Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

His Indian invasions were only one facet of the life of Ahmad Shah Abdali (or Durrani). For the people of Afghanistan, where he lies in a tomb in Qandahar, his Indian campaigns are marginal to his greatest achievements: the creation of an independent Afghanistan and the establishment of standards for it. Inside Afghanistan, he won over the people before he won the tribal chiefs, treated defeated rivals and chiefs with respect and as equals, genuinely consulted a council of advisors, stopped cruel forms of punishment like cutting off noses and ears, and made it unlawful for a master to kill a servant.

The Jhang success encouraged Ranjit Singh to reconstitute the Sikh military into three wings. The first wing, which he commanded himself, included the best of his generals. Much of it trained in the European style, this wing possessed cavalry, infantry and artillery branches, the last led by a Muslim, Ghausa Khan. A second wing consisted of soldiers supplied as needed by a clutch of the once-powerful Bhangi sardars who had received their lands back by undertaking to provide soldiers for the Maharaja. The third wing comprised soldiers from misls allied to Ranjit Singh, including the Kanhiya and Nakkai. Altogether, the Maharaja’s army probably had 24,000 soldiers by 1809 and 50,000 by 1821.13

him. A nephew he brought into the Court, the future general Tej Singh, would earn a disreputable name in Sikh history.

As Ochterlony moved up towards the Sutlej, chiefs welcomed him in several places, including Patiala, Nabha and Jind. Apparently Raja Sahib Singh of Patiala received the British commander with ‘childish joy’.

Later, in 1834, when Allard sought Ranjit Singh’s permission to return to France so that his Lahore-born children could receive a Christian education, the Maharaja said, ‘Every person should be free to follow the religion he chooses… You can go.’ Apparently the remark was published in the French press.71

During the 1780s, when Ranjit Singh’s father and other misl chiefs captured portions of Punjab, thereby laying the beginnings of the Maharaja’s kingdom, two countries that experienced revolutions, America and France, had given themselves constitutions. One of the Maharaja’s Frenchmen may indeed have spoken on the subject to him, or to Fakir Azizuddin. There was no call for Ranjit Singh or his compatriots to dream of a republican constitution. However, something like a council to aid governance was not beyond imagination or accomplishment. Had he created one in his lifetime, and demanded loyalty for it from the army, it might have reinforced his successors.

Euclid was translated from Arabic into Punjabi in this period, and the Maharaja had a Muslim cleric called Ali Ahmed, well-versed in mathematics and astronomy, brought from the North West Frontier to Lahore to teach elite young men, including Lehna Singh Majithia, who would acquire a name as an engineer-mathematician, and Ranjit Singh’s grandson, Nau Nihal Singh.

‘The name of Nalwa became a terror in the tribal territory’, and Pashtun mothers would for years frighten children into good behaviour by speaking of ‘Haria’, after Nalwa’s first name.

Punjab’s leaders, on their part, were keen that the British should. The panches had horrified the kingdom’s aristocratic chiefs and nobles by their insolence. Supported by several chiefs, Maharani Jindan evidently approached the British with the suggestion that ‘they may destroy the [kingdom’s] army’ and take the boy-king under their protection.

the two men invited to lead the defence, Lal Singh, who was named wazir, and Tej Singh, who was made the army commander, had decided (or been told) to scuttle the defence. Like Tej Singh (a nephew of Khushhal Singh), Lal Singh was a Brahmin converted to Sikhism. It was said, too, that Lal Singh was Rani Jindan’s paramour.

Fearing, during a tense moment, that the British would lose, Hardinge instructed the destruction of confidential papers. But ‘the irresolute or traitorous Tej Singh’—to use Moon’s description—ordered abrupt withdrawals of his army and aided the British. Gough in any case was in no mood to lose, and in Pheru Shah the attacking Bengal army won. However, its Hindustani sepoys came across as reluctant fighters. The ill-fated Afghan campaign had demoralized them. Moreover, some of them harboured sympathy for the only independent native government left on the subcontinent. According to Moon, ‘The Sikhs were deeply impressed by the toughness of the British soldiers and never forgot it. The Hindustani sepoys they despised.’

