Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

could. I should confess that I grew up in Delhi

could. I should confess that I grew up in Delhi

was fortunate, too, that Ishtiaq Ahmed, the reputed Lahore-born political scientist who has lived for years in Sweden, read the manuscript and suggested improvements. His comprehensive study, published in 2011, of Punjab’s 1947 trauma was of invaluable help. I am greatly indebted to him. Helpful thoughts were also given by Professor Amita Sinha of the University of Illinois. Only I am responsible, I should add, for this study’s opinions and shortcomings.

was fortunate, too, that Ishtiaq Ahmed, the reputed Lahore-born political scientist who has lived for years in Sweden, read the manuscript and suggested improvements. His comprehensive study, published in 2011, of Punjab’s 1947 trauma was of invaluable help. I am greatly indebted to him. Helpful thoughts were also given by Professor Amita Sinha of the University of Illinois. Only I am responsible, I should add, for this study’s opinions and shortcomings.

These two were the first monarchs of what historians have called the Delhi Sultanate, a rubric for the three-century rule over much of India by four dynasties—Slave, Khilji, Tughlaq and Lodhi (or Lodi)—the first three predominantly Turkic and the last one Afghan, though some claim an Afghan origin for the Khiljis too. However, influenced as they were by Persian culture, India’s Turkic rulers employed Persian as the Sultanate’s court language.

The Sultanate’s control over the Punjab region was tenuous, largely because of raids throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by Central Asia’s Mongols. Unprecedented in the speed of their terrifying spread across Asia and Europe, remarkable in their military prowess and hugely destructive in their raids, the Mongols repeatedly pillaged not only Iran and the Arab world but also India, especially Punjab. Though the Mongols stopped (or were stopped) before reaching Delhi, they destroyed much of Punjab.

Thus Baba Farid seems to have said to his disciples, ‘Give me not a knife but a needle. I want to sew together, not cut asunder.’12 We know, too, that Farid’s thirteenth-century Punjabi verses refer to Punjab’s flowers and fruits, trees and thorns, birds in flight and in ponds, the tiger, the swan, the falcon, the crow and the dog.13

A poet and musician of exceptional talent, Khusro, a Turk born on the subcontinent, was a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Sufi mystic. While delighting in the Sultanate’s expansion and Islam’s spread, Khusro called ‘Hind’ or India his ‘motherland’ and, even with its Hindu majority, ‘a paradise on earth’. He thought that Muslims might find much to admire if they penetrated the heart of the seeming idol-worshipper.

Though Khusro spent several years in both Lahore and Multan, and wrote about the former city, he did not compose Punjabi verses or songs. His languages were Persian and Hindawi, a half-way house towards Urdu, a language born on the subcontinent from the interaction of Turkic ruling elites with Punjabi-speakers in the regions of Multan and Lahore, and with Hindi-speakers living in and around Delhi.

Timur’s legacy on the subcontinent is of a different sort. Possessing both Turkic and Mongol blood and professing Islam, Timur created a Central Asian empire and is today a hero in his native Uzbekistan. However, during his 1398-99 attack on India he not only spelt death and devastation for the Indian Sultanate and the Hindu p...

Babur demanded that the Lodhis of Afghan origin then heading the Sultanate should hand over the Delhi throne to Timur’s rightful heir, namely himself. Rejecting the demand, Ibrahim Lodhi fought Babur’s forces in a gory battle in Panipat in eastern Punjab in April 1526. Thanks largely to Babur’s cannons, Lodhi was defeated and killed, and India’s Mughal Empire began.

The emperor was aided in his campaigns by a road that Sher Shah Sur had earlier built from Bihar via Agra to Punjab, a highway that Akbar would extend westward to Peshawar and eastward to Bengal.

Most of Akbar’s mansabdars were descendants of nobles who had migrated from Central Asia to India, or new migrants. A few, as we have seen, were indigenous Hindus. It does not appear that Punjabi Muslims—whether converts or descendants of converts—were among them. Even Akbar’s army did not contain many Punjabis. It seems that ‘the newly converted Muslims of the Punjab… were never recruited in the Mughal armies’.

Akbar gave Punjab a degree of peace not experienced in the region for centuries. Individuals rebelled here and there, none more celebrated in modern times than Dulla Bhatti, a Muslim Rajput chief from Pindi Bhattian, about seventy miles northwest of Lahore, who was executed in Lahore for his revolt. Punjab’s population and economy grew under Akbar.

