An extract from Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mount Batten

I ntroduction : W H Y A P U N JA B H I S TO RY

When employed today, the noun ‘Punjab’, which has come down from the Persian word for ‘five rivers’, usually means either Pakistan’s largest province (with a population in excess of ninety million in 2013) or its immediate eastern neighbour, the Indian state of Punjab (containing twenty-eight million people), while the adjective ‘Punjabi’ characterizes the people, ways or things connected to either of the two Punjabs, or both.

In this study, however, ‘Punjab’ signifies the subcontinent’s Punjabispeaking region as a whole, or what old-timers remember as undivided or ‘British’ Punjab. (In consonance with current popular practice in both India and Pakistan, this study will speak of Punjab rather than ‘the Punjab’ of traditional usage.)

A hundred years or so ago, around 1914, British Punjab, stretching all the way from Attock in the northwest to the borders of Delhi, seemed ideally placed to lead the subcontinent towards economic progress and intercommunal understanding. The Raj had provided stability to the area for six decades. While diverse in religion, sect, caste and class, the vast majority of Punjabis spoke the same language or a closely-related variant. Water gushing in its great rivers and canals, Punjab’s agriculture was vigorous.

Although even in 1914 prominent Punjabis were apt to quarrel in the press and from public platforms over the situation of Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs, the population seemed to live in peace. Nine decades earlier, and prior to British rule, Ranjit Singh’s indigenous kingdom had presented a marked contrast to the instability which enabled the British to conquer the rest of India.

Why did this promising Punjab witness division and carnage in 1947?

For clues we have to go not merely to what happened between World War I and 1947 but also to earlier history.

There are global reasons too for recalling Punjab’s past. In August 2012, after a white gunman in America killed six innocent Sikhs in a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Harpreet, an eighteen-year-old Sikh woman about to enter the University of Texas in Tyler, urged fellow-Americans via a large poster, ‘I am a Sikh, please don’t hate me.’ Circulating her plea on Facebook 15

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and Twitter, Harpreet also told CNN: ‘[Y]es, my skin is brown and my hair is dark but that does not make me and my family Muslims or terrorists’.1 Several Sikhs in America quickly dissociated themselves from any suggestion that it was acceptable to think of Muslims as terrorists. We must assume that Harpreet herself did not intend to convey such a suggestion.

That she was neither a Muslim nor a terrorist is what she was declaring.

Yet Harpreet’s remark was a reminder that the Sikh-Muslim relationship, for centuries a major question in Punjab, is now a factor in our world as a whole.

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.

More than half of all Pakistanis—the people who belong to supposedly the world’s most dangerous country—live in Punjab. Moreover, Punjab’s relationship with Pakistan’s other provinces, Sindh, Balochistan and KhyberPakhtunkhwa, is critical to that country’s future.

In India, Punjab has produced two prime ministers (Inder Kumar Gujral and Manmohan Singh), twice the same acting prime minister (Gulzari Lal Nanda), and one president (Zail Singh), as well as the assassins of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. While posing tough problems for the Indian state, Punjab has also performed as one of India’s growth engines: the Punjabis’ energy has powered India’s agriculture and military, even as the other Punjab has powered the military and agriculture of Pakistan.

In the twentieth century, Sikhs from undivided Punjab helped in the process that transformed western Canada and California. In earlier centuries, Punjab was the gateway for a series of invasions into India. In the middle of the twentieth century, the subcontinent’s partition bisected and traumatized Punjab and Bengal while the rest of the region remained intact.

Though several angles reveal Punjab’s significance, its histories are scant.

Latif ’s History of the Panjab was published in Lahore in 1889, nearly 125 years ago, that is. Thereafter British civil servants wrote their district gazetteers, scholars of Sikh history produced major works, Ranjit Singh’s rule (17991839) was recorded by contemporaries and analyzed by later scholars, British Punjab was portrayed by its architects, and studies and novels sought to capture the shock and shame of the 1947 killings and migrations.

Historians have delved into other aspects of Punjab’s story, too.

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the influence of the still-popular eighteenth century poets Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah

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the 1857 Revolt and Punjab Punjab as the Empire’s garrison state the Bhagat Singh phenomenon during 1929-31 the Muslim League’s ‘Pakistan’ resolution of March 1940, and more

Yet, after Latif ’s oft-quoted, controversial and now dated work of 1889, there has been no new history of Punjab as such, no attempt to tell Punjab’s story from, say, the end of the Mughal empire to the finis of the British one— except for Ikram Ali Malik’s study of the 1799-1947 period, which however excludes the eighteenth century. Though Punjab’s Sikh story has often been presented, as well as stories of partition, the history of Punjab itself, assuming that Punjab had a personality of its own, has been captured rarely or not at all.