Shah Mohammed’s Jangnamah, a Punjabi lament on the kingdom’s defeat, was evidently written soon after the defeat of the Sikhs by the British and their quislings. Said to be a high-born Muslim, and a son or nephew to Sultan Mahmud, one of the kingdom’s artillery officers (who is named in the ballad), the poet, Shah Mohammed, is scathing about Rani Jindan, Tej Singh, and the British.

The ultimate blame for what happened to the Sikh State rests neither with the Dogras, nor with the Brahmins, who subverted it from within, nor with the British who triumphed with the help of traitors. In the end the Sikhs themselves are responsible for failing to protect the magnificent legacy of an exceptional man.

Anxious to prevent a union of the two Sikh armies, Gough engaged Sher Singh’s force in Chillianwala, on the Jhelum’s eastern bank, on 14 January 1849. The result was the Company’s worst defeat in its long history in India. After losing nearly 3,000 officers and men, the Bengal army withdrew. The Sikh forces of father and son were able to come together, move east, and cross the Chenab.

British eyewitnesses captured the sad sight of the Sikh soldier ‘flinging down tulwar, matchlock and shield upon the growing heap of [surrendered] arms’ and the ‘more touching sight still’ of the ‘parting for the last time from the animal which he regarded as part of himself ’. The soldier ‘caressed and patted his faithful companion on every part of [its] body, and then turned resolutely away. But his resolution failed him. He turned back again and again to give one caress more [until] he tore himself away for the very last time, brush[ing] a teardrop from his eye.’

On 29 March 1849, at a ceremony in Lahore Fort, ten-year-old Dalip Singh was told to sign a document. Writing his name in Roman letters, the boy-king renounced, on his behalf and on behalf of all heirs and successors, every ‘right, title or claim’ to Punjab. All of the kingdom’s property, including the Kohinoor and other jewels, now belonged to the British. The Sikh kingdom gone, all of Punjab was annexed to British India. The proclamation of annexation, read out that day by Dalhousie’s Secretary, Sir Henry Elliot, ‘was received by those present with silence’.

Posted next as the Company’s Resident in Nepal, Lawrence concluded that the children, most of them half-native, of India-based British soldiers deserved residential schools and started giving most of his savings to create such ‘asylums’. This was the origin of the still-existing Lawrence Schools* in Sanawar in the Simla hills, Lovedale in the Nilgiris and Murree in Pakistan.

Abbott would thereafter rule over Hazara for five more years. With—so it would be claimed—‘fatherly kindness’, he helped turn ‘a wild and desolate region into one of the happiest and most peaceful districts of the Punjab’.4 Hence, to this day, the name Abbottabad for Hazara’s chief town.

Lawrence dented a practice among some in the Bedi clan of killing baby girls. The justification for the practice was this. The clan that produced Guru Nanak would lose prestige if its girls married into inferior clans; if they married within the clan, it would be like incest. The only solution was to kill the girl-child. Some of the Jullundur-based Bedi clans petitioned John Lawrence to be allowed, under the principle of non-interference with religious and social customs, to bury their daughters at birth, a ‘custom’ they claimed to have followed for ‘the last four centuries’. Confronting the Bedi elders, John Lawrence first obtained an admission that their scripture did not justify the practice. Then, ‘before some hundreds of people’, he told the Bedi elders ‘that Government would not only never consent to such a villainous crime being perpetrated but that we should certainly hang every man who was convicted of such a murder’.20

According to Bosworth Smith, the Punjab which the British took over contained very few prisons.28 Not wishing to look after prisoners, the Sikh Durbar had punished criminals by mutilation. One of its European generals, Avitabile, given charge of the Peshawar region in the kingdom’s final phase, seems to have had men blown from guns.29 Henry Lawrence and his colleagues ended mutilation and built twenty-five jails.

