The Sikh army was rebuilt from irregular horse into a drilled force of infantry, artillery and cavalry between about 1805 and 1830. From 1822 European officers trained and commanded its infantry, cavalry and guns under the Maharaja, among them Ventura, Allard and Court.
At Ranjit Singh Ji's death it stood at roughly 29,000 regular infantry, 4,000 regular cavalry, 250 to 300 guns, and a large body of irregular horse, the Ghorchara Fauj, on top of that. By 1845 the establishment had grown to over 70,000.
Command was Indian. Europeans trained and led brigades but the Sikh generals, Hari Singh Nalwa, Misr Diwan Chand, Sham Singh Attariwala, Ventura's Sikh counterparts, ran the campaigns.
Words of command were Persian, Punjabi, French and English at different times in different units. Pay was regular, which was unusual, and the accounts of it survive in the Khalsa Darbar records.
After 1839 the army became the arbiter of the succession at Lahore. Regimental panchayats elected representatives and negotiated directly with the durbar. That is a soldiers' council in an Indian state in the 1840s and it has almost no parallel anywhere.
It fought two wars against the Company and lost both, in circumstances where its own commanders were in correspondence with the enemy.
It was reorganised from the misl levies into a standing regular army with European drill, uniforms, regular pay and its own artillery foundries, which no other Indian power managed at that scale.
By the 1840s it had several hundred guns and a regular establishment in the tens of thousands, and it was the last Indian army the British had to fight twice to beat.
It was also, after 1839, the political power in the state. The Panchayats elected by the regiments were negotiating with the court, which is a large part of why the first war happened at all.