If undivided Punjab had a personality and history of its own, then it follows that we cannot fully understand its descendants, the modern Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal and Pakistan’s Punjab province, or indeed modern India and Pakistan, without confronting that personality and history.

While constituting invaluable intellectual wealth, the Sikh histories available today—all deriving from the Sikh faith’s deep involvement, right from its founding, with Punjab’s language and soil—easily outweigh any studies available of aspects of Punjab as a whole, or of Punjabi Muslims (even though Punjabi-speaking Muslims have always outnumbered Punjabi-speaking Sikhs), or of Punjabi Hindus.

Moreover, an important question has not been addressed in existing scholarship: Why was Punjab’s Muslim majority unable to fill the power vacuum when, post Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire retreated from the province? In fact, eighteenth-century Punjab as a whole, post-Aurangzeb and pre-Ranjit Singh, has received meagre attention in India and Pakistan, and the same is true of the contribution of Punjabi Muslims to nineteenth-century Punjab.

There were gaps, and I yielded to the urge to try and fill them while capturing, if possible, the heart of the entire story, starting with Aurangzeb, of pre-1947 Punjab.

With the death of Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal, central authority over Punjab started to erode. The ensuing contest for regional power involved a couple of outside forces, Afghans and Marathas. The contest also involved Punjab-based Mughal governors who looked either for independence or for an Afghan umbrella. And it involved a local minority, the Sikhs.

The local majority, Punjab’s Muslims, stayed aloof from the contest,

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which ended in favour of the Sikhs. Available accounts imply that until the British conquered Punjab, the more numerous Punjabi Muslims lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the Sikh minority. What were they doing? What were their hopes, fears, struggles? The questions called for answers.

Varying a good deal among themselves—in tribe, dialect and local customs—Punjab’s Muslims thought of themselves as both Punjabi and Muslim, and were so seen by others. Today they dominate a powerful Pakistani institution, the army. They also dominate Pakistan’s business, industry and agriculture. By virtue of numbers, they greatly influence Pakistani politics as well. Smaller ethnic groups in Pakistan (Sindhis, Pashtuns, Balochis and the so-called Muhajirs, Urdu-speaking descendants of refugees from northern and central India) frequently criticize Punjabi hegemony.

Yet the story of Punjabi Muslims has been neglected by historians, including by those in Pakistan. In part, the neglect is linked to the status in Pakistan of the Punjabi language. Not Punjabi but Urdu, the language spoken before partition by Muslims and numerous Hindus in northern India and yet seen by many as ‘Islamic’ (a language, moreover, which Punjabi had helped evolve), has been Pakistan’s national language ever since that country’s inception.

Indeed it was Punjab’s Muslim leadership which steered the successful campaign to declare Urdu as Pakistan’s national language. It was a way of showing Muslim Punjab’s love for Islam.

But this readiness to yield first place to a language different from theirs was not necessarily an ‘Islamic’ preference. Nor did it necessarily mean a magnanimous refusal by Pakistan’s Punjabis to impose their language on the country’s linguistic minorities: Sindhis, Pashtuns and Balochis.

A widespread belief among a section of Punjabi-speaking Muslims that theirs was a folk idiom rather than a literary language and one, moreover, that enjoyed a special relationship with the Punjabi Muslims’ supposed historic foes (the Sikhs), helped remove Punjabi as Urdu’s competitor. In fact, these Punjabi Muslims frequently claimed that Urdu rather than Punjabi was the language they spoke, even as (in Indian Punjab) many Punjabi Hindus claimed that Hindi not Punjabi was their language.

Thus Punjabi became the ‘Sikh’ language, Urdu the ‘Muslim’ language, and Hindi the ‘Hindu’ language. Language was uprooted from ground-level and tied to religion rather than to the varied people who spoke it, or the tract where it was spoken.

Yet the people of Punjab, in Pakistan and in India, whether Muslim,

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Hindu or Sikh, continued and continue to speak (and sing) in Punjabi. In culture and politics alike, Punjabiyat or Punjabi-ness appears to be alive in both Pakistan and India, even though defining or analyzing Punjabiyat is not easy, and even though undivided Punjab has been gone for more than six decades.