Dalhousie’s successor in Calcutta was Charles John Canning, whose father had died as Britain’s prime minister. Like Dalhousie, Charles Canning too had served in the cabinet before coming out to Calcutta, where, right away, he was confronted with troubling events to India’s west. Persia having claimed Herat and received Russia’s backing, Dost Muhammad asked for British aid. In July 1856, London announced that a Persian attack on Herat would be taken as an attack on Britain.

Begun in November 1856, the Anglo-Persian war, in which many Indians of the Bengal Army also took part, ended in April 1857 with British victory. Persia withdrew its claims to Herat, which was returned to Afghanistan.

Not forgetting the ultimate boss in London, on 15 May Lawrence wrote also to Ross Mangles, the East India Company chairman, calling the revolt ‘the greatest crisis which has as yet occurred in India’ and urging ‘most strongly… that a large body of European infantry be despatched to India as soon as may be possible’.

The British columns were still far from Kanpur when, on 25 June, after three weeks of bombardment, illnesses and deaths at the Entrenchment, General Wheeler sued for peace. The man to whom he submitted was Nana Sahib, a descendant of the Peshwas, who lived near Kanpur and whom the sepoys had accepted as their ruler. From the besieged Lucknow Residency, Henry Lawrence had smuggled out a letter asking Wheeler not to trust Nana Sahib, but Wheeler yielded before the letter arrived. The Entrenchment’s surrendering men, women and children were assured safe passage to Allahabad by Nana Sahib. Two days later, at Kanpur’s Satichaura Ghat, Wheeler and many other Britons were killed while boarding boats in the Ganga for the promised journey to safety. The rest from the Entrenchment were either shot or detained. In the middle of July, under the aegis of Nana Sahib, the imprisoned were all slaughtered, including women and children, in the well-known Bibighar massacre.

Before this, on 4 July, Henry Lawrence had been killed inside the Lucknow Residency by a rebel-fired shell exploding near him. As the fifty-one-year-old officer lay dying, he uttered words for his tombstone: ‘Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty.’ The shelling continued while a short prayer was said over a hurriedly-dug grave, and ‘a few spadefuls of earth speedily covered’ Lawrence’s remains.

Aware as Lawrence was of the Sikh soldiery’s disdain for the Hindustanis, or the Purbiahs as Punjabis often called them, he knew that Sikhs and Hindus had been close during Sikh rule, and that knowledge made him cautious.

hors de combat

Bloodlust found free play in recaptured Delhi. Wilson ordered that anyone found with a weapon should be killed, not taken prisoner. In the event, the empty-handed too were slain. Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, Pashtuns and Gurkhas joined the British in the slaughter. The Punjabi/Hindustani ‘divide’ was shrieked up. ‘Poorbeah dogs’ and ‘quaking’ Hindustanis, as they were dubbed, received no mercy.148 Delhi’s residents were not spared. Without remorse, a British official wrote at the time:

Thanks in part to Punjabi soldiers, Rohilkhand and Awadh were back in British hands by the summer of 1858. In June, the brave young Rani of Jhansi was killed in Gwalior. Though neither Nana Sahib nor Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, who defied the British in Lucknow, were caught, the two had been forced to leave India for Nepal’s marshes.

In addition, India’s British rulers decided, post-1857, to Separate Christianity from British rule; Recognize the sensitivities of India’s chiefs and aristocrats, but Rule Punjab and the rest of India as a superior race, dismissing any notion of equality between rulers and subjects, and yet Offer Punjabis and other Indians a better quality of life through a network of roads, railway lines, post and telegraph offices, canals, schools, hospitals, colleges, universities and law courts; Cultivate, in particular, the farmer; Recruit new soldiers for the Empire’s armies from rural Punjab but underscore every recruit’s distinct religion and caste, ensure that Indian hands stayed far from big weapons, and, finally, Aim to make the soldier the Empire’s agent in his village.

