Radical Politics in Colonial Punjab

Governance and Sedition

Shalini Sharma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135261115
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

The actions of the radical left in Punjab in pre-Independence India during the 1920s and 30s have often been viewed as foreign and quintessentially un-Indian due to their widely vilified opposition to the Quit India campaign. This book examines some of these deterministic misapprehensions and establishes that, in fact, Punjabi communism was inextricably woven in to the local culture and traditions of the region. By focusing on the political history of the organised left, a considerable and growing force in South Asia, it discusses the formation and activities of radical groups in colonial Punjab and offers valuable insights as to why some of these groups did not participate in the Congress movement during the run-up to independence. Furthermore, it traces the impact of the colonial state's institutions and policies upon these radical groups and sheds light on how and when the left, though committed to revolutionary action, found itself obliged to assimilate within the new framework devised by the colonial state.

Based on a thorough investigation of primary sources in India and the UK with special emphasis upon the language used by the revolutionaries of this period, this book will be of great interest to academics in the field of political history, language and the political culture of colonialism, as well as those working on Empire and South Asian studies.

1
The Punjab, communism and the state

Section I: Political Punjab

The Punjab has a distinctive history which is very different from that of other parts of India. Their last major conquest in India, the British ruled the province for less than 100 years. Economically, the land of five rivers was to become India’s granary in the late colonial period. Militarily, it was the province from which the post-Mutiny armies of British India were mainly recruited. Socially, the Punjab had a unique mix of Muslims (the majority community), Hindus and Sikhs. Administratively and politically, its trajectory was unlike that of the rest of India. In the Punjab the British had their greatest successes, whether by its rule, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the so-called Punjab tradition of administration or, later during dyarchy, by achieving the successful working of ministries which were supra-communal and which managed to repulse the inroads of the all-India parties of nationalism, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. Yet it is particularly ironic that the Punjab, a model of difference and by most standards of colonial success, should, when the British left India, have been torn apart in a bloody partition which left much of its society, its economy and its polity in tatters. The purpose of radical politicians was to dig under the surface of the Punjab, which superficially seemed so loyal and prosperous. Throughout British rule the radical students and militants, often ideologically confused and always outside the mainstream of politics, remained a tiny minority. But radicals on the left were evidence of quite deep currents of discontent and they throw new light on the peculiar, and peculiarly interesting, political history of the Punjab.

Yet, there are many Punjabs. Throughout its turbulent history, Punjab’s borders have been in flux, cut about, extended and redefined. In the last century, the British Indian province of the Punjab was divided into two in its partition in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Again in 1966, the boundaries of the new state of the Punjab in independent India (essentially its eastern districts) were changed. In part, this was a consequence of history, the fact that the Punjab has been a marcher region, on the margins of empires to the north and to the east. Situated between Afghanistan and the land-based empires of the mid-Gangetic plain, these frontier tracts were inhabited in the main by martial peasant tribes. The so-called land of the five rivers—the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej are tributaries of the mighty Indus, once lauded ‘as the beautiful forehead of Hindustan’ by Waris Shah, an early chronicler of the Punjab—was the gateway into India as well as the border through which all invaders from the north-west had to pass.¹

The Punjab which is the subject of this book is the province of that name conquered by the British in 1849. Historians of the Punjab tend to see religion as the chief motor driving its politics.² But religion in the Punjab has taken many forms. Some Punjabis have rejected Hinduism, particularly in its Brahmanical guise. According to commonly accepted stereotypes, Punjabis are characterised as a people more profane than spiritual, driven by the pitchfork of economic necessity rather than by the ideals of one religion or the other. Yet the reality, of course, lies somewhere in between, depending on which sections of a diverse and by no means homogeneous population is under scrutiny.

Yet the Punjab was atypical of much of British India. To administer it, the British deployed methods quite different from those used in the maritime presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. The famous Punjab School of administration had its origins in a perception of the Punjab rooted in the experience of the eighteenth century. A marcher region, the Punjab had turned against its Mughal overlords and also fought against most of its neighbours. Out of the military and social turmoil which followed, there emerged the ‘Sikh’ kingdom of the Punjab. By allying with the Punjab’s other communities and by cleverly winning over their key leaders, Ranjit Singh’s kingdom proved to be a model for the Punjab School of administration under the British and some decades later, in the twentieth century, for the Unionist Party, whose ministries dominated the province in the last twenty-five years of British rule. Just as John Lawrence was the uncovenanted legatee of Ranjit Singh, so also, paradoxically, was Sikander Hyat Khan, the leader of the Unionists, themselves the heirs of Lawrence and the Punjab School of administration.

