors in the oriental fashion reclining on cushions on a carpet. He ordered new coins to be struck. These did not bear his effigy or his name but that of Guru Nanak, and were named the Nanak Sahi coins. The seal of government likewise bore no reference to him. The government was not a personal affair but the Sarkar Khalsaji of the people who brought it into being and of those who collaborated with it; the court for the same reason came to be known as the Darbar Khalsaji. Despite sonorous tides which the sycophants in the court used for him, the one by which he preferred to be addressed was the plain and simple Singh Siihib. These conventions were a complete departure from the accepted traditions of oriental courts, where protocol was rigidly obse1ved to keep the monarch as far away from the masses as possible. Ranjit Singh did not want to, nor ever did, lose the common touch. The most important consequence of taking on the title 'Maharajah of the Punjab' was that thereby Ranjit Singh assumed rights of sovereignty not only over all Sikhs (the government itself being Sarkar Khals~i) but over all the people who lived within the ill-defined geographical limits of the Punjab. The title also gave Ranjit Singh a legal right to demand that territories which had at any time paid revenue to Lahoreterritories such as Jammu, Kashmir, the Rajput hill states, Multan, Bahawalpur, Dera Ismail Khan, Dera Ghazi Khan, Mank.era, and others-should pay tribute to him and owe allegiance to the Lahore Durbar. Ranjit Singh did not derive his tide from either the Mughals or the Afghans; it was given to him by that mystic entity, the Pail.th