BENGALURU: A calligraphist who had spent many years making a copy of the Quran and had failed to get any of the Muslim princes of Hindustan to give him an adequate price for his labours turned up at Lahore to try and sell it to the foreign minister, Fakeer Azizuddin. The Fakeer praised the work but expressed his inability to pay for it. The discussion was overheard by Ranjit Singh, who summoned the calligraphist to his presence. The Maharaja respectfully pressed the holy book against his forehead and then scrutinized the writing with his single eye.
He was impressed with the excellence of the work and bought the Quran for his private collection. Sometime later Fakeer Azizuddin asked him why he had paid such a high price for a book for which he, as a Sikh, would have no use. Ranjit Singh replied: ‘God intended me to look upon all religions with one eye; that is why he took away the light from the other.’
The story is apocryphal. But it continues to be told by Punjabis to this day because it has the answer to the question why Ranjit Singh was able to unite Punjabi Mussalmans, Hindus and Sikhs and create the one and only independent kingdom in the history of the Punjab. Another anecdote, equally apocryphal and even more popular, illustrates the second reason why Ranjit Singh succeeded in the face of heavy odds: his single-minded pursuit of power. It is said that once his Muslim wife, Mohran, remarked on his ugliness—he was dark, pitted with smallpox, and blind of one eye (‘exactly like an old mouse with grey whiskers and one eye’—Emily Eden)—‘Where was your Highness when God was distributing beauty?’
‘I had gone to find myself a kingdom,’ replied the monarch. Ranjit Singh has been poorly served by his biographers. Hindu and Sikh admirers deified him as a virtuous man and a selfless patriot. This academic apotheosis reduced a full-blooded man and an astute politician to an anaemic saint and a simple-minded nationalist. Muslim historians were unduly harsh in describing him as an avaricious freebooter. English writers, who took their material largely from Muslim sources, portrayed him as a cunning man (the cliché often used is ‘wily Oriental’) devoid of moral considerations, whose only redeeming feature was his friendship with the English. They were not only not averse to picking up any gossip they could (every Oriental court has always been a whispering gallery of rumours) but also gave them currency by incorporating them in works of history. In recent years, monographs on different aspects of Ranjit Singh’s government have been produced under the auspices of departments of history in some Indian universities.
These are mostly catalogues of known facts put in chronological order without any attempt to explain them in terms of historical movements. This method of treatment makes the meteoric collapse of his kingdom appear as a freak of history instead of as the culmination of an important historical movement. Just as a tide seems deceptively still to those who watch it from the shore, so did the swift undercurrent of Punjabi nationalism pass unnoticed by people who did not fathom the depths beneath the swell on which the Sikhs led by Ranjit Singh rode to power.
Extracted from Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab by Khushwant Singh in The Book of Indian Kings: Stories and Essays, with permission from Aleph Book Company