Ranjit Singh proclaimed Maharaja; the Sarkar Khalsaji

Who: Ranjit Singh, ruler of Lahore; Baba Sahib Singh Bedi, a pious Sikh described in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism as in direct descent from Guru Nanak; and the sardars and people gathered at Lahore.

What: On Baisakhi day, 12 April 1801, Sahib Singh Bedi applied the saffron tilak, the mark of sovereignty, to Ranjit Singh's forehead and proclaimed him Maharaja of the Punjab. (The Encyclopaedia's separate entry on Sahib Singh Bedi dates the ceremony to 11 April.) Ranjit Singh refused to wear royal emblems or sit on a throne for the ceremonies. He had coins struck in the name of the Guru, with neither his name nor his likeness on them. From 1801 they carried the same inscription as the earlier Gobindshahi coins but were called Nanakshahi, and the Lahore mint dates from that year. The seal of the government made no mention of him either. The state was called the Sarkar Khalsaji, the Government of the Honoured Khalsa, and its court the Darbar Khalsaji. Ranjit Singh preferred to be addressed simply as Singh Sahib.

Where: Lahore, which Ranjit Singh had taken from the Bhangi sardars in July 1799.

Why it mattered: The proclamation turned two years of conquest into a sovereign Sikh state with a recognised ruler. The form mattered as much as the title: authority was claimed in the name of the Guru and the Khalsa, not of a dynasty, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the government was not his own or his family's. The conquests that followed, Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819 and Peshawar in 1834, were made by this state, which the Encyclopaedia's entry on the Lahore Darbar places between 1799 and 1849.