The Visit of Czarevitch Nicholas Alexandrovitch to Lahore, January 1891
- Fakir Aijazuddin
- Jun 22, 2021
- 19 min read
Updated: Mar 29
The below is adapted from Fakir Aijazuddin's 2021 book Imperial Curiosity: Early Views of Pakistan, 1845-1906.
Introduction
The nineteenth century was a period of imperialist expansion. Powerful countries in Europe like Great Britain, Germany, and Russia recognized the potential of countries in the near and far East—potential for travel, for tourism, for the advancement of scientific knowledge, for trade, and perhaps most important of all, resources with which to fuel their own domestic economies.
The British came to India as equals and stayed as victors. By the 1840s, after having dominated most of the Indian peninsula, they turned westwards, annexing first Sindh in 1843, then extending into the Punjab following the First Anglo-Sikh war of 1845-46, and then with finality after Punjab’s annexation in 1849. As one historian of the British Raj has put it, the subcontinent of India thereafter became ‘a manageable entity, brought to order by British method; on the ground, first to last, it was a pungent virile and gigantic muddle, kept in hand by British bluff’.[1]
When the winter of 1845 began, the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh had been dead for less than ten years. The kingdom he had put together with stratagem and guile was left in the inept hands of his successors, each less memorable than the last. The army that he had so assiduously trained with the help of French mercenaries like General Jean Francois Allard and Charles Court, the artillery he had manufactured and assembled at his fort at Govindgarh, the cavalry that rode on horses many of whom he knew by name had all been pitted against the forces of the East India Company in a reckless challenge of misplaced bravado. The irascible Sikh darbar dared to do what the canny maharaja had avoided. It crossed the Sutlej river which served as the border between the Sikh empire and the incipient British one. Had the Sikh darbar read Roman history, they would have understood what the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ meant. They crossed their own Rubicon, except that it resulted not in victory but a humiliating defeat. The Sikh army had to return to its side of the river. With more impulsiveness than reason, the Sikh Khalsa fought the troops of the East India Company. Again, they lost. The Sikh kingdom of the Punjab forfeited both sovereignty and independence.
Before this debacle, in the early part of the nineteenth century, numerous British and European visitors had come to the Punjab to marvel at the court of the fabled Maharaja Ranjit Singh. After the annexation of his kingdom in 1849, the subjects of their curiosity became Queen Victoria’s loyal subjects.
Nothing typifies this more, for example, than an image that appeared in the Illustrated London News of the preparations for the visit of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1876. It shows local workmen lifting a crown to form the apex of their decorations. The caption ends with a condescending but telling pun: ‘Supporting the Crown’. His and other such tours by British royalty were to become benign affirmations of an irreversible conquest—the clamp of a crested yoke that would not be lifted until 1947.