A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej.

202

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS

CHAP. VII

1835-6. beaten from Kandahar, Nur Muhammad of Hyderabad was
Negotia understood to be willing to surrender Shikarpur to the
tions. Maharaja, on condition of his guarantee against the attempts
of the ex-king.l But this pretext would not get rid of the
English objections; and Ranjit Singh, moreover, had little
confidence in the Sindians. He kept, as a check over
them, a representative of the expelled Kalhoras, as a pensioner on his bounty, in Rajanpur beyond the Indus; 2 and,
at once to overawe both them and the Barakzais, he again
opened a negotiation with Shah Shuja as soon as he returned
to Ludhiana.3 But his main difficulty was with his British
allies; and, to prove to them the reasonableness of his
discontent, he would instance the secret aid which the
Mazari freebooters received from the Amirs; he would
again insist that Shikarpur was a dependency of the chiefs
of Khorassan,5 and he would hint that the river below
Mithankot was not the Indus but the Sutlej, the river of the
treaty,-the stream which had so long given freshness and
beauty to the emblematic garden of their friendship, and
which continued its fertilizing way to the ocean, separating,
yet uniting, the realms of the two brotherly powers of the
East! 6
Ranjit But the English had formed a treaty of navigation with
amSiion Sind, and the designs of Ranjit Singh were displeasing to
displeasing them. They said they could not view without regret and
tEngih disapprobation the prosecution of plans of unprovoked
1 Capt. Wade to Government, 6th Feb. 1835.
2 Capt. Wade to Government, 17th June 1834. Sarafraz Khan,
otherwise called Ghulam Shah, was the Kalhora expelled by the
Talpurs. He received Rajanpur in jagir from Kabul, and was
maintained in it by Ranjit'Singh. The place was held to yield
100,000 rupees, including certain rents reserved by the state, but the
district was not really worth 30,000 rupees.
3 Capt. Wade to Government, 17th April 1835, and other letters
of the same year. The Maharaja still urged that the English should
guarantee, as it were, Shah Shuja's moderation in success; partly,
perhaps, because the greatness of the elder dynasty of Ahmad Shah
still dwelt in the mind of the first paramount of the Sikhs, but partly
also with the view of sounding his European allies as to their real
intentions.
4 Capt. Wade to Government, 5th Oct. 1836.
5 Capt. Wade to Government, 15th Jan. 1837.
6 Capt. Wade to Government, 5th Oct. 1836.