After Akbar’s death (in Agra), the brilliant and influential Islamic scholar, Shaikh Ahmad of Sirhind (1563-1624), questioned the genuineness of the Emperor’s Islam, even though Akbar was buried as a Muslim under Islamic rites. Offended by the freedom that Akbar’s regime gave to Hindus, Christians, Zoroastrians and other non-Muslims, as well as to Shias and Sufis, the Shaikh called for a return to what he saw as pure Islam. Others criticizing Akbar along similar lines included Abdul Qadir Badauni, a scholar in the Emperor’s office.

Such critics also disliked Akbar’s alliances (including marital) with Hindu princely families from Rajasthan, and the elevation of Hindus like Raja Todar Mal Tandon, the minister who managed the empire’s finances until his death in Lahore in 1589, and Raja Man Singh (hailing from today’s Jaipur), who led Akbar’s armies in battle or governed Kabul or another imperial province.

In 1574, when the third Guru’s daughter was getting married to one who would become the fourth Guru, the Mughal emperor gave, as a wedding gift, an area of land in a place in the Bari doab not yet called Amritsar.

In 1604, a year before Akbar died, the Granth Sahib, compiled by the fifth Guru, Arjan Dev, was installed in Amritsar at the site the emperor had provided. Earlier, in 1588, a renowned Lahore-based Sufi, Mian Mir (1550-1635) had evidently journeyed to the site—at the invitation of Guru Arjan Dev—to lay the foundation for a Sikh temple, the Harimandir, close to a tank, already sacred to the Sikhs, that Guru Ram Das had built.

When Jahangir died in 1628 (in Kashmir), Shah Jahan was not his obvious successor. Though his older brother, the rebel Khusrau, had died in imperial custody, Nur Jahan, who bore no children to Jahangir, was determined that Prince Shahir Yar, her son-in-law from a previous marriage, should succeed her husband. But the stratagems and resources of her brother, who was similarly resolved in favour of his son-in-law, Shah Jahan, were more successful, even though Jahangir had signed a will nominating Shahir Yar.

By the end of Shah Jahan’s kingship, Punjabis appeared to view the Mughal umbrella as reassuring rather than foreign. Though the Mughals employed Persian rather than Punjabi as their administrative language, many Punjabis were now relating themselves to the Mughals and perhaps even beginning to ‘own’ the Mughals.

Dara was also—unlike Akbar—a serious scholar who wrote or commissioned works of lasting interest on mysticism and on similarities among religions, including Sirr-i-Akbar (The Great Secret) and Majma-al-Bahrain (Mingling of the Oceans). Dara’s dialogue with Baba Lal, a Hindu thinker, ‘regarding bridging the gulf between race and race, creed and creed, Hinduism and Islam’, was held in Lahore in the home of a rich Hindu, Chander Bhan, who wrote down the conversation.52 Apparently the prince was a also friend of a French Jesuit priest, Father Buzee.

The Guru seemed safe in Anandpur, but as the seventeenth century drew to a close, his was not the only Sikh voice being heard in Punjab. In the doabs, the successors of Prithi Chand seemed dominant. In fact, the Guru’s message went out more to sangats located outside Punjab or in the cis-Sutlej tracts.73 ‘In terms of followers, the doabs of the Punjab [seemed] virtually lost to the successors of Guru Hargobind.’74 Recognizing that an empire in crisis could hit out at one like him, and facing dissension in the Sikh community at the same time, Guru Gobind Singh produced a radical response in April 1699. Articulated on Baisakhi day in front of a large gathering in Anandpur, this reply included a new and militant rite for becoming a Sikh (sipping sweetened water after the Guru had stirred it with a double-edged sword), the right of any five ‘new’ Sikhs to similarly baptize others, the elimination of intermediaries (masands) between the Guru and the Sikh, and the obligation of a new Sikh to keep his hair uncut, carry a sword, and call himself a Singh.

In a dramatic gesture, Guru Gobind asked to be baptized himself by five of the new Singhs. He declared, moreover, that while any five of the initiated, no matter how humble, could make one a Singh, neither masands nor the followers of Ram Rai, Dhir Mal or Prithi Chand were entitled to do so.

