British annexation of Punjab

Who: The East India Company under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, and Maharaja Duleep Singh, son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who was born in September 1838 and so was about ten and a half. The Sikh Council of Regency also had to sign. Henry Lawrence, the British Resident at Lahore, called the annexation "unjust and impolitic".

What: The Sikh army was beaten at Gujrat on 21 February 1849, and its remnants surrendered at Rawalpindi on 14 March (National Army Museum). Early on 29 March 1849 a darbar was held in the palace inside the Lahore Fort. Duleep Singh was seated for the last time on his father's throne, surrounded by British troops, and signed the document that deprived him of his crown and kingdom. Henry Elliot, the foreign secretary, then read Dalhousie's proclamation that the Punjab kingdom had ceased to exist and its territories had become part of the British dominions. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls the proclamation "a most artful statement" and says its charges against the Sikhs were not factually sustainable. Scroll gives 2 April 1849 for the formal incorporation of the Punjab into British India, and says the Punjab's army was disbanded and its soldiers told to go back to their villages.

Where: Lahore Fort, then the whole of the Punjab, including present-day Indian and Pakistani Punjab.

Why it mattered: It ended the Sikh sovereignty that began when Ranjit Singh took Lahore in 1799, fifty years earlier. The Company governed through a Board of Administration, with Henry Lawrence as president and John Lawrence and C. G. Mansel as members, until John Lawrence became the first Chief Commissioner on 11 February 1853.

Duleep Singh was taken from Lahore on 21 December 1849 and placed in the care of Dr John Login. At Fatehgarh he became a Christian. He was sent to England in 1854, and died in Paris in October 1893. The Koh-i-noor reached the Governor-General from Login on 7 December 1849 and was handed to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850. After the 1857 revolt the British recruited Sikhs heavily, and Sikhs kept a numerical lead in the British Indian Army for about half a century after 1861 (Scroll).