What Happened to Ranjit Singh's Wives After the British Took Punjab?

In June 1839, in Lahore, the day after his death at the age of fifty-eight, the body of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, was carried to the funeral pyre. Four of his queens and seven other women of his household joined him on the pyre, eleven women in all by most accounts. His youngest wife did not. Jind Kaur, the daughter of the man in charge of the royal kennels, had a nine-month-old son, Duleep Singh, and she would spend the rest of her life fighting for him. Ranjit Singh had built the last great empire in India that the British had not conquered, a Sikh kingdom with Hindu and Muslim ministers that stretched from the Sutlej river to the Himalayas. He married, depending on who you ask, somewhere between sixteen and forty-six women: princesses from the hills, widows of a defeated rival, dancers from Lahore and Amritsar. When he died, every one of their lives changed in a single day. In this video, we trace what actually happened to Ranjit Singh's wives after the British took the Punjab. From six years of murders inside the royal family, when Chand Kaur became the first woman to rule the Sikh Empire and was killed in her own palace by her own maids, to a five-year-old Duleep Singh on the throne and his mother ruling as regent. From two wars with the East India Company, to Jind Kaur locked in a tower of the Lahore Fort, separated from her son and sent to the fortress of Chunar on the Ganges, to her escape in April 1849 dressed as a servant, some eight hundred kilometres to Kathmandu. We follow the dancer Gul Bahar, who stepped back from the pyre and was given a British pension for life, the Koh-i-Noor on its way to Queen Victoria, the reunion of mother and son in Calcutta after thirteen and a half years, Jind Kaur's death in London in 1863, and a diamond ornament of hers sold at Bonhams in 2021. This is the full story of the palace the Lion of the Punjab left behind, and of the kennel keeper's daughter who defied an empire. If you made it this far, leave the word Jindan in the comments. And if you enjoyed the video, please subscribe. These deep dives take real work, and your support genuinely makes a difference. Sources: • Priya Atwal, Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire (Hurst, 2020) • Martin Honigberger, Thirty-five Years in the East (1852) • Sohan Lal Suri, Umdat-ut-Tawarikh (chronicle of the Lahore court) • Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University), Jind Kaur, Gul Bahar Begam, Daya Kaur • Wikipedia, Ranjit Singh • Wikipedia, Wives of Ranjit Singh • Wikipedia, Mehtab Kaur • Wikipedia, Datar Kaur • Wikipedia, Rani Katochan • Wikipedia, Moran Sarkar • Wikipedia, Jind Kaur • Wikipedia, Chand Kaur • Wikipedia, Kharak Singh • Wikipedia, Second Anglo-Sikh War • Wikipedia, Koh-i-Noor • Wikipedia, Duleep Singh • Wikipedia, Bamba Sutherland • Wikipedia, Shahdeo Singh • Dawn, Harking back: Dazzling Rani of Punjab that was Gulbahar Begum • The Sikh Museum Initiative, Maharani Jindan Kaur • Bonhams, auction lots from the collection of Maharani Jindan Kaur (2009 and 2021) • Swarajya, In Search of Ranjit Singh: A Legacy That Continues To Shape A Nation #RanjitSingh #JindKaur #MaharaniJindan #SikhEmpire #LionOfPunjab #Punjab #Lahore #SikhHistory #DuleepSingh #KohINoor #AngloSikhWars #ChandKaur #GulBahar #Sati #EastIndiaCompany #BritishRaj #IndianHistory #WomenInHistory #RoyalWomen #RoyalFamilies #ExiledRoyalty #LostKingdoms #DynastyHistory #HistoricalDocumentary #ForgottenHistory #SouthAsianHistory