Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji did not build his army out of the misl cavalry he inherited. He rebuilt it on European lines, and he hired Europeans to do it.
Four men did most of the work, all of them veterans of the Napoleonic wars who had come east after Waterloo left them unemployed. Jean-Baptiste Ventura, an Italian, took the infantry. Jean-François Allard, a Frenchman, took the cavalry. Both entered service around 1822. Claude Auguste Court came later and worked on the artillery and on foundry work. Paolo Avitabile governed Wazirabad and then Peshawar, and is remembered there for methods that were effective and brutal in roughly equal measure.
The brigade they raised was the Fauj-i-Khas, the special force. It drilled to French command, carried its own colours, and was paid and equipped ahead of the rest.
The wider army was divided between the Fauj-i-Ain, the regular paid infantry and artillery, and the Fauj-i-Be-Qawaid, the irregulars. The ghorchara, the old feudal horse of the misls, remained but was no longer the centre of the thing. The Topkhana, the artillery arm, was the piece the British respected most, and Lehna Singh Majithia ran the ordnance work that supplied it.
The result was the only Indian army of its period that the East India Company genuinely did not want to fight. It took two wars and the deaths of the men who had held it together before the Company got past it.
After 1839 the army became the political actor rather than the instrument. Regimental panchayats decided matters that ministers could not, and the succession struggles at Lahore between 1839 and 1845 were settled, when they were settled, by which units backed whom.
Its officers and men were paid in cash on a fixed scale rather than in land, and that is the change that mattered more than the drill did. A soldier paid monthly by the state answers to the state. A soldier holding a jagir answers to whoever gave it to him, and every other Indian army of the period ran on the second arrangement.
It was infantry, cavalry and artillery in one formation, paid regularly and trained continuously, which almost nothing else in India was at that date.
The rest of the army was reorganised on its model over the following decade. The British accounts of the two wars describe the infantry and the artillery they met in terms they used for no other Indian force.
Standard histories of the Sikh Empire and the Anglo-Sikh wars. This page draws on general historical accounts rather than a single cited source, and specific figures for troop strength and gun counts are deliberately not given here because the published numbers vary widely.