Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

As for Punjabi, Miss M. Rose Greenfield, a missionary teacher in Ludhiana, had pointed out in 1882 that many Punjabi girls, Muslim and Hindu, were in fact learning Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script in schools, or in the Persian or Nagari scripts in their homes. Let primary village schools, she proposed, teach Punjabi in Gurmukhi to all children, irrespective of gender or religion. Later they could switch to Urdu or Hindi.56 The perspective of people in Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan differed from that of the Ludhiana teacher. Even so, ‘for the most part’, Punjabi women who could write at this time, including Muslims, evidently ‘wrote Punjabi in the Gurmukhi character’. As a contemporary historian points out, ‘[W]omen’s education in the Punjab owed a great deal to the Gurmukhi script.’57 Apparently the process had begun in Ranjit Singh’s time.