The land

Water dominates the political economy of most oriental societies, not least of the Punjab. In the words of Malcolm Darling, an old Punjab hand who had a special relationship with the province in which he served for so long and loved so deeply, ‘So valuable, in fact, is water that property in it arose before property in land.’³ Throughout the Punjab’s recorded history, its rulers strove to control the rivers which irrigated the land. Just as their predecessors before them, the British understood the critical importance of water and in the later nineteenth century began to invest huge resources into irrigation systems, which were intended to consolidate their rule in the Punjab. As Spate aptly put it, ‘It is clear that in the strictest sense the prosperity of the Punjab [was] artificial, dependent as it is on the efficient working of an extremely intricate man-made machine; and for this, political stability is the obvious first essential.’⁴ Given its fertile alluvial soil, which stretches all the way from the Indus to Delhi, the agrarian economy of the Punjab had a measure of homogeneity under the Mughals and under the Sikhs, reinforced by revenue collection systems which the Sikh kingdom inherited from its Mughal predecessors and which taxed village communities rather than individual peasants.

The Punjab falls naturally into three main geographical regions, one stretching from the north to the extreme south of the province, from the North West Frontier Province border to Rajasthan. This region consists of tracts of land that was largely infertile and sparsely populated. In this unpromising and arid territory, tiny hamlets of sometimes no more than four or five families lived under the sway of local pirs, Muslim holy men, and of jagirdars or landholders. Unlike the rest of the province, here a relatively small number of families owned most of the land. They were the dominant landowners, families such as the Shahs of Gojra and Multan, the Akbar family of Jhelum or the Tiwanas of Shahpur, whose influence remains in today’s politics of this region, now part of Pakistan. In this region the great majority of the population, about 80 per cent, was Muslim, although Hindu moneylenders and artisans of the Khatri and Bania castes could also be found in market centres such as Multan. Sawan Mal, a Bania or trader, who rose to be governor of Multan under Ranjit Singh, had pioneered the construction of small ‘inundated’ canals to a measure of irrigation to these dry lands.⁵ However, such canals were useless during the dry weather when they were most needed. It was only in 1859, ten years after the British annexation of the Punjab, that the first modern canal was built in this part of the province, bringing in due course, rich harvests to fields that for so long had been barren.

The second main region was central Punjab, which, as Darling describes it, was the cradle of the Sikhs. In central Punjab, the Sikhs were the most numerous community, particularly in the countryside; and their power and influence had grown immeasurably during Ranjit Singh’s long reign from 1799 to 1839. Situated between two low-lying riverine tracts, the crops of central Punjab tended to be good when the weather was normal. But in conditions of drought, its people, many of whom were Jat Sikhs whose ‘brotherhoods’ owned small farms, failed to grow enough food to keep themselves alive, let alone prosperous. So the exigencies of nature forced the inhabitants of central Punjab to seek alternative ways of earning their keep, whether by joining the armies of the Raj or moving to other parts of British India in search of employment. Central Punjab had two big towns, one being Lahore, sometimes described as the Queen of the Punjab, the seat of government and a centre of education, which boasted (in the 1920s) more bookshops than towns of a comparable size in England.⁶ The second big city was Amritsar, a large trading town, which came to be an important market for traders from as far afield as Kashmir, Tibet and Sinkiang.⁷ Here moneylenders prospered, kazis kept the law according to local custom (be that the Shariat or the Hukum Nama), and traders ran bazaars that linked the Punjab with the outside world. Amritsar also housed the Golden Temple, the most important of all Sikh gurdwaras. But, even though Amritsar was the epicentre of Sikh culture and religion, Sikhs were far from being the majority community in Amritsar district as a whole, being a mere 15 per cent of the population. Both Lahore and Amritsar relied heavily on Hindu and Muslim trading castes to sustain their market economies; and the administration, which was based in the capital city of the province, Lahore, whether bureaucrats or lawyers, also tended to be recruited mainly from Muslims and Hindus, and the city’s urban economy was underpinned by a host of lower castes.

The third region of the Punjab consisted of the eastern tracts, which stretched from the foothills of Kangra to Ambala, and was the most prosperous part of the province. It was also the most densely populated, especially the districts of Hoshiarpur, Jullunder and Ludhiana. According to Darling, in these fertile plains, the ‘evils of small-holding’ were particularly evident. The eastern tracts also contained many untouchables, roughly 25 per cent of the population. The dominant castes in the east were Rajputs who, legend has it, ‘cultivate[d], hookah in hand,’⁸ and Jats, whether Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, who were reputed to have ‘a tenacity of character and a skill in farming which makes them the best cultivators in India.’⁹ Jullunder, an important rail-head, Ludhiana and Ambala, all of which came to be centres of industry and commerce under British rule, were the main towns in the east. Ambala also had an important role as a cantonment town, strategically situated as it was between the plains and the foothills of the Himalayas.

