Daily Times

The death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839 brought to an end 40 years of uninterrupted rule of a native Punjabi. The maharaja left behind a formidable fighting force but not a framework for succession that could provide stability and continuity. The British exploited the dissensions among the sons of Ranjit Singh and provoked war. Nevertheless, the Sikh armies fought a number of pitched battles before they were vanquished. In March 1849, the British marched into Lahore.

Rajmohan Gandhi’s treatment of the British period is especially instructive. The contrast between the benevolent type of oriental despotism of Ranjit Singh and an imperial power based on a coherent chain of command and military organisation becomes quite obvious. The defeated Sikhs were easily won over with bribes and other inducements. Muslim chieftains also followed suit as did Hindu notables. Punjab embarked upon a long period of rehabilitation and transformation under British rule. Henry and John Lawrence proved to be exceptionally able administrators. The former favoured the continuation of traditional practices and close cooperation with the old Punjabi elites, while the latter believed that the mainstay of the company’s power in Punjab should be the peasantry and common people.

In the 1857 uprisings in northern India, the British employed Sikh and Muslim troops to crush the rebels. Another Englishman, John Nicholson, displayed great guts, ruthlessness and bravado while Major Hudson exploited the situation to amass treasures, killing in cold blood Mughal princes. The Punjabis fought for the British with great ferocity — a decade earlier when the British invaded Punjab they brought Poorbi Bhayias from northern India to crush the Punjabis; now the British allowed the Punjabis take revenge from the people of Delhi, Lucknow and other such places. I have always been puzzled by the fact that our forebears had no moral compunctions in serving any master.

In any event, from 1858 onwards, India came directly under the British Crown. The new imperialist policy and strategy rested on the following considerations: “Separate Christianity from British rule, recognise the sensitivities of India’s chiefs and aristocrats, but rule Punjab and the rest of India as a superior race, dismissing any notions of equality between the 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 away from big weapons, and, finally, aim to make the soldier the Empire’s agent in his village.”

Punjab began to be treated as a strategic province in the great game vis-à-vis Russia and later the Soviet Union. Semi-desert regions were transformed into flourishing granaries through a vast network of canals and dams. Canal colonies were established and a significant population from the overpopulated eastern districts was settled in the colonies. Urdu, instead of Punjabi, was adopted as the official language in the lower tiers of government. Ranjit Singh had used Persian as the state language. Punjabi remained the language of the people but without powerful patrons. A martial races theory identified Muslim Rajputs, Gakhars and Awans of northern Punjab, the Sikh Jatts of the Majha region and the Hindi-speaking Hindu Jats of eastern Punjab as the castes that provided the best material for army recruitment. Lahore became an exquisite city where culture, education and the arts flourished in those 90 years when the British ruled over Punjab.

Such measures were backed by a very sophisticated political system of patronage, which, while it favoured the landed gentry, also saw to it that Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity would not be established in Punjab. For a while, a popular agitation did bring Punjabi Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs together after the Rowlatt Bill, which authorised arrest without trial for up to four years of anyone suspected of revolutionary and terroristic inclinations, was passed. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre followed soon afterwards. However, the landed gentry remained steadfastly loyal to the British. Mahatma Gandhi’s mass civil disobedience movements remained peripheral in Punjab.

The solidly pro-British Punjab Unionist Party, which emerged in 1923, maintained communal harmony. Its leadership hailed from rural and pro-rural backgrounds. Sir Fazl-e-Hussain (a Bhatti Rajput, who though not a landlord himself built his support base among the landowning classes and castes); Sir Sikander Hayat Khan (a Khattar Jatt and a big landlord), Sir Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana (a Rajput and a big landlord) and Sir Chhotu Ram (Jat peasant proprietor) were its most prominent leaders. The Unionists could keep both the Congress and Muslim League at bay but, from 1937 onwards, that pattern could not be maintained for long.

After the March 1940 Lahore resolution was adopted by the Muslim League, Punjabi politics were transformed. The author has provided considerable new information and data on the processes underway that drove Punjab towards confrontation and partition. The massive communal violence and terrorism, which took place in 1947, turned out to be essentially a contestation between armed Muslims and Sikhs with the Hindus siding with the Sikhs. A chapter entitled ‘Insaniyat (humanity) amid Insanity’ presents oral histories Rajmohan and his wife Usha Gandhi collected when they visited Lahore in 2005. Many Muslims helped save Hindu and Sikh lives in what became the Pakistani Punjab and many Muslims who originally hailed from what became the Indian Punjab owed their lives to the help and protection they received from Hindus and Sikhs.

Since mid-August 1947, the old Punjab is no more. The Indian East Punjab has a population of only 28 million, which is some two percent of the total Indian population. Yet, Indian Punjabis are an influential group in Indian political and cultural life. The 90 million Pakistani Punjabis are the biggest nationality in the Pakistani dispensation and dominate the civil and military sectors of society and even the economy. About the Pakistani Punjab, Rajmohan Gandhi observes: “Pakistan’s Punjab province, almost wholly Muslim, holds today a population larger than that of Egypt, Iran or Turkey, a fact which makes Pakistani Punjab by itself one of the most important Muslim regions in the world.”

He also alludes to the fact that, despite the old Punjab being no more, Punjabiyat or Punjabi-ness remains manifest through Punjabi writers and poets, and the global Punjabi diasporas.

The author will be presenting his book at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on December 4, 2013.

(Concluded)

The reviewer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com