Peace was maintained. Canals built between 1860 and 1920 brought about ten million acres of new land under the plough. Ownership of land passed more widely from a village community or a tribe to the individual farmer. His title to the land was recorded and preserved. The rate of land revenue was lowered even if collection was now more stringent. As Punjab’s agricultural production increased, so did the government’s revenue. British banks, ships and agencies handled India’s exports and imports, including Punjab’s exports of cotton, wheat and oilseeds. By controlling the rupee-sterling ratio and defraying home charges from revenues in India, the Empire made certain that it was ‘a major co-sharer’ in Punjab’s growing wealth.

Trade expanded in Punjab. Land was monetized and agriculture commercialized, but some farmers did worse than others. Money-lending prospered and Indian banks were born, yet rural debt also grew as farmers borrowed from urban and rural moneylenders, mortgaging their land. Often land was alienated.

Started by the government and by Christian missionaries, new schools expanded literacy. Higher education opened up. Lahore’s Government College started in 1864 and the University of the Punjab on 1 January 1882, also in Lahore. A medical college had opened in 1860 in the city, Forman Christian College (a Presbyterian institution) in 1866, and a law college in 1870.

Although an education administrator in the province called G.W.Leitner attempted to revive Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, English elbowed out the classical languages. Leitner’s wish to use the vernacular for transmitting western sciences in schools was also not fulfilled, with Urdu rather than Punjabi becoming the medium of instruction up to the matriculation level.

Slowly yet steadily, a new if small Indian middle-class emerged, educated in English and entering government service or professions like teaching, medicine and the law. In the bureaucracy (which remained white at senior levels) and also in the professions, sections of Punjab’s Hindus—chiefly Khatris, Aroras, Brahm...

recruitment was now increasingly confined to a few locations and a few castes or tribes. In the town of Rawalpindi, officers recruited Punjabi Muslims of the Salt Range—Gakhars, Janjuas, Awans, Khattars and Tiwanas. Amritsar was where Jat Sikhs were taken into the army. For Hindu Jats from Rohtak, Hissar, Gurgaon and western UP, Delhi was the recruitment centre. For Dogras, the centre was Jullundur town. Pathans were taken in Peshawar. Communities that lost out included Ahirs, Gujjars and the Awadh groups who earlier had entered the Bengal army in sizable numbers.

recognizing that the loyalty of the expanding numbers of Punjabi soldiers would be ‘won or lost in [their] homes and villages, not in the regiments’,11 the Raj sought to unify its military and rural policies: It was no coincidence that the ‘martial classes’ coincided with the dominant landholding elements of rural Punjab. The grafting of the army’s regiments onto the social base of Punjab’s rural order demonstrated a masterful appreciation by the military and the state in rural Punjab that the essence of a reliable and stable military lay in a contented peasantry.

If essential for governance, the census also fitted perfectly into imperial strategy since, among other things, it recorded an Indian’s caste, sub-caste and religion, and the numbers from each category, thereby supplying competing Indians with ammunition for mutual political warfare.

Why does not a Noon, Tiwana, Minhas, Wattoo or Bhatti claim to be descendants of the Prophet or the Companions? Because they are not. They do not feel ashamed to say that they are Rajputs, Jats etc. They are even proud of it. And why should they not [be]?

Punjabi bureaucrats involved with the colony schemes became grantees as well. After the Lower Bari doab colony came up in Montgomery district, a senior British officer observed: Barring the Colonisation Officer himself, there does not appear to have been a single [government servant] connected with the Montgomery Colony who had not obtained a grant.22 The Raj’s answer to the scheme’s abuse was the Colonisation Bill of 1906, which empowered the provincial government to enforce its conditions of tenure in colony lands by summary or executive process, i.e. without initiating proceedings in civil courts. An uproar resulted. Throughout 1907, the Bill was assailed in a number of meetings held in the colonies and in Punjab’s journals, including the Tribune and the Zamindar of Lahore. Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus seemed united in their criticism. Those protesting included Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928), born near Moga in eastern Punjab, who had become an all-India figure by this time, and Ajit Singh (1881-1947), raised in Jullundur district, who would have a revolutionary career, including in Europe and Brazil. At a Lyallpur rally, young Ajit Singh’s call to the Jat peasant to guard his honour, ‘Pagdi Sambhal, Jatta,’ evoked a popular response. It was also ‘the refrain of a song recited by Banke Dayal’ on this occasion.23 Ajit Singh and Lajpat Rai were both arrested and sent to Burma.