To return to the Guru, shock followed escape, for he learned that his minor sons, Zorawar and Fateh, had been put to death by Wazir Khan, the Mughal faujdar of the sarkar of Sirhind, into whose hands the boys, their mother and their grandmother were betrayed. One version states that the boys, defiant in bearing, were bricked alive in Sirhind town, and that the grandmother died of shock. Another account has the boys executed.76 While the Muslim ruler of Malerkotla, not far from Sirhind, is said to have protested the killing of the boys, it appears that a devoted Sikh follower managed to escort the Guru’s wife, Mata Sundri, to Delhi. On learning of what had happened to his youngest sons, the Guru himself, Sikhs believe, composed as ever, bent upon his knees and lifting his hands to God in prayer uttered: ‘These two, Thy trust, I have rendered unto thee’; and digging up a shrub with his knife, he made this prophecy: ‘Just as I have torn this shrub from its roots, so shall this tyrannous empire be destroyed, root and branch.’

‘The Punjabi Muslims… had a negligible role in the elite power groups which controlled Punjab. The Mughals who were ruling Punjab from 1526 to 1748 kept their own hand-picked governors, mostly of Turkish, Persian or Pathan descent. Merely being Muslim did not qualify the Punjabi for a respectable place in the Mughal hierarchy.’

That enmity was not the norm even at the height of Aurangzeb’s rule is also perhaps indicated by the tone and content of Khulasat ut-Tawarikh, written in Persian in 1695, twelve years before the emperor’s death, by Sujan Rai Bhandari, a Hindu from the Bari doab town of Batala, which in British times would belong to the Lahore division. In this work, which among other subjects deals with the rulers, rivers, landscapes and heroes of Punjab, Bhandari refers to the saints honoured by the region’s Muslims, the Gurus of the Sikhs and the shrines of the Hindus, and offers no depiction of hostility between communities.

Some provinces declared virtual independence, including Hyderabad in the south, where Asaf Jah, Qamruddin’s predecessor as grand wazir, established himself as viceroy in 1725, starting a Sunni dynasty of the Nizams. In the east, Saadat Khan, the leader of the court’s Irani faction, inaugurated a Shia dynasty in Awadh, after being named viceroy there in 1722.

Nadir Shah, from 1736 the ruler of Iran, had been born in 1688 into a poor Turkic family in Khorasan, a region where Iranian generals and Afghan chiefs were in conflict. Victories over Afghans, and his prowess as soldier and commander, had made the tall, powerfully-framed, black-bearded and sun-tanned Nadir Shah an Iranian hero and eventually, despite his being a Sunni, the king of Persia.

Reaching the bank of the Beas, Nadir Shah ordered the execution of 1,007 men taken prisoner by his army after entering India. Carnage continued in the Jullundur doab. Crossing the Sutlej, Nadir Shah reached Sirhind on 5 February 1739, Rajpura on the 6th and Ambala on the 7th.

Though hardly famous, his ancestors were Bukhara-origin Sayyids long connected to the Multan area. One of them was a disciple of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint buried in Multan city, Bahauddin Zakaria. Bulleh’s father, Shah Muhammad, however, lived much closer to Lahore, in the neighbourhood of Kasur. A teacher affiliated to the village mosque in Pandoke, fifty miles from Kasur town, Shah Muhammad was well-versed in Arabic, Persian, and the Qur’an.

While Bulleh’s comments on contemporary political scenes were ‘random and oblique,’67 the poet wrote these lines (tr. Rafat): The Mughals quaff the cup of poison/Those with coarse blankets are up The genteel watch it all in quiet/They have a humble pie to sup The tide of the times is in spate/Punjab is in a fearsome state.68 By ‘those with coarse blankets’, Bulleh Shah evidently meant the Sikhs.69 Remembering, however, his philosophical kinship with Guru Nanak’s message, modern Sikhs appear to join Punjab’s Muslims in celebrating Bulleh Shah’s life and verse, as do Hindu Punjabis.

Did Zakariya Khan miss a trick, in the years before his death, by not declaring Punjab’s independence from both Nadir Shah (who would be assassinated in 1747) and the dying Mughal empire? In the south of India, Asaf Jah had established his independent chiefdom, and Saadat Khan had done likewise in Awadh, but Zakariya Khan did not emulate them. It has been suggested that the Sikhs’ rise to power, which we will shortly witness, might have been pre-empted in the early 1740s if a satrap like Zakariya Khan had declared Punjab’s independence.76 We do not, however, know whether the thought entered his mind, or whether an independent set-up led by him would in fact have attracted enough support in Punjab to thwart Sikh opposition.

