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Bikaner
Bikaner
Walled desert city founded in 1488 by Rao Bika; capital of Bikaner State until 1947.
Pratap Singhji
Sixteenth ruler of Bikaner, April to October 1787. Crowned at six under the regency of his uncle Surat Singh and dead within five months; historians generally hold he was murdered.
p>Pratap Singh was crowned Maharaja of Bikaner on 25 April 1787, aged six, on the death of his father Raj Singh II. His uncle Surat Singh — Raj Singh's younger brother and the sixth son of Gaj Singh — was appointed regent.</p><p>He died on 9 October 1787, about five months later. Surat Singh, already exercising the powers of the state as regent, succeeded him as ruler in his own right and held the gadi until 1828.</p>
p>The <em>Khiyat</em>, the Bikaner court chronicle, gives the cause of death as smallpox. This is not generally accepted.</p><p>The standard modern assessment, stated plainly in the Wikipedia account and drawn from Sehgal's <em>Rajasthan District Gazetteers — Bikaner</em>, is that historians agree Pratap Singh was in all probability murdered by Surat Singh. The circumstantial case is what it looks like: three rulers died or were removed within seven months, the beneficiary of each death was the same man, and that man was already in control of the state as regent when the child in his care died.</p><p>The charge cannot be proved at this distance and the record here does not assert it as fact. But the historiographical consensus is itself a fact about this reign, and a court chronicle written under Surat Singh's own successors is not a disinterested witness to how his predecessor died.</p>
p>Wikipedia, 'Surat Singh of Bikaner', citing K. K. Sehgal, <em>Rajasthan District Gazetteers — Bikaner</em> (1962), p. 49, for both the <em>Khiyat</em>'s smallpox attribution and the historians' consensus that he was probably murdered; Wikipedia, 'Bikaner State' regnal list (25 April – 9 October 1787; b. 1781, d. 1787).</p><p><strong>Note.</strong> The murder is recorded here as the prevailing scholarly view rather than as established fact. No Wikidata item confirmed; local QID minted pending verification.</p>
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