Some Sikhs concluded, looking back, that their deceased kingdom had compromised with purity. Hindu rites had been too readily accommodated in the kingdom’s ceremonies. Ranjit Singh’s feats notwithstanding, perhaps a king and his court were not what the Gurus had in mind.

Some Muslims in Punjab drew similar conclusions regarding the purity of Islam in the Mughal empire, dead now for half a century. In their view, the 1857 bid to resurrect that empire by (as they thought) a corrupted Muslim like Zafar was doomed from the start. Together with loyalty to the triumphant Raj, a return to a cleaner version of their faith was seen as the way forward.

More willing than Muslims and Sikhs to accept the Raj and embrace its schools, and generally viewing British rule as a blessing that ended Muslim rule in India, Punjab’s Hindus utilized the new openings in trade, government service and the professions. But some of them, too, looke...

Hearing of Baba Dayal’s impact and teaching, the Christian mission in Ludhiana viewed him and the growing circle of his followers as potential converts, but what followed was a different trajectory, leading eventually, through Baba Dayal’s successors, to what mainstream Sikhism would see as the heterodox, if also popular, Nirankari movement.

Baba Ram Singh’s confinement multiplied the number of his followers, who were called Namdharis and, at times, Kukas. After seven Muslims were killed in a Kuka attack on butchers in Amritsar and in Ludhiana district, eight Kukas were sentenced to death.

Raj removed Cowan from service and Forsyth from Punjab. It also sent Baba Ram Singh into exile in Rangoon. Namdhari fervour reached a high pitch in 1885, the year of Baba Ram Singh’s death, when it was reported that Prince Dalip Singh, disenchanted with the British after living among them for decades, was returning to Punjab. The enthusiasm seemed to collapse, however, when, in 1890, Dalip Singh ‘returned to his loyalty’ to Queen Victoria.

The British were more comfortable with the Singh Sabha movement, which seemed to blend better also with general Sikh sentiment. Its start was triggered by an incident in 1873. ‘Four Sikh pupils of the Amritsar Mission School proclaimed their intention of renouncing their faith in favour of Christianity. This shocked Sikh feeling.’39 Meeting in Amritsar, a group of Sikhs including Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia (a relative of Ranjit Singh’s), Baba Khem Singh Bedi (from Guru Nanak’s clan), and Bikrama Singh (a Kapurthala prince whose relative, Harnam Singh, had become a Christian) established the Singh Sabha. The Singh Sabha’s declared aims included restoring ‘Sikhism to its pristine purity’, publishing historical and religious books, recovering apostates, and involving ‘highly placed Englishmen’ in its activities.

The reformist ideology percolated to the Sikh peasantry primarily through soldiers serving in the army or those who retired. One of the regiments had constituted a choir of reciters to go round the villages and sing the sacred hymns at Singh Sabha congregations. The movement picked up momentum and rocked the Punjab from one end to the other.

Many among Punjab’s Hindus felt that the Gujarat-born Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-1883), who visited Punjab in 1877, was the answer to their search. His reputation had preceded the Swami’s visit. Opposing idolatry and all rituals except the havan ceremony, the celibate Dayanand was a gifted scholar and energetic debater. Published in Hindi in 1875, his Satyarth Prakash (Light on the Meaning of Truth) had urged Hindus to return to ‘the pure monotheism’ of the Vedas. The book had also criticized Christianity, Islam, idolatrous or corrupted Hinduism, and Sikhism.

The Swami’s Arya Samaj quickly attracted a following among Punjabi Hindus of different castes. Before long, Arya Samaj branches set up ‘Anglo-Vedic’ schools and colleges in different parts of Punjab to promote education and also an outlook where Vedic beliefs co-existed with openness to the Empire’s institutions.