Correction to image title: the photograph was taken in early 1848 rather than in 1849 but it was first published in 1849.

Further information (taken from: [1], [2]):

"The first ever daguerreotype – photo – portrait of a Sikh or Punjabi was taken in Lahore in early 1848 by Dr John McCosh, a surgeon in the army of the British East India Company. The subject was Diwan Mool Raj, the Sikh Governor of Multan, taken captive and condemned to death by the British.

He was the last flicker and certainly an unsung hero of the sovereign Sikh state of the Punjab. He, along with Bhai Maharaj Singh, had led the stiff resistance against the British army at the battle of Multan."

...

"The definition of the word portrait as an artistic representation of a prisoner taken by an invading army cannot be strictly applied, especially to the one of Diwan Mool Raj. The McCosh collection in the National Army Museum in London, England, consists of 310 surviving photographs of British officers and their families."

...

"The Diwan portrait was first published in the Illustrated London News (1 September, 1849) with the following caption:

'Moolraj is seen here wearing a similar dress to that worn on the day of his surrender where he was gorgeously attired in silks and splendid arms; in figure he appeared not to exceed the middle height, and, though powerfully, was elegantly formed; his dark, keen and piercing eyes seemed to take in whatever was within their range with a rapid but comprehensive glance.'

The Diwan was perhaps the first Sikh or Punjabi to face the trunk-size camera and it took a while for those colonised to get accustomed to the three-legged and one-eyed monster coming all the way from vilãyat. Nevertheless the Diwan, in his defiant posture, shows dignity in defeat and a deep sense of disgust towards his captors.

He was to die a year later at Buxar in August 1850 from an illness contracted as he was being transported to Benares. He was 37 then."

This photograph may have originally been arranged on a page grouped together with other photographs labelled "Sikhs", with each having an album/mount caption, as per Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious in 'What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures' (pages 142–143, 21 November 2022, ISBN: 9781800082984), available for free download via: [3]

Quote from the above discussing this:

A particularly notable discovery was a group of calotypes of Burmese architecture and people. Some were beautifully composed, but in general there was a sense of amateur experimentation about them. One of them was mounted on white paper with the handwritten title ‘Great Pagoda Prome (very ancient)’; however, of much greater interest to me was the reverse of the page. Here were nine empty spaces with torn sepia remnants where whole photographs had once been; each of the spaces was marked with an accession number, and the group was titled ‘Sikhs’, with the central image ‘Maharajah’. This was probably the result of a misguided attempt to lift the images from the page and potentially rearrange them according to new evaluations such as separating architecture from people, but I recognised this as a significant loss. Cultural knowledge enabled their identification as the earliest photographs of the Sikh people and their ruler Duleep Singh. The acquisition registers revealed that Dr McCosh deposited them in the Art Library in 1884, and subsequent research identified them as extremely rare prints by Dr John McCosh (figure 8.3).