The Empire’s Conscience: Joseph Davey Cunningham and the Making of Sikh History

Part 4: Cunningham’s pioneering and sympathetic opus on the Sikhs was an act of moral courage that cost its author his career.

Colonel James Tod and James Grant Duff are remembered as the grand patriarchs of Indian regional history. For all their flaws and limited sources at hand, the works of Tod, the romantic chronicler of Rajput valour with his ‘Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’ (1829–32), and Grant Duff, the epic narrator of Maratha ambition in his three-volume ‘History of the Mahrattas’ (1826), have long enjoyed the glamour of pioneering status.

Yet it was Joseph Davey Cunningham, the least flamboyant of the trio, whose work stands out not just for its meticulous scholarship but his moral courage as well.

Cunningham’s ‘History of the Sikhs’ (1849) remains not merely a classic of historical reconstruction but a testament to intellectual integrity. While Tod and Grant Duff worked within the sentimental and didactic framework of empire, Cunningham wrote with the disciplined conscience of a truth-teller. His book was an act of intellectual rebellion that cost him his career and, ultimately, his life - but it also laid the foundations of Sikh historiography as we know it.

For eight crucial years in Indian history (1838–46), Cunningham had lived among the Sikhs, first as an engineer, then as a political officer, and later as a participant in the very events he would immortalise. His proximity to the Punjab frontier, to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s fading court, and to the chaos that followed the Maharaja’s death gave his account a rare immediacy.

“He brought to bear on the subject an unbiased mind, a fastidious fondness for accuracy, and consummate erudition,” wrote H.L.C. Garrett in his 1915 appreciation of the work.

The ‘History of the Sikhs’ was published at a dangerous moment, barely months after the annexation of Punjab by the East India Company. At one level, it was a conventional history beginning with the founding of the religion by Guru Nanak in the 15^th century and ending with the First Anglo-Sikh War in 1845. But beneath its eloquent Victorian prose ran a current of dissent. The result was a book that offended the most powerful man in India - Governor-General Lord Dalhousie - by telling the truth about British duplicity during negotiations with the Sikh chiefs.

The son of a Scottish poet, Joseph Davey Cunningham was born in Lambeth in 1812 and educated in mathematics and engineering before joining the Bengal Engineers through the influence of the famed Sir Walter Scott (which explains the double literary influence that courses through Cunningham’s immensely readable Sikh history).

His early career in India was spent under the shadow of empire-building by serving as assistant to political agents on the Sikh frontier, and observing first-hand the delicate diplomacy between Ranjit Singh, the British and the Afghans.

In his history, Cunningham followed the maxim of Colonel Gurwood, editor of Wellington’s Despatches: “The greatness of history is the exact illustration of events as they occurred; there should neither be exaggeration nor concealment.” This he obeyed religiously. His voluminous footnotes and careful ethnographic observations of the Punjab reflect an astonishing range of study.

After a meticulous opening on the geography, peoples and industries of the Punjab, Cunningham turned to the lives and teachings of the Sikh Gurus. In a striking parallel, Cunningham compared the Mughal persecution of the Gurus to the Roman emperors’ repression of early Christianity - a policy of fear that, paradoxically, consolidated the faith it sought to destroy.

The Mughal persecution transformed Sikhism from a creed of simple altruism into a militant brotherhood under Guru Gobind Singh with the result that the faith was reborn as a nation-in-arms.

From the chaos of the 18th century triggered by the invasions of the Persian, Nadir Shah and the Afghan, Ahmad Shah Abdali following the collapse of Mughal authority, there emerged the disciplined energy of the Khalsa.

Cunningham chronicled how, in 1742, under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, the army of the Khalsa became a recognised organisation and how, in 1764, they occupied Lahore and organised themselves into what he called a “Theocratic Confederate Feudalism.”

But unity remained fragile until Ranjit Singh’s arrival in 1799. Cunningham’s portrait of the one-eyed ‘Lion of the Punjab’ was balanced and unsentimental.

“Temperance and chastity were not his conspicuous virtues,” Cunningham observed dryly, “but with all his shortcomings, he was a strong and able ruler admirably suited to the conditions of the time.” The Maharaja’s consolidation of the Sikh misls (military confederacies which emerged in the 18^th C. in wake of the doddering Mughal Empire), his careful balancing of European officers and his diplomacy with the British are vividly narrated.

But it was Cunningham’s explosive account of the First Anglo-Sikh War that sealed his fate. Cunningham viewed the conflict as a tragic outcome of mutual mistrust rather than of Sikh aggression.

Ranjit Singh’s territorial ambitions inevitably brought him face to face with the British. His consolidation of the Punjab drew his forces up to the Cis-Sutlej States which were small principalities that had slipped under British protection. The outcome was the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809, which fixed the Sutlej as the boundary between the two powers. Ranjit Singh, ever the shrewd statesman, kept the treaty’s terms faithfully until his death three decades later in 1839, though he could not entirely conceal his unease at Britain’s growing ascendancy in the subcontinent.

With his passing, the Punjab plunged into turmoil. The central authority disintegrated, and the once-disciplined army of the Khalsa transformed itself into a political force, not unlike the Praetorian Guard at its most turbulent in Ancient Rome.

Cunningham, in one of the most vividly written sections of The History of the Sikhs, traces this period of intrigue and bloodshed in the Lahore court - a succession of bloody coups, regicides and intrigues that hollowed out the state Ranjit Singh had built.

The chaos reached its zenith when the Sikh army, goaded by court factions and emboldened by its own sense of power, crossed the Sutlej - an act that triggered the First Anglo-Sikh War.

Cunningham’s critics were quick to point out that his narrative here betrayed a sympathy for the Sikhs that was too pronounced for imperial comfort. He presented the war as a spontaneous uprising of national pride, a desperate act of self-preservation by a people resisting the creeping domination of the British. Later historians, however, would note that the war was far from an idealistic defence of sovereignty. It was rather the product of a corrupt and frightened Lahore administration, terrified of its own army and hoping to destroy or exhaust it through war. By driving the Khalsa across the Sutlej, the rulers of Punjab carried out a manoeuvre reminiscent, as Cunningham observed, of the political stratagems of Napoleon III.

Cunningham’s overt sympathies with the Sikhs, however, sealed his fate and he was abruptly transferred to faraway Bhopal, where he commenced the writing of his great work in exile.

As another soldier-scholar Gorge Bruce Malleson later explained the hostile reaction to Cunningham’s work: “A despotic Government cannot endure truths which seem to reflect on the justice of its policy. Cunningham’s book would be widely read and would influence the general verdict… That an officer holding a high political office should write a book which, by the facts disclosed in it, reflected, however indirectly, on Lord Dalhousie’s policy, was not to be endured. With one stroke of the pen, he removed Cunningham from his appointment at Bhopal. Cunningham, stunned by the blow, entirely unexpected, died of a broken heart.”

Truth, however, has its own endurance. Dalhousie would crush the man, but he could not destroy his work.

While Cunningham died in 1851 aged just 38, his ‘History of the Sikhs’ has since become the cornerstone of modern Sikh historiography - a springboard for a group of remarkable later scholars like Sita Ram Kohli, Indubhushan Banerjee and Hari Ram Gupta, who expanded and refined the edifice he had so meticulously laid.