The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

In 1801, Ranjit Singh, the young scion of a petty fiefdom in the Punjab was declared the Maharaja of Punjab. The young man went on to carve out a kingdom that stretched from the borders of Afghanistan in the west to those of the British Raj in the east—the lush hills and valleys of Kashmir, the barren mountains of Ladakh and the fertile plains of his native Punjab. The British dared not engage in military adventures against Ranjit Singh, but valued him as an ally who would keep their western frontier safe.

The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia brings alive the king's dynamic court and his tumultuous but effective reign. In his court was Akali Phoola Singh, the tempestuous leader of the militant Sikhs, who won Ranjit Singh some of his most notable victories, but never fully submitted to his authority. The teenaged Muslim courtesan, Bibi Moran, was the love of the emperor's life. Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Philadelphia (the camel merchant of the title), rose to become a trusted administrator, only to defect to the Afghans. Jean Baptiste Ventura and Jean Francois Allard formed the king's famed French legions and rose to the highest ranks of the empire's armies.

Sarbpreet Singh's compelling new history of Ranjit Singh's life and times humanises a great emperor without glossing over his flaws and foibles. He examines the maharaja's complex relationship with his mother-in-law, Mata Sada Kaur, arguably the chief architect of his ascension to the throne, just as candidly as he does the rise of the Dogra brothers, who began as humble soldiers and went on to scale unimaginable heights of power and glory in his court.

This is an unusually nuanced and complex image of Maharaja Ranjit Singh-a must-read for everyone interested in Indian history.

SARBPREET SINGH is a poet, playwright, and commentator with a career in technology. His podcast, The Story of the Sikhs, has listeners in eighty countries. He is the author of Kultar's Mime, which tells the story of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in verse. His commentary has appeared on Huffington Post, Sikhchic, NPR, Boston Herald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Providence Journal. He is the founder of the Gurmat Sangeet Project, which is dedicated to the preservation of traditional Sikh music.

The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia came into being quite serendipitously. Growing up in Gangtok, Sikkim, far from Punjab, the Sikh homeland, I did not have much of an understanding or appreciation of Sikh history. There were hardly any Sikhs in Sikkim; other than a few army officers and civil servants who would be posted there occasionally, there were literally two Sikh families in Gangtok! My high school history books mentioned Sikhs only in passing and I never really learned about Maharaja Ranjit Singh or his empire.

I left India for the U.S. as a young man to attend graduate school and then stayed on to build a career in technology and business. I was in my mid-twenties, when quite by chance I happened upon a copy of History of the Sikhs, written by J.D. Cunningham, a Scotsman who served the East India Company, in 1849. By then I had read a few books on Sikh history, but I found Cunningham's work to be particularly engaging, especially the sections of the book that addressed events in the nineteenth century, which the author was an eyewitness to. That was my first memorable encounter with the romance and tragedy of the Sikh empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his colourful court, the Lahore Durbar.

Several years later, teaching history at Sunday school to Sikh teenagers born in the diaspora, I had the opportunity to revisit the stories that had captivated me so, as a young man. Teaching history to a group of jaded teens can be a challenging task and one summer, I decided to write a play about the life and times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, hoping that it might spark their interest. This led me to start collecting references and on a visit to Amritsar, I ventured into the well-known Singh Brothers bookshop and managed to acquire a translation of the Umdut Ut Twarikh, an account of the Lahore Durbar written in Persian by Sohan Lal Suri, the court's official diarist and scribe.

**Contents and Sample Pages**