Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History magazine. I'm Ellicothorn. In today's episode you'll be hearing from Priya Atwell, who's a teaching

fellow in modern South Asian History at Kings College London.

Priya has recently published a new book on the Sikh Empire of the early 19th century

examining its spectacular rise and fall and exploring the lives of some of its key players.

She also wrote an article on this subject for the October issue of BBC History magazine.

Priya was joined in conversation by our editor Rob Attar.

Okay so first of all I suppose a rather basic question but geographically whereabouts was the Sikh Empire?

So the Sikh Empire is today split between India and Pakistan.

The heartland of it was the Punjab in northern India at that time.

The southeastern border of it was the river Sutlage, which demarcated

Rungitsing's Banjib from the other separate Sikh states in southern Banjab and then the British Raj in the rest of India.

And the northern and western borders were with Afghanistan and Tibet and then of course the rest of

Central Asia. So it really did span quite a vast area of land in what was

their northern India and spreading into the Himalayas. And actually from what you were just saying, you talked about other Sikh kingdom, so this is not the only Sikh state around this area.

Absolutely, so, Ranjit Singh's kingdom, the Sikh, well today we know was the Sikh Empire, it wasn't known as such then,

those are modern terms that we're using, was one of several Sikh kingdoms that emerged really by the end of the late 18th century.

And there were some other Sikh states that were south of the river Sutlage,

between the river Sutlage and the river Jumna that are today known as the

cis-Sushledge states but were essentially the kingdoms of the Rajas of Bhadbanjind as well as

Kapoor-Dalla so those were other smaller Sikh clans that alongside Rungizi's

family's warrior band, the Sukajukiya missile, were essentially part of 12 Sikh warrior bands that Sikh missiles which predominated throughout

the 18th century but by the middle to the end of that century we're setting up little kingdoms

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