This was the first of Ahmad Shah Abdali’s ten Indian invasions. Only twenty-six in 1748, he belonged to the Abdali or Durrani tribe of the Pashtuns. His person was ‘tall and robust’, his face ‘remarkably broad, his beard very black, and his complexion moderately fair’. Though he mixed freely with his soldiers, his appearance was ‘expressive of an uncommon dignity’ and toughness.79 When Nadir Shah was killed, his Durrani (Abdali) contingents had unanimously ‘elected’ Ahmad Shah as the Persian king’s successor in the Pashtun country.

That Mughal authority was expiring was by this time known everywhere, from the northwest’s Khyber to each coastal town. Like the Marathas across much of India, and the Sikhs and Adina in Punjab, the East India Company in its coastal outposts was willing to flex muscles and seize opportunities. Only three months after Abdali’s arrival in Delhi, a Company force led by thirty-two-year-old Robert Clive defeated twenty-year-old Siraj-ud-Daulah, Bengal’s Mughal viceroy but in reality the territory’s young ruler, in the Battle of Plassey (or Palashi), near the satrap’s capital of Murshidabad. Thus, by the autumn of 1757 the British had obtained Bengal even as the Afghans had annexed Punjab, Sindh, and the northwest. In reality, however, Punjab had no ruler.

Commanded by Murad Khan, Afghan troops crossed the Beas into the Doab but ran into Sikh soldiers who fought with ‘indescribable fury’. Led by Sodhi Barbhag Singh and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, and ‘intoxicated with opium and bhang’, the Sikhs routed the Afghans and looted their possessions.

Saved by the Sikhs, Adina gave them leave, early in December 1757, to pillage the entire Doab, including the city of Jullundur. Fired by prospects of loot and also by anger against Nassir Ali, a city resident accused of anti-Sikh excesses, the Sikh soldiers were merciless. ‘Children were put to the sword, women were dragged out and forcibly converted to Sikhism’ and carried off as wives. The town was burnt down. Mosques were defiled by pigs’ blood, and flesh was thrust into the mouth of Nassir Ali’s dead body, dug out of the grave.

‘As the Marathas and the Sikhs thought of nothing but plunder, they so thoroughly looted the inhabitants of Sirhind, high and low, that none, either male or female, had a cloth on his or her person left.’8 Houses were pulled down, timber carried off, and floors dug up for hidden treasure.

Efforts to prevent river-crossings, cut off escape routes and deny water, fodder and supplies to the enemy culminated in a huge and gory battle fought in Panipat in Sirhind sarkar on 14 January 1761. It was won by Abdali’s forces.

2nd Battle of Panipat, fought between Marathas and Afghans (Abdali)

To everyone’s surprise, Abdali won over the support of Shuja, the Shiite noble who controlled Awadh. In contrast, the Marathas failed to enlist the support either of Rajasthan’s chiefs or of the Hindu Jats around Delhi, although for a few days one Sikh leader, Ala Singh, like most Sikh chiefs a Jat, procured food and fodder for the Marathas. But that was an exception. Abdali’s logistical stranglehold was such that, in the climactic battle of 14 January, Maratha soldiers and horses struggled on empty stomachs.

On their journey back to Kabul, which commenced on 22 March 1761, Abdali’s troops, loaded with plunder and booty, were once more molested by groups of Sikhs who followed Abdali ‘all the way’.27 During the Panipat battle, the Sikhs had been perfectly content ‘to watch the Afghans and Marathas destroy one another’s hopes of dominance’.28 But Abdali’s prestige had soared.

Two days after Panipat, the British—rulers of Bengal from 1757—defeated the French in a crucial encounter at India’s southern end. Three years later, in another critical battle at Buxar in eastern India, Bengal-based British forces defeated a combination of Mughal nobles backed by Shah Alam II. One consequence of this 1764 event was that the East India Company successfully claimed the revenues of Bihar and Orissa as well. Another consequence was that the autonomous territory, west of Bihar, of Awadh, in earlier times a Mughal province, consented to British ‘protection’. The Company was moving westward. Delhi too was now in its sights though not in its hands. The Company ‘recognized’ Shah Alam II as India’s ‘emperor’ but he was only a title-holder without resources. The Marathas, still the leading Indian power despite their Panipat defeat, also recognized Shah Alam II and hoped to use him. Since Abdali seemed unwilling to occupy Delhi, it appeared that before long either the British or the Marathas would control that capital.

