British rule in Punjab after 1857
By Sitanshu Das

IT is natural for people who find themselves for a length of time in a situation of hopeless bondage to alien rulers to assert their cultural identity as a separate people, and initially this assertion takes the form of reassertion of their separate religious identity.

Often the early response of such a people to alien rule is expressed in religion-based patriotism. In Punjab of the post-1849 period three separate identities — Muslim, Hindu and Sikh — acquire distinctive shapes under the cumulative impact of the imperial policies pursued from 1849 to 1900.

As political systems imposed from above, empires in history are known to have introduced homogeneous schemes of government over large areas and disparate peoples. But the empires comprising subject people, ethnically different from those of the metropolitan centres of the empires, rarely pursue conscious policies to foster internal cohesion of the subjugated people.

In Punjab, in spite of the post-Mutiny policy that would conciliate the classes of “natural leaders”, landlords and nobles, and the benefits of preferential treatment given to the newly defined “martial classes” among Punjabis, Punjab witnessed in the first fifty years of English rule the emergence of separate identities of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

Muslim dominance had ended with the establishment of the Sikh kingdom. This order was supplanted by the government of the English company; and there was no immediate prospect of return of Muslim domination over Punjab. As a community, the Muslims could not empathise with the English though the Muslim nobles had sided with English against the Sikhs.

Given this, and other circumstances, a Punjabi Muslim identity took shape in the new situation. There, however, need have been no competitive communally-accented separate identities of Hindus and Sikhs had the British not consciously pursued a policy of separateness stressing the spearateness of the two from a fear of a possible resurgence of Sikh hostility towards English rule. There is no doubt that British policy helped to sever the bonds of unity that had naturally subsisted between the Hindus and Sikhs.

The diminution of the importance of the Sikh community after 1849 was a welcome development to the English administration in the immediate aftermath of the dethronement of Maharaja Duleep Singh; and the Sikh soldiers who had remained in the British army after the Khalsa armed forces had been disarmed and disbanded were barely tolerated with open show of disdain.

“The Sikh faith and ecclesiastical policy is rapidly going where the Sikh political ascendancy has already gone .... The sacred tank at Amritsar is less thronged than formerly, and the attendance at annual festivals is diminishing yearly. Initiatory ceremony for adult persons is now rarely performed. Gurmukhi is rapidly falling into disuetude,” the official chronicler of the new English administration gleefully recorded.

After 1857, the new regiments enlisting Sikhs insisted on recruiting only keshdharis whereas, before 1857, the Sikh sepoy in the British Indian armies was encouraged to be rid of his hair and beard.

The British encouraged granthis to travel in villages to recruit young Sikhs for the British Indian army and insisted on administering Pahul, the rite the Tenth Guru Gobind Singh had prescribed for the Sikhs volunteering for the Khalsa armed forces. Of the other Punjabi Hindus only Jats benefited to an extent by the policy of rewards the English offered to “the martial” classes in Punjab.

Even this policy would not probably have produced with crisis of identity in the Hindu-Sikh relationship had society as a whole not undergone vast changes which , in the absence of a better word, can only be described as modernisation.

Education, the rule of law and the principle of equal opportunities for all subjects of the British Crown (regardless of the special provisions made for the classes the British especially wanted to befriend and have as allies) produced an enormous change in the situation and thinking of the long-suppressed Hindus of Punjab.

As long as Hindus generally looked upon the Khalsa Panth as the defender of their faiths and largely a common culture, providing a shield of protection against the excesses of Muslim zealotry, the Hindu-Sikh relationship was qualitatively different.

The bond altered under Pax Britannica when the Sikhs lost their special position as the defenders of the ancient faiths of the land; and Hindus, taking the fullest advantages of the opportunities English rule offered, began a search to rediscover the roots of their much-maligned spiritual and cultural heritage.

Only against this background is it possible to comprehend the meaning of the Hindu-Sikh dialogue on their new relationship and how sections of Hindus and Sikhs responded to the demands of reform arising in both segments in the late nineteenth century.

The imperial policy made a negative contribution to this dialogue, aggravating dissensions through misinterpretation of the history of religious reforms in the region and misrepresentation of the meanings of reformist endeavours which Hindus and Sikhs had undertaken in the light of new knowledge and their changed political conditions.

For the imperial purposes, the separateness of the Keshdhari Sikh identity was not only desirable but also to be fostered, Brigadier Hodson had argued in a memorandum to the supreme government in 1850, shortly after the annexation of Punjab.

“If they (Sikhs) re-entered the pale of strict Hinduism their value as a foreign body, and a moral counterpoise would be diminished... His (the Sikh’s) political worth as foreign military exotic is lost.”

Hodson’s theory was refined in theological terms thirty years later by Macauliffe who warned of the danger of the Sikh faith being reassimilated in the capacious Hinduism. This cry was taken up by other imperial administrator-scholars of the age. “Aggressive Arya (Samaj) preachers”, including Swami Dayananda Saraswati, have been blamed for souring Hindu-Sikh relations by denying the Sikh faith its fundamental separateness.

The British administrator-scholars had stressed the differences between the so-called Hindu and the Sikh faiths, a distinction the Sikh Gurus and the Sikh rulers had never tried to underscore. What the Arya Samaj actually said was no longer as important as the construction put up on it by English interpreters of the faiths of Hindus and Sikhs and their social configurations.

In the post-1857 period the English ruler abandoned their early attempt at levelling down the Sikh aristocracy, and the latter, in turn, responded to this altered policy by a show of unqualified attachment to English rule. The Hindu-Sikh polemics stoked up in the late nineteenth century soon obscured the common ground the Arya Samaj and Sikhs shared. Both reject the worship of physical forms represented as aspects of the one and only formless ultimate reality; the rituals of worship demanding the presence of a hereditary priestly class; and the hallowed Varnashram dharma which had spawned casteism.

Through the early 1880s, young educated Sikhs worked in the Samaj with little noticeable strain. Aryas and reformist Sikhs stressed the similarities of ‘true’ Sikhism and Arya Hinduism.

“Parallel to Arya identification with Sikh goals and past achievements ran a current of Arya criticism of contemporary Sikhism for many of the same errors found in existent Hinduism. It emerged as early as 1885.”

Taking Punjab’s population in its totality, the Sikhs were a relatively small minority — 14 per cent in a combined Hindu-Sikh population of 38 per cent and 56 per cent Muslims in the 1880s. Since the externals mark off the Sikhs from Hindus the forfeiture of the elite status in Punjab’s political structure heightened Sikh fears about the future of the community.

Reassimilation in the Hindu community was not desirable for a spiritual movement which had been libertarian. Besides, the faith had inspired in this frontier region a social and political revolution, the like of which this land had not known for centuries. Sikh thinkers would have been unwise to depreciate the value of the Sikh heritage. Sikh anxiety centred on the preservation of the Sikh identity; and there was no reason why this should have been turned into a Sikh-Hindu contentious issue.

Facing a far-reaching change, the Sikh community, wanting to modernise itself, was bound to redefine its identity in terms of Sikhism and Sikhs. There was nothing astonishing in that trend, because the Khalsa Panth was truly a remarkable development in an age of social decadence, upheavals and misery caused by repeated central Asian invasions and inadequacy of the statecraft of the Mughals who wanted to impose on this vast land a unitary system of government run by faujdars, appointees of the central authority of the emperor.

Excerpted from Indian Nationalism: Study in Evolution by Sitanshu Das, published by Har-Anand Publications Pvt Ltd New Delhi.