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

142

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS

CHAP. V

1809-18. once cease, and the Jodh Singh Kalsia, who avoided giving
in his adhesion to the British Government on the advance
of Sir David Ochterlony, required to have troops sent
against him in 1818 to compel the surrender of tracts which
he had forcibly seized.1
The history of the southern or Malwa Sikhs need not be
continued, although it presents many points of interest
to the general reader, as well as to the student and to those
Perplexi- concerned in the administration of India. The British
British functionaries soon became involved in intricate questions
authorities about interference between equal chiefs, and between chiefs
regarding and their confederates or dependants; they laboured to
the rights
of supre- reconcile the Hindu laws of inheritance with the varied
macy, and customs of different races, and with the alleged family
the operation of in- usages of peasants suddenly become princes. They had to
ternational decide on questions of escheat, and being strongly impressed
with the superiority of British municipal rule, and with the
undoubted claim of the paramount to some benefit in return
for the protection it afforded, they strove to prove that
collateral heirs had a limited right only, and that exemption
from tribute necessarily implied an enlarged liability to
confiscation. They had to define the common boundary
of the Sikh states and of British rule, and they were prone
to show, after the manner of Ranjit Singh, that the present
possession of a principal town gave a right to all the villages
which had ever been attached to it as the seat of a local
authority, and that all waste lands belonged to the supreme
power, although the dependant might have last possessed
them in sovereignty and intermediately brought them under
the plough. They had to exercise a paramount municipal
control, and in the surrender of criminals, and in the demand
1 Resident at Delhi to Agent at Ambala, 27th Oct., 1818, mulcting
the chief in the military expenses incurred, 65,000 rupees. The head
of the family, Jodh Singh, had recently returned with Ranjit Singh's
army from the capture of Multan, and he was always treated with
consideration by the Maharaja; and, bearing in mind the different
views taken by dependent Sikhs and governing English, of rights of
succession, he had fair grounds of dissatisfaction. He claimed to be
the head of the 'Krora Singhia' Misal, and to be the heir of all childless feudatories. The British Government, however, made itself the
valid or efficient head of the confederacy.