The Sikh Empire Rises And Falls In Punjab

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore in 1799 and was formally crowned in 1801, founding the Sikh Empire. For the first and only time in the faith's history, Sikhism became the religion of a ruling state across the Punjab, with Ranjit Singh himself building and holding that state together for close to four decades of his own reign.

His death in 1839 removed the one figure who had built the empire and held its many parts together, and the decade that followed was one of succession disputes among his heirs and two wars against the British East India Company. Neither the internal disputes nor the wars were resolved in the Sikh state's favour: the empire was formally dissolved by proclamation on 30 March 1849, and annexation was completed three days later, on 2 April 1849, closing out the fighting that had followed Ranjit Singh's death.

What this changed for Sikhism's spread was the end of Sikh political sovereignty in the very region the faith had governed for half a century, and the beginning of Sikh life under a colonial power rather than under a state of its own. The empire Ranjit Singh had founded in 1799 lasted exactly fifty years to its formal dissolution, a rise and fall bounded at one end by his own coronation and at the other by the British annexation that a decade of disputed succession had failed to prevent.