The Man Who Purchased Kashmir
Published in Kashmir Life - June 2015
It was extraordinary for an illiterate man to evolve into a crafty warlord who worked for others to create his own empire. Promoted by Khalsa Durbar, he allied with the East India Company, and eventually raised loans to purchase Kashmir in installments. But Gulab Singh, the ruthlessly ambitious maverick who founded J&K state, shall remain an enigma throughout history for cobbling a heterogenic state that defies logic but still exists 157 years after his death.
Manhattan Indians’ sold New York City to Dutch settlers in 1614 for about 24 dollars. In 1867 even America purchases ‘Russian America’ for 7.2 million dollars from Russia and renamed it Alaska. But the sale of Kashmir by East India Company in March 1846 continues to be the most discussed sale of a nation ever. Nearly 170 years later, this Rs 75 lakh purchase still haunts Kashmir nation’s core conscience. Key to its tensions and instability, Kashmir is still groping to find a way to stop devouring generations.
The March 16, 1846 Treaty that sold Kashmir, “their fields, crops, streams, even the peasants…” – as poet Iqbal lamented later, was signed more than 500 kms away from Srinagar, in Amritsar. “On this occasion Maharaja Gulab Singh stood up and with joined hands, expressed his gratitude to the British Viceroy – adding, without however, any ironical meaning,” recorded Captain Joseph Davey Cunningham, an East India Company official, in his celebrate History of Sikhs. “That he was indeed the zar-kharid or gold-boughten slave!”
Gulab Singh - 1847
Plate 1 from "Recollections of India. Part 2. Kashmir and the Alpine Punjab" by James Duffield Harding (1797-1863) after Charles Stewart Hardinge (1822-1894), the eldest son of the first Viscount Hardinge, the Governor General. This depicts Maharaja Gulab Singh (died 1857) who started his career as a soldier under Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1792-1839) and rose to a prominent position at his court. During the first Sikh war he forged an alliance with the British and defeated Sikh groups vying for power after Ranjit Singh's death. After signing the Treaty of Amritsar, 1846 he became Maharaja and bought the territories of Jammu and Kashmir which occupied an important position in the political geography of India. The British needed a friendly power by which the Northwest frontier could be defended against the Afghans.
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