| No family has had such a long and continuous association with the Sikh Khalsa as the Fakir family of Lahore. For more than two hundred years, there has remained a durable contact between them despite changes in fortune, in circumstance and in the political configurations within the subcontinent. |
| The origins of the Fakir family were humble but dignified, as its name implied. According to early oral traditions, its founder was one Jalaluddin who, it is said, migrated during the seventh century from Arabia to Bokhara, and settled finally with his young grandson Bahauddin in the Uchch (Punjab), where his piety and erudition attracted a number of disciples. By the 18th century, the family had relocated at Chunian. There, Jalaluddin’s lineal descendant Syed Ghulam Muhyuddin served as a minor official under Zakaria Khan, then Governor of Lahore. |
| The family achieved unexpected prominence through the careers of Muhyuddin’s three sons – Azizuddin, Imamuddin and Nuruddin – all of whom in differing capacities but with equal loyalty served Maharaja Ranjit Singh from the earliest years of his reign until his death in 1839. |
| The earliest record of this service is Imamuddin’s reception, on behalf of the twenty-eight year old Maharaja, of Charles Metcalfe (Lord Minto’s envoy) in August 1808. Metcalfe had been sent to solicit the Sikh ruler’s help in thwarting an invasion by the French. Imamuddin’s performance as a diplomatic conduit were soon overshadowed by the superior talents of his elder brother Azizuddin, who was as gifted a linguist and scribe as he was a skilled hakim. He had learned his alchemy as a pupil of the Lala Hakim Rai of Lahore and through his mentor came to the attention of the Sikh ruler whose precious single eye he was able to cure of a threatening infection. |
| Gradually, the dependence of the Sikh ruler on his Muslim physician deepened into trust, and Azizuddin found himself executing assignments on behalf of the Maharaja of increasing complexity and sensitivity. These included the successful recovery of the strategic Attock Fort from the Afghan governor Jahandad Khan in 1813, negotiations with the Pahari rajas of Mandi and Rajauri, parleys with the Nawab of Bahalwapur, and coaxing tribute out of recalcitrant vassal rajas. As the Maharajah’s ‘parrot of sweet sound’, Azizuddin not only articulated the opinions of the Sikh ruler but within the privacy of the court helped significantly, through his sagacious and reasoned advice, to calibrate the fledgling state’s foreign policy, ensuring a pragmatic balance between the Maharaja’s instinctive urges to expand the frontiers of his growing kingdom and the ambitions of his covetous neighbours. Azizuddin’s main contribution to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s success as an independent sovereign of the Punjab lay in the consummate skill with which he conducted negotiations with potential adversaries – the Afghans in the northwest and more particularly the British, in the east across the Sutlej, who envied the Maharaja’s glittering court as much as they coveted his rich and extensive kingdom. |
| The measure of Azizuddin’s success in protecting and promoting the interests of the Sikh kingdom must be the durability of the various treaties he was able to secure through his negotiating skill – from the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809 by which the British recognized Ranjit Singh’s independent status as a raja to the Tripartite Treaty of 1838, in which they concluded an alliance with him as an equal. |
| Numerous visitors to the Punjab during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh – the British William Moorcroft, Alexander Burnes, the Frenchman Victor Jacquemont, the German Baron Charles Hugel, the Transylvanian Doctor Martin Honigberger, and the sisters Emily and Fanny Eden - have left their indelible impressions of Azizuddin. They wrote not always admiringly of his appearance, mellifluous eloquence and self-effacing demeanour. But they would have agreed that he could be subtle without being devious, loyal without being obsequious. Throughout his career that spanned the reign of Ranjit Singh himself, Azizuddin served the Maharaja with a solicitude that distinguished him from almost every other courtier. He retained the trust of the Maharaja until the maharaja’s death on 27 June 1839, ministering to him until the very end. |
| Linked as he was so closely to the person of the Maharaja, it was perhaps inevitable that following the death of his patron, Azizuddin’s own relevance and utility would diminish. Even though he was deputed by Maharaja Sher Singh to placate Lord Ellenborough after a diplomatic faux pas at Ferozepur in 1842, and succeeded, it was clear that he could not repeat the scale of his earlier triumphs during the meetings he attended between Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Lord Bentinck (then Governor General) at Rupar in 1831 and Lord Auckland at Amritsar and later at Lahore in December 1838. |
| Azizuddin died on 3 December 1845, unable to restrain the hotheaded elements within the Sikh durbar from a confrontation with the British. The words of a British administrator – Henry Lawrence – who arrived in the Punjab ayear after Azizuddin’s death could serve though as a fair epitaph to Azizuddin as a man and a diplomat: ‘Step by step he retired from public service. Blind though he was, his other senses were little impaired and it was only because his advice was disregarded that he abandoned his post. His last act was to implore the return of the invading army. I can believe all this; it is in keeping with Azeezooddeen’s character. He was the honestest, and perhaps, the ablest of Runjeet Singh’s advisers and was a well-wisher of both states.’ |
| Azizuddin’s younger brother Fakir Imamuddin, from the outset of his career, lived under the shadow of his elder brother, outdistanced by him in diplomacy and relegated to the distant but responsible post of Killahdar or Keeper of the Govindgarh Fort, the Maharaja’s treasury near Amritsar. |
| The tradition of professional fealty and a commitment to hikmat or local medicine as established by Fakir Azizuddin were continued on a different plane by his youngest brother Fakir Nuruddin, who was entrusted with subordinate responsibilities such as entertaining the British traveller William Moorcroft in 1820, hosting the soldier Lt. William Barr in February 1839 or supervising the roads and buildings of Lahore. Fakir Nuruddin’s parallel responsibility appears to have been the management of the family dispensary known as the Gulab Khana overlooking the entrance of the Badshahi Masjid, opposite the Lahore Fort. |
| During the turbulent reigns of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s successors, Fakir Nuruddin represented a voice of reason and caution against erratic governance. He was appointed as one of the members on the Regency Council for the young Maharaja Duleep Singh. He performed a final act of loyalty to the memory of the Maharaja by supervising the construction of his samadhi near the Roshnai Gate of the Lahore Fort, and later to his widow – Rani Jindan - when he accompanied her during her externment from the Punjab in the summer of 1848. |
| Nuruddin died at the age of sixty-three on 26 March 1852. |
| Both Azizuddin and Nuruddin were writers of distinction and composed poetry in Persian. Examples of Azizuddin’s compositions are now difficult to trace but Nuruddin’s Diwan-i-Munnawar (Munnawar being his pen-name) has been recently reprinted. |
| Nuruddin’s sons – Fakir Zahurduddin and Fakir Qamaruddin – continued into the next generation the connection between their family and the with the family of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Zahuruddin served as the tutor in Persian to the young Maharaja Duleep Singh during his exile at Fatehgrah, while Qamaruddin accompanied Rani Jindan during her exile and became a chronicler of the period of Sikh rule in the Punjab to which he had been a young witness. |
| Succeeding generations of the Fakir family have nurtured the connection, and it was revived in 1965 by Col. Fakir Waheeduddin with the publication of his popular biography The Real Ranjit Singh (published in 1965) and in 1979 by his son Fakir Aijazuddin with his volumes Pahari Paintings and Sikh Portraits in the Lahore Museum (1977) and Sikh Portraits by European Artists (1979), a biographical study of oil paintings in the Princess Bamba collection, displayed in the same Lahore Fort that had been the backdrop of the first germinating contact between the great Maharaja and the scions of the Fakir family. |
