HOW LONDON PRICED INDIA'S PRINCES

At Sotheby's London "Arts of the Islamic World and India" sale, Tipu Sultan's pistols sold for £1.1 million and a Maharaja Ranjit Singh procession painting fetched £952,500, helping push the auction past £10 million.

- TDG NETWORK

Procession of Maharaja Ranjit Singh - This richly detailed painting from the Sikh court shows Maharaja Ranjit Singh riding an elephant through a Lahore bazaar, attended by his sons Kharak Singh and Sher Singh on horseback.

In late October 2025, a pair of eighteenth-century silver-mounted pistols and an intricate nineteenth-century painting mesmerised bidders at Sotheby's London.

The pistols had been made for Tipu Sultan, the “Tiger of Mysore,” and the painting depicted Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh Empire, riding on an elephant through a bustling bazaar. In an auction titled “Arts of the Islamic World and India,” the pistols sold to a private collector for £1.1 million - almost fourteen times their estimate - and the painting was bought by an institution for £ 952,500, setting a record for Sikh art. The sale generated more than £10 million, and 20 per cent of the buyers were new to Sotheby's.

On the surface, this is just another headline about wealthy collectors, spectacular prices and antique treasures. Yet the objects and their journeys to the auction block reveal a far more complex story about colonial conquest, the movement of courtly objects across empires, and the politics of heritage in the twenty-first century. To understand why these guns and paintings command such prices in London today, one has to trace a path from eighteenth-century Mysore and Punjab through the violence of imperialism to modern museums and private collections.

TIPU SULTAN AND THE SIEGE OF SERINGAPATAM