Defining Punjabiyat may be hard, yet we know that it is symbolized by poets like Amrita Pritam and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and by storytellers like Saadat Hasan Manto and Khushwant Singh. We know too that immortal singers like the Jammu-born Kundan Lal Saigal (who died in 1947), Kasur’s Noor Jehan (d. 2000), Amritsar district’s Muhammad Rafi (d. 1980), and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (d. 1997), who was born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), enriched Punjabiyat with their Punjabi or Hindi-Urdu songs.

Artists like them and Punjabi-origin movie stars from Bollywood like Nargis (d. 1981), Dev Anand (born in 1923 in Gurdaspur district’s Shakargarh tehsil, now in Pakistan, d. 2011), Raj Kapoor (born in Peshawar in 1924, d. 1988), Sunil Dutt (born in Jhelum in 1929, d. 2005), and the Amritsarborn Rajesh Khanna (d. 2012) kept Punjabiyat alive for future generations.

However, most Pakistanis today do not know that Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan and other towns in Pakistani Punjab held significant Hindu and Sikh populations before 1947. An even larger number of Muslims lived in Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Ferozepur and other towns in what today is Indian Punjab, a fact of which most Indians are unaware. Rural Punjab, too, in both its halves, used to contain the ‘Other’.

Not to recognize the Punjab that was, or to imagine that Punjabi history started only in 1947, is to erect—in India and Pakistan both—a granite wall between our lives and those of our grandparents and thus ensure a failure to understand ourselves.  Large in area, undivided Punjab was varied in soil, temperature, dryness or dampness, population density, religion, caste and sect. What was common to the area and to almost all its inhabitants was the Punjabi language, which seems to have existed for a thousand years or more, though spoken in several variants and written in more than one script. Their language seemed to reveal the Punjabis as a distinct people; not homogeneous by any means, yet distinct.

Punjab’s boundaries were marked in the west and northwest by the Indus and tracts belonging to the Baloch (or Baluch or Biluch) and Pashtun (or Pakhtun or Pathan) tribes, in the north by the Himalayas and Kashmir, in the east by the Jamuna, and in the south and southwest by the Aravalli Hills

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and the Thar Desert. Though substantial portions of western and southern Punjab were desert-like, other areas were fertile, including the Himalayan foothills and tracts close to the rivers.

Presenters of Punjab’s stories often divided the region into its doabs, a doab (or doaba) being the space between two rivers, and pointed out that each doab possessed special physical and linguistic features, often a different agriculture and, at times, a different politics.

We too will use the doab device, first employed, it seems, by Emperor Akbar, who evidently gave each doab its name.2 So there was (and is) the Chej (or Chaj or Jech) doab between the rivers Chenab and Jhelum, the Rachna doab between the Ravi and the Chenab, the Bari doab between the Beas and the Ravi, and the Bist (or Bet) doab between the Beas and the Sutlej. The space between the Jhelum and the Sindhu (Indus), the great continental river which formed the western boundary of Punjab and of which the five Punjabi rivers were tributaries, was (and is) the Sindh Sagar doab.

While Punjab’s western-most doab was called the Sindh Sagar doab, its eastern-most region, south and east of the Sutlej was, in Akbar’s time, known as Birun Panchnad, i.e. outside the five rivers, birun being the Persian word for ‘outside’ and panchnad a Sanskrit expression for ‘five rivers’.

But the phrase ‘panchnad’ (or panjnad) was also used more narrowly for a short southbound stretch of water, starting well to the south of Multan, where the five rivers flowed as one. The eastern frontier of the Birun Panchnad land was the river Jamuna. Since the Jamuna flowed past Delhi, ‘Delhi doab’ was another name for the large Birun Panchnad area. In later times, the Sikhs would use the term ‘Malwa’ for much of this area, while the British would think of this space south of the Sutlej as ‘cis-Sutlej’ territory.

While it is often meaningful to locate a Punjabi place or person in a particular doab, equally convenient is the British-era breakdown of Punjab into five geographically contiguous divisions, which, ignoring the rivers, were named after cities.

Thus there was the Rawalpindi division in the region’s northwest, which included the districts (and towns) of Gujrat, Shahpur, Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Attock and Mianwali. In the middle of British-run Punjab was the Lahore division, to which the districts of Lahore, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Sialkot, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura belonged.

