Harking back: Last wishes of the last Maharajah of Lahore Darbar.

In the Samadhi of Maharajah Ranjit Singh next to the Lahore Fort are the ashes of the great Punjabi maharajah, his wives and maids who were burnt alive with him, as are also those of his sons and their wives and maids, all burnt alive with them.

All these ashes represent almost the entire ruling family of the Lahore Darbar. The last great Maharani was Jind Kaur, who died in Abingdon House, Kensington, in London, on the first of August, 1863. She was first buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London because in England cremation was banned. The British were scared of sending her body back to Lahore fearing an uprising. It took almost two years for her son to negotiate the setting up of a Samadhi in Bombay, now called Mumbai, with the undertaking that her ashes would not be moved to Lahore.

Ultimately it took Ranjit Singh's granddaughter, Princess Bamba Duleep Singh, to get the colonial rulers to let the British secretly move her ashes to Lahore in 1924, which was exactly 63 years after her death. Initially, no plaque was allowed there, which the Pakistani government only recently allowed. Princess Bamba lived in Lahore's Model Town 'A' Block and died in Lahore and was buried in the Jail Road Christian Graveyard.

So we have Jind Kaur, known better as Jindan, whose ashes reached the family Samadhi. But then there is one last Maharajah whose ashes remain to reach where he himself wished to be, next to those of his father. Hence this narration is the tale of the missing last Maharajah of the Lahore Darbar and the Khalsa Punjab, whose last wishes remain to be fulfilled.

So on to Maharajah Duleep Singh. Born to Maharajah Ranjit Singh and his wife Maharani Jind Kaur, on the 4thof September, 1838, in Lahore, this youngest child of Ranjit Singh represented the last living child of the ruling Sikh family. In 1839 Maharajah Ranjit Singh died, and was followed by strife and struggle. In the end power, purely by the right of accession, passed on to the five-year old Duleep Singh in September 1843. De-facto power was exercised by his mother and her advisers.

In March, 1849, the British East India Company took over the Punjab after the Second Anglo-Sikh War, who recognised the five-year old as the legally-accepted maharajah. By the time he was ten-years old he was deposed and moved to Fatehgarh under the care of Dr. John Login.

In 1853 the British forced Duleep Singh to convert to Christianity, a move that the Governor General Lord Dalhousie approved. The...