Nuruddin, a Jammu-based Afghan general ordered by Abdali to subdue the Sikhs, was driven back at Sialkot by Sikh soldiers led by Charhat Singh Sukerchakia. In reply, Khwaja Abed Khan, Abdali’s governor in Lahore, tried to besiege Sukerchakia’s base in Gujranwala—south of Sialkot and north of Lahore—but the bid misfired. Other Sikh forces—soon to be called misls or missals (from the Persian for ‘alike’), each under an independent chief and usually comprising the chief’s kinsmen—rallied to Sukerchakia’s support, including by attacking Afghan officers wherever found.

Facing an unexpected attack on their forces and also on families and supplies, misl chiefs Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and Charhat Singh Sukerchakia, both present at Kup, instructed their soldiers to form circles around the families and retreat but also fight, even as Abdali ordered his army to cut off the Sikh soldiers from their families and baggage. It was a hopeless task for the Sikhs, yet many in Abdali’s army were slain. A much greater number of Sikhs were killed in what has entered Sikh history as the Wadda Ghallughara (Great Carnage). Figures vary from 8,000 to 30,000 Sikh dead.

Ala Singh was the Sikh chief of Patiala, the territory where Abdali had ended up. A year earlier, at Panipat, Ala Singh, who belonged to the Phulkian misl, had procured food and fodder for the Maratha army. Ordered now to submit to Abdali, the Sikh chief procrastinated, whereupon he was seized and imprisoned. An angry Abdali wanted Ala Singh to ‘rid himself of the most visible symbol of Sikhism by getting himself clean-shaved’, but the Afghan king’s first minister, Wali Khan, successfully intervened and a large tribute was deemed sufficient punishment for Ala Singh’s vacillation.30

On the way back to Lahore, Abdali instructed the destruction and desecration of the Sikh shrine in Amritsar. Wali Khan ‘pleaded against the move’ but Najib, Abdali’s Rohilla ally, supported it.31 In acts the Sikhs would not forget, the temple was blown up with gunpowder and the sacred tank desecrated with the flesh and blood of cows. Cart-loads of Sikh heads were brought from Kup to be displayed on the gates of Lahore, which was back under Afghan control.

For several years the most influential misl was that of the Bhangis, who acquired their name from the intoxicant bhang many in the misl consumed. Both Lahore and Amritsar came under Bhangi control, as also portions of western Punjab. While the Nakkais held territory south of Lahore, the eventual conquerors, the Sukerchakias, started off with only the town of Gujranwala, north of Lahore, in their possession. The Ahluwalias dominated spaces between the Ravi and the Beas. East of the Beas, and up to the Himalayan foothills, the Kanhiyas and the Ramgarhias were strong; the Phulkians controlled Malwa (Sirhind).

After reaching Sirhind and Karnal, the Afghan and Baluch armies turned back. In Sirhind, which Abdali found in ruins, his ally Ala Singh of the Phulkian misl claimed that he had tried to prevent Sikhs from destroying the city. The Patiala chief brought gifts for Abdali and promised to repopulate Sirhind. Giving Ala Singh the title of raja—thus making him the first Sikh to be called a prince or king—Abdali, who hoped to divide the Sikhs, also announced Ala Singh as his Sirhind governor. In 1765, ‘Ala Singh was probably the most powerful of the Sikh chiefs not only of the cis-Sutlej region…also of the Punjab proper’.

Earlier, while many Muslim Punjabis relied on the Mughals, the gory Aurangzeb–Dara battle that Lahore witnessed had disillusioned them, and they found Aurangzeb’s victory troubling. The puritanical and intolerant features of his rule, and his neglect of Lahore, undermined their loyalty to the Mughals.

Despite a common adherence to Islam, Punjabi Muslims did not join the Afghans in their battles against the Sikhs. Often they stood non-aligned, even as, during the Panipat battle of 1761, the Sikhs had remained neutral between the Afghans and the Marathas. On occasion, Punjabi Muslims tilted in favour of the Sikhs.

No text gives a better picture of life in Punjab of this period (and preceding periods) than Waris Shah’s celebrated Heer, composed in 1766. Its story was not Waris’s original creation. Punjabis had been reciting it from Akbar’s time: they believed that the events unfolding in Heer had actually occurred in areas around Jhang during the fifteenth century. Several writers before Waris had presented their versions of the Heer story, including Damodar Das Arora of Jhang. Earlier, Lahore’s famed poet, Shah Hussain, had turned to the story for some of his verses.