ARMY OF MAHARAJA RANJIT SINGH, a formidable military machine that helped the Maharaja carve out an extensive kingdom and maintain it amid hostile and ambitious neighbours, was itself the creation of his own genius. His inheritance was but a scanty force which, in the manner of the Sikh misldari days,

ANGLOSIKH TREATY (BHYROWAL/ BHAROVAL, December 1846), signed on 16 December 1846 between the East India Company and the minor Maharaja Duleep Singh, provided for a Britishcontrolled regency till the Maharaja came of age. Maharani Jind Kaur, who was acting as regent other son, Duleep Singh, had believed that, as stipulated

ELLEN BOROUGH PAPERS, official and private correspondence and papers of Lord Ellen borough, Governor General of India (1842-44), preserved in the Public Records Office, London. Some of these papers were used by Lord Colchester in his History of the Indian Administration of Lord Ellen borough in His Correspondence with the

MONTAGUCHELMSFORD REFORMS AND THE SIKHS. The first time the elective principle was introduced to choose representatives for legislative bodies in India was with the introduction of the scheme known as Morley Minto reforms of 1909. By then the Muslims had succeeded in persuading Lord Minto, Governor General of India, that

UNITY CONFERENCE, convened on 3 November 1932 at Allahabad by a small group of Hindu and Muslim leaders led by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya and Maulana Shaukat `All, to which were invited delegates representing a broad spectrum of Indian religious communities, interest groups, and political organizations, aimed at drafting agreements

PRASADI HATHI, an elephant trained to perform several unusual feats, was among the presents brought to Guru Gobind Singh by an Assamese chief, Ratan Rai. According to Sikh chronicles, Ratan Rai`s father. Ram Rai had served Guru Tegh Bahadur during his travels across Assam in the mid1660s and received his

RAKHI SYSTEM, the arrangement whereby the Dal Khalsa during the middecades of the eighteenth century established their sway over territories not under their direct occupation. Rakhi, lit. `protection` or `vigilance,` referred to the cess levied by the Dal Khalsa upon villages which sought their protection against aggression or molestation in

CHARYARI SOWARS was the name given to an irregular cavalry regiment in Sikh times. It owed its origin to four friends, or Char (four) Your (friends), who were seen together all the time. Their names were: Bhup Singh Siddhu.Jit Singh, Ram Singh Saddozai and Hardas Singh Bania. They were all

ANGLOSIKH WAR I, 1845-46, resulting in the partial subjugation of the Sikh kingdom, was the outcome of British expansionism and the near anarchical conditions that overtook the Lahore court after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in June 1839. The English, by then firmly installed in Firozpur on the Sikh

EUROPEAN ADVENTURERS OF NORTHERN INDIA, 1785 to 1849, by G. Grey, first published in 1929 and reprinted by the Languages Department, Punjab, Patiala, in 1970, contains biographical sketches of over one hundred Europeans who came to or served in the Punjab during Sikh times. The book, which is the result

NANKANA SAHIB MASSACRE refers to the grim episode during the Gurdwara Reform movement in which a peaceful batch of reformist Sikhs was subjected to a murderous assault on 20 February 1921 in the holy shrine at Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak. This shrine along with six others in