When Ranjit Singh was born on November 13, 1780, even the most prophetic seer could not have predicted his meteoric rise. A childhood bout of smallpox left him with a pockmarked face and blind in his left eye—and he was short of stature and homely in appearance to begin with. No matter. At the age of 18, he seized control of Lahore, then as now a large and important commercial and cultural city. When the Pashtun king of Afghanistan, who had long held the Punjab, named him governor of the region at age 20, he declared himself Maharaja—and did what no Indian ruler had accomplished in a thousand years: drove the occupiers out. Modernizing the army and promoting soldiers of all faiths, the Lion of Punjab conquered neighboring regions, until he had established a Sikh Kingdom. He took Peshawar and Kashmir. He took Amritsar and Multan. In his negotiations with the Pashtuns, he even managed to acquire the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond. He was young, precocious, cunning, merciful, and vivacious: the Alexander the Great of India.
This is a silver coin struck in the name of the Sikh Gurus during the reign of Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab.