With 55 per cent of its population Muslim, 13 per cent Sikh and the remainder Hindu, with a sprinkling of Jains, Buddhists and Christians, the Punjab had an eclectic religious mix. Islam’s influence in the Punjab was increasingly evident the further west one went. But even in the west, Muslims were by no means a homogeneous community, divided as they were into competing brotherhoods, owing allegiance to various pirs or leaders. In central or eastern Punjab, the different religious communities tended to have more in common with each other than in the west. Everywhere, Jats and Rajputs, less than a third of the population as a whole, dominated the countryside through their networks of class, kin and lineage.¹⁰ Two other groups among the Muslims call for a particular mention: the Sheikhs and Sayeds, and also the Arains, who traditionally were market gardeners. But it is significant that, when they came to enumerate and classify the population of the Punjab, the British tended to deploy categories such as ‘Jats’, ‘Arains’ or ‘Rajputs’, in other words, census categories denoting tribal groups rather than castes or religious communities. In this way, the category of Jats included Hindus, Sikhs and even Muslims. Another feature of British taxonomy, for example Ibbetson’s influential work on Punjab’s tribes and castes, was to attribute different characteristics to the people of the Punjab depending on from where they came. In the extreme west, Punjabis were seen as superstitious and lacking in enterprise. In the central and eastern Punjab, the sturdy Jats were seen as the province’s backbone and the key to its prosperity. However crude these stereotypes,¹¹ they were used by the British as the building blocks of their policy and had a disproportionate influence on their revenue system, which was specifically designed to protect the agriculturalist against moneylenders and traders, the banias who ‘spends his life in his shop, and the results are apparent in his inferior physique and utter want of manliness. He is looked down upon by the peasantry as a cowardly money grubber.’¹²

Despite the diversity and differences which divided the peoples of the Punjab, they did have some characteristics in common. Throughout the province, people spoke one language, Punjabi, and had a popular culture and oral traditions in common. Most Punjabis—their different faiths notwithstanding—shared a belief in panth (or community) and kismet (or predetermined fate).¹³ Panths followed a particular spiritual guide, whether a Guru, Sant, Yogi, Mahant, Sheikh, Pir or Baba.¹⁴ They also had a common worldview influenced by notions of fate which helped to make sense of the ‘otherwise inexplicable, and [of turning] adversity in its tracks’, and believed that, however much an individual’s fate might appear to be predetermined, the intervention of powerful human agencies could change destinies.¹⁵

Another powerful theme in the world view of Punjabis was the notion of izzat, literally, pride or respect, which was used to justify their challenge of accepted norms.¹⁶ The fifth Sikh Guru, Hargobind and the tenth, Gobind Singh, are both celebrated as defenders of the notion of izzat, specifically the defence of Sikh religion against Mughal repression.¹⁷ Izzat could also denote pride in landownership, the honour of rulers and of patrons, which was the basis of the deference and respect accorded to powerful patrons by their clients both in rural Punjab and in its towns.

The Punjab’s political traditions

The history of the Punjab before the coming of British rule is by no means a seamless web, its politics being characterised by frequent ruptures and breaks. Yet the historiography of the Punjab, particularly in works written by the British, divides its history into periods which are Muslim or Sikh, with Ranjit Singh’s long reign being seen as a time when the Sikhs were in the ascendant.¹⁸ More recent histories are a corrective to this simplistic periodisation, showing, as they do, the powerful continuities between the so-called Muslim or Sikh or indeed the British periods in the history of the Punjab. These continuities are most evident in the tradition of giving land to mosque or gurdwara alike; and the importance of monarchy in a supposedly demotic society. However much Sikh mythology depicts Ranjit Singh as ‘a man of the people’, in fact he was as remote from the ordinary man as the supposedly aloof Muslim sovereigns who came before him. In his statecraft, strategies and tactics, Ranjit Singh borrowed copiously from his predecessors. His administration, and both the substance and the forms of his government, had all, to a greater or lesser extent, been tried and tested by rulers who came before him, whether the sy...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in South Asian History
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 The Punjab, communism and the state
• 2 Martyrdom and the nation
• 3 Learning the new rules
• 4 The contradictions of communism during the Second World War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index