The alliance that made Ranjit Singh's rise possible did not survive his consolidation of power. Once he no longer needed the Kanhaiya Misl's cavalry to secure his throne, the relationship between Ranjit Singh and his former regent and mother-in-law deteriorated. Sada Kaur pressed him to provide for her grandchildren's inheritance, resisted his demands that she formally surrender administration of her own estates, and by some accounts threatened to appeal to the British for protection against her son-in-law, a move that in the political climate of his court amounted to open defiance.
Ranjit Singh responded by summoning her to Lahore under the appearance of reconciliation and placing her under close surveillance. When she attempted to flee toward British territory to make good on her threat, she was intercepted and confined, and her extensive estates, the same territory and wealth that had once made the Kanhaiya Misl a power in its own right, were confiscated and redistributed, part of it to Ranjit Singh's son Sher Singh and the remainder placed under a court-appointed governor. She remained a prisoner until her death in 1832 at around seventy years of age.
Ranjit Singh is recorded as having travelled to Amritsar to mourn her formally, and his grandson performed her funeral rites, a ceremonial recognition that sits uneasily beside the fact of her imprisonment. Modern reassessments of Sada Kaur read that contradiction as the clearest evidence of how completely the political partnership that built the Sikh Empire could be discarded once one partner's usefulness to the other had ended.