Death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh

Who: Maharaja Ranjit Singh; his eldest son Kharak Singh, the chosen heir; his grandson Nau Nihal Singh, then on the frontier directing the campaign against the Afghans; his second son Sher Singh; Raja Dhian Singh Dogra, the wazir; and a court split between the Dogra brothers and the Sikh nobility.

What: Ranjit Singh died of paralysis at Lahore on the evening of 27 June 1839. Six days earlier he had announced that Kharak Singh had chosen Dhian Singh as his wazir. The funeral was on 28 June and Kharak Singh took the throne. Khushwant Singh writes that Ranjit Singh left seven sons by different mothers, and that the wrangling began while his body still lay awaiting cremation. The chief courtiers agreed they could not trust Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh to continue their estates, and the day after the cremation they asked the heir to swear on the Granth that their grants would stand. Kharak Singh claimed to be Ranjit Singh's only legitimate son. Sher Singh, who based his claim on being the son of Ranjit Singh's first wedded wife, Mehtab Kaur, had stayed away from his dying father's bedside and came to Lahore only after Kharak Singh pledged not to arrest him. On 16 July Kharak Singh invested Sher Singh with titles, and by then Nau Nihal Singh had made the sardars sign a paper confirming his father as successor and himself as chief minister.

Where: Lahore, in the Fort and the palace.

Why it mattered: The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the state survived not more than a decade after Ranjit Singh's death. Khushwant Singh argues that his greatest oversight was failing to train any son to succeed him, and that the favourites he had raised from obscurity put their own estates before the state. Within eighteen months Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh were dead; Sher Singh took Lahore by force in January 1841 and was assassinated in September 1843; and the kingdom was annexed in 1849.