Ranjit Singh Ji was born at Gujranwala on 13 November 1780. His grandfather Charat Singh had taken the town and built the fort there; his father Mahan Singh held it after him. The Sukerchakia misl was one of twelve and not the largest.
He lost an eye to smallpox as a child and succeeded at twelve when his father died. He took Lahore in July 1799, four months short of his nineteenth birthday, was proclaimed Maharaja in 1801, and by 1820 had absorbed every misl on the near side of the Sutlej.
The samadhi of Mahan Singh stands at Gujranwala. Ranjit Singh Ji's own samadhi is at Lahore, beside the Badshahi mosque.
Gujranwala is in Pakistani Punjab now and is a manufacturing city, known for fans, sanitary ware and wrestling. Its akharas have produced pahalwans for two centuries and the Bholu Brothers came from here.
Nothing in the town is signposted as the birthplace of the man who ruled from the Sutlej to the Khyber. The house is generally said to be gone.
The Sukerchakia name comes from Sukerchak, a village near the town that the family held before it held Gujranwala. Charat Singh took the place from the Chattha chiefs, and the Chatthas fought his son and his grandson over it for another forty years.
Mahan Singh died at about twenty seven, on campaign at Sodhra. His son was married at fifteen to Mehtab Kaur of the Kanhaiya misl, and it was his mother in law Sada Kaur who brought the Kanhaiya force to Lahore with him in 1799. The state was put together out of marriages as much as out of battles.
In April 1919, in the week after Jallianwala Bagh, aircraft were sent over Gujranwala and bombed and machine gunned crowds in the town and in the villages around it. The Hunter Committee took evidence on it afterward. It is the only occasion on which a town in India was bombed from the air by its own government, and it happened where the Maharaja was born.