The Gurus were around at a time when monarchy was most definitely the political norm. However, we must recognise that new “kingdoms” were still being created around the globe even into the nineteenth century, and royal elites in Ranjit Singh’s day were continually trying to assert themselves in a multitude of ways – a fact that perhaps conflicts with modern, popular understandings of that century as an era in which nation-states and democracy were becoming the order of the day.
Take Europe, where new states headed by royal dynasties were created throughout the nineteenth century, even as demands for constitutional reforms of monarchies were growing louder and revolutions were taking place. Examples include the kingdoms of Greece, Belgium, Bulgaria and unified Italy.