A Muslim poet's requiem for the Sikh Empire
By Jeevandeep M Singh · April 2026
There is a peculiar thing about the most celebrated poem ever written on the fall of the Sikh Empire: it was written by a Muslim. Shah Mohammad of Vadala Viram, near Amritsar, composed his Jangnama Singhan te Firangian — the War Chronicle of the Singhs and the Foreigners — sometime around 1846, in the raw aftermath of the First Anglo-Sikh War. He wrote it in Punjabi, in the traditional baint metre, and he wrote it not as an outsider looking in but as a Punjabi mourning the destruction of something he considered his own.
That fact alone tells you something about Ranjit Singh's Punjab that no political treatise can. A Muslim poet, living within sight of the Harmandir Sahib, felt the fall of the Khalsa Raj as a personal wound. His poem is not a neutral chronicle. It is a lament — fierce, proud, and heartbroken — for a kingdom that belonged, in his telling, to all Punjabis.
Shah Mohammad (1780–1862) lived his entire life in the Amritsar district. His relatives served in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's army, and it was from their eyewitness accounts that he pieced together the story of the war. He is sometimes called the national poet of nineteenth-century Punjab — not because he wrote in the service of the state, but because he captured the spirit of a whole people at the moment of their greatest crisis. He gave his poem the title Jang Hind-Punjab da — the War between Hindustan and Punjab — a name that insists on Punjab's distinct identity as a sovereign nation, not merely a province to be absorbed.
The poem comprises 105 baints (stanzas of four verses each). The first forty-five describe the murderous palace intrigues that followed the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839. The remaining sixty describe the battles of the First Anglo-Sikh War — Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon — and the treachery that doomed the Khalsa from within.
Shah Mohammad begins not with the war but with the rot that made the war inevitable. He traces, with a historian's precision and a poet's fury, the chain of assassinations and betrayals that destroyed the Lahore Durbar from within. Maharaja Kharak Singh, his son Kanvar Nau Nihal Singh, Maharaja Sher Singh and his son Kanvar Partap Singh — all fell to palace intrigues. The prime minister Dhian Singh Dogra manipulated, manoeuvred and was himself murdered by the Sandhawalia sardars within minutes of their assassination of Sher Singh. Shah Mohammad relates this nightmare with what scholars have called a historical precision unusual in a popular poet.
The Dogra brothers — Dhian Singh, Gulab Singh, and Suchet Singh — are the villains of his account. They had been given jagirs and fiefdoms by Ranjit Singh; after his death, they hollowed out the empire from within. Gulab Singh emptied the Khalsa treasury. Tej Singh and Lal Singh, the commanders who would later betray the Khalsa army on the battlefield itself, were their creatures. Shah Mohammad saw all of this with clear eyes and recorded it without mercy.
The war itself lasted barely two months — from the Khalsa army's crossing of the Sutlej in December 1845 to the catastrophe at Sobraon on 10 February 1846. Four major engagements were fought: Mudki (18 December), Ferozeshah (21–22 December), Aliwal (28 January) and Sobraon (10 February). Shah Mohammad describes them all, but it is the contrast between the bravery of the ordinary Sikh soldier and the treachery of the commanders that gives his poem its agonising power.
At Ferozeshah, the Khalsa army came within hours of destroying the British force entirely. Governor-General Hardinge had already prepared to destroy his state papers. Then Tej Singh, commanding the Sikh reserve, inexplicably withdrew — pulling twenty thousand fresh troops out of a battle that the Khalsa was winning. Shah Mohammad makes no secret of where he places the blame.
The climax of the Jangnama is Sobraon. By February 1846, the Khalsa army was entrenched on the left bank of the Sutlej, twenty-five thousand men behind fortifications two and a half miles long. Maharani Jindan, the queen regent, had summoned the veteran general Sham Singh Attariwala from retirement. He came — and brought the Akali Nihangs under Akali Hanuman Singh with him.
When Tej Singh ordered a withdrawal, Sham Singh refused. He went to the tent where the Guru Granth Sahib was placed, bowed his head, and is said to have spoken words that have passed into Punjab's collective memory — words to the effect that jackals and dogs had been placed in command of lions, and that he would not be coming home. He donned his white shroud, mounted his horse, and led the charge. He took seven bullets in the chest, all from the front. Behind him, Tej Singh had dismantled the pontoon bridge across the Sutlej, trapping the Khalsa army between the British guns and the river. Thousands drowned.
Shah Mohammad immortalised the sacrifice. His verses on Sobraon are among the most powerful passages in Punjabi literature — a Muslim poet praising a Sikh general's martyrdom in language that makes no distinction of faith, only of courage and betrayal.
Why does a numismatist care about a poem? Because the Jangnama is about the end of the coins. Every rupee I have ever collected from the Sikh Empire — every Gobindshahi, every Nanakshahi, every leaf-marked Amritsar specimen — exists because the sovereignty that Shah Mohammad mourns once existed. The fourteen mints fell silent in 1849 because of the events he describes. The treachery of Tej Singh, the martyrdom of Sham Singh, the destruction of the pontoon bridge — these are not just episodes in a poem. They are the reasons the Sikh coinage ends where it ends.
Shah Mohammad himself titles his poem Jang Hind-Punjab da — not an Anglo-Sikh war, but a war between India and Punjab. That insistence on Punjab as a sovereign entity, distinct from Hindustan, is exactly the claim the coins made. Every rupee that carried the Guru's couplet instead of a king's name was asserting the same thing: that Punjab's sovereignty was its own, derived from the Guru and held in trust by the Khalsa. When that sovereignty was destroyed, the coins stopped. Shah Mohammad, without ever discussing numismatics, wrote the best explanation of why.
The Jangnama was transmitted orally for decades before it was set down in manuscript. Dr Ganda Singh edited a version; Sita Ram Kohli published a scholarly edition in 1966; P.K. Nijhawan produced the first English and Hindi verse rendition, published by the Maharaja Duleep Singh Foundation, calling the war — as Shah Mohammad himself did — the First Punjab War rather than the First Anglo-Sikh War. Shamsher Singh Ashok included it in Prachin Varan te Jangname (Amritsar, 1950). It remains the single most important popular literary source for the fall of Ranjit Singh's empire.
One hundred and five stanzas. A Muslim poet. A Sikh war. A Punjabi grief. The Jangnama is proof that the Khalsa Raj was never a sectarian project — and that its fall was mourned by everyone who had lived under its shelter.
"Jang Hind-Punjab da hon lagga…" — Now starts the war between Hindustan and Punjab.
— Shah Mohammad, opening of the battle section
Kohli, Sita Ram, ed. Var Shah Muhammad. Ludhiana, 1966.
Ganda Singh, ed. Panjab dian Varan. Amritsar, 1946.
Ashok, Shamsher Singh. Prachin Varan te Jangname. Amritsar, 1950.
Nijhawan, P.K. The First Punjab War — Shah Mohammed's Jangnamah. Maharaja Duleep Singh Foundation.
Sekhon, S.S. and K.S. Duggal. A History of Punjabi Literature. Delhi, 1992.
Read about the First Anglo-Sikh War on SikhCoins.in ↗
© 2026 Jeevandeep M Singh · Ludhiana, Punjab