Punjab’s southwest constituted the Multan division. This contained the districts of Montgomery (now Sahiwal), Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), Jhang, Multan, Muzaffargarh and Dera Ghazi Khan. The eastern division, named

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after Jullundur (now Jalandhar), included the districts of Kangra, Hoshiarpur, Jullundur, Ludhiana and Ferozepore. The fifth division, named at times after Delhi (which the British administered for fifty-three years as a part of Punjab) but more often after Ambala, occupied the southeast and contained the districts of Hissar, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Karnal, Ambala and Simla (now Shimla).

Of the five divisions, those of Lahore and Jullundur appeared to be the most fertile. While Muslims formed a majority in the Rawalpindi, Lahore and Multan divisions, they were a minority in Jullundur and Ambala. A sixth Punjab-linked space—not contiguous and not called a ‘division’ by the British—comprised numerous princely states where the British did not directly rule.

Many of these princely states lay in the Himalayan hills to the north or east of the Rawalpindi, Lahore or Jullundur divisions, but some occupied Punjab’s broad plains, such as Bahawalpur, which stretched extensively to the east and south of Multan, and Patiala, Nabha and Jind, which formed enclaves within the Ambala division. While Bahawalpur was predominantly Muslim, as was Kashmir, the large princely territory to Punjab’s north, non-Muslims formed a clear majority in almost all the rest of these princely states.

Independent India’s states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal and Pakistan’s Punjab province constitute modern re-arrangements of the five British-era divisions of Punjab and the sixth ‘princely’ space.  After an opening chapter on Punjab’s historical background, this study proceeds with the 1707 demise of Aurangzeb, which, as has been mentioned earlier, left a vacuum in Punjab and triggered a scramble for power. For the rest of that century, Punjab remained unstable.

Three forces—invading Afghan rulers, Mughal governors and sons-ofthe-soil Sikh chieftains—clashed for control. Punjab’s unchanging eighteenthcentury picture of continual clashes between these three forces was only disturbed twice: in 1739, when the Iranian Nadir Shah raided Punjab and Delhi, and in 1758, when for a transitory spell a Punjabi Muslim called Adina Beg governed Punjab in the name of the Maratha Confederacy.

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, Sikh chiefs dominated the city of Lahore. Inaugurated in 1799 and controlled from Lahore, the considerable kingdom of Ranjit Singh and his heirs lasted for half a century.

After defeating the Sikhs first in 1846 and again in 1849, the British ruled Punjab for a century until 1947, when under Mountbatten’s viceroyalty Punjab

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was partitioned, tearing up that Punjab which is the subject of our enquiry.

This, therefore, is Punjab’s story from the time of Aurangzeb to the time of Mountbatten, preceded by a backdrop recalling Punjab’s Mughal and pre-Mughal past.

That the span focused upon has to be book-ended with non-Punjabi names is only one of the ironies of the Punjabi story. Perhaps the irony contains a clue to Punjab’s personality.

Punjab’s society and economy, as these evolved, form part of the inquiry, but this is essentially a political history, told chronologically and by confronting a procession of interesting characters involved with Punjab—Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and British characters, rulers and poets, gurus, Sufis, avengers, reconcilers, district officers from afar, political leaders, journalists and others.

In the process, several historical questions are examined. These include the secret of Sikh success from the 1760s to the 1840s; the inability of Punjab’s Muslim majority to fill the eighteenth-century power vacuum—their unwillingness to enter the contest for power which the Sikhs, Afghans and Marathas had energetically joined; the pluses and minuses of British rule; Punjab’s history of revenge and counter-revenge; but also a less known, and contrasting, history of cooperation.

The study also touches upon the condition of Punjab’s women; the evolving politics of the region’s Hindus and Sikhs; the relationship between Punjabi Muslims and the British; and the oft-ignored role of Punjab’s farflung and long-settled Pashtun families.

Also examined is the question of why the Gandhian or nationalist Congress movement, which swept much of India from 1919 to 1947, failed to make sufficient headway in Punjab, despite a promising start there in 1919. The salience of Punjab’s Unionist Party from the 1920s and the initial slowness with which Muslim Punjabis embraced the call for Pakistan are also looked at.

Towards the end, the study addresses two interconnected yet separate questions which Punjabis and non-Punjabis continue to ask. Why did partition occur? And why did upheaval and tragedy accompany it? A short subsequent chapter provides a few true stories of insaniyat’s victories over the tragedycum-insanity of 1947. Trends after 1947 in divided Punjab, and prospects for the future, are lightly touched upon in the concluding chapter, which should be seen as a postscript.

Onward, then, to Punjab’s story.