Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik alias Meeto

 

Composite Culture in Pre-Partition Punjab

Fractures and Continuities

 

Introduction

For my dissertation I would like to explore the shared cultural and religious practices of pre-Partition Punjabis which transcended community boundaries, and questioned the logic of a strict division between religious communities. I will focus on Sufi shrines and local religious cults, popular festivals, and the ballads and narratives of Bulhe Shah and Waris Shah. All these were aspects of the shared culture of Punjab and came under attack in the late 19th century as socio-religious reformers attempted to construct strict boundaries between communities defined on the basis of religion. I want to examine whether the composite culture of Punjab withstood both the attempts of religious leaders to reform it out of existence, and the growing communalization of identities in the region.

The history of Punjab can be viewed as leading inexorably from cultural diversity and pluralism to an increasing obsession with community boundaries, which culminated with the partition of 1947. The vivisection of Punjab on the basis of religious identity, and the violence, dislocation and rupture that came with it, meant the destruction of the shared Hindu, Muslim and Sikh culture of the region. This loss of shared cultural traditions and patterns of co-existence is lamented in much of the writing on Partition, both fiction and non-fiction, and there are frequent articulations of the need to ‘preserve a memory, however fugitive, of that culture before time and history have placed it beyond reach.’1 The historical literature on Punjab, however, has as its backdrop the fact of Partition and attempts to read its roots further and further back into history. In such a teleological reading of Punjabi history, there is little scope to examine those aspects of culture which brought communities together rather than prised them apart. This is  perhaps rashly  what I want to do.

This paper is divided into four sections. The first section is a brief analysis of the historiography of Punjab and the few attempts to write about the popular and syncretic aspects of Punjabi culture. The second maps out some important sites on which the historian can focus to recover the textures of shared Punjabi culture. The third focuses on the attacks on that culture and whether these attacks were successful in destroying it. The last section discusses sources and methodology.

 

Historiographical Approaches to the Study of Punjabi Society and Culture

British histories of Punjab represented it as a region of instability, violence and a long established tradition of communal animosity.2 They viewed all conflict in pre-colonial Punjab as resulting from deep-seated religious hostility. By contrast, mid nineteenth century histories penned by Punjabis emphasised a shared past the idea of a ‘sanjhi Punjabiyat’ and detailed a shared cultural landscape. Ganesh Das’ Char Bagh-i-Punjab for instance, sees the people of Punjab as consisting of three communities Muslim, Sikh and Hindu  however, there was no single criterion in his work by which he divided the people of Punjab into social groups. The criteria he used ranged from religion, sectarian belief, profession and tribe.3 By 1900 however, with the growth of socio-religious reform movements in urban centres like Lahore and Amritsar, new community-centred histories began to proliferate. These bypassed the folk forms and shared cultural traditions of Punjabis and focussed primarily on the evolution of what they saw as distinct and monolithic religious communities.4

This trend of writing community histories continued in the work of nationalist historians and beyond. The historiography on late nineteenth and twentieth century Punjab tended to emphasize the social formations of religious community, class, and zat. J.S Grewal’s The Sikhs of the Punjab traced the development of a Sikh identity and community from the foundation of the Sikh panth to the demand for a separate Sikh nation of Khalistan in the late seventies.5 Richard Fox focused on the privileging of a militant Singh identity by the Akalis who were committed to an orthodoxy that they believed represented original Sikhism, but that in many res-pects had only been promulgated by an urban reform movement in the last quarter century. Fox detailed the role of the colonial state in nurturing Singh identity, in order to constitute a martial species for an Indian army arranged on racial principles.6 The work of Kenneth Jones focused on the Arya Samaj, and the role played by the Samaj in the emergence of a reformed Hindu identity and consciousness in Punjab.7 In Empire and Islam, David Gilmartin examined the colonial encouragement to zat or tribal identities and the slow and conflicted process of the emergence of an ‘Islamic’ identity through the efforts of both reformist pirs of the rural Sufi shrines as well as the urban ulema.8 Writing a history of the construction of Jat identity in rural south-east Punjab, Nonica Dutta related it to the decline of warrior culture, the rise of a village based peasant economy, the influence of the reformist ideologies of the Arya Samaj and the decline of syncretic traditions.9 Thus, most of this scholarship studied the sharpening of community boundaries. The backdrop, either implicitly or explicitly, was Partition on the basis of religion, or the rise of the Khalistan demand on the basis of a reified Sikh identity.

Almost all the books referred to above are prefaced by a description of the remarkable diversity and plurality of Punjab in terms of religion, language and culture. However, informed by the predominance of religious reform movements in the late nineteenth century, the colonial categorization of ‘tribes’ and ‘castes’ as the region’s most important social institutions, and the region’s partition in 1947, the historiography of colonial Punjab largely neglected the cultural and religious practices shared by most Punjabis, and those forms of sociality that transcended the boundaries of religious, caste or zat differences.

Important exceptions to this trend is the work of Harjot Oberoi, Anil Sethi, Anna Bigelow and Farina Mir. Both Oberoi and Sethi uncovered aspects of the shared popular culture of Punjab, but their focus remained on the attacks on that culture by urban reformers in the late nineteenth century.10 They portrayed a world in which Punjabis quickly gave up their syncretic cultural traditions and began to subscribe to the normative religious and cultural practices propagated by, for example, the Arya Samaj and Singh Sabha movements. But was this the entire picture? Did Punjabis indeed turn away completely from their syncretic culture? Or is there evidence to suggest that syncretic Punjabi culture was resilient in the face of reformist attacks and sharpening community boundaries?

Farina Mir’s work explores the practice of saint veneration, particularly of Muslim pirs, which she understands as ‘a locus of a kind of sociality in which people participated irrespective of their religious, class or zat affiliations.’11 Anna Bigelow’s research on Malerkotla provides another kind of affirmation. The only Muslim majority region in Indian Punjab today, Malerkotla is a refreshing reminder that communities continue to have an interest in cooperative cohabitation and actively work to create spaces where pluralism and difference are embraced and applauded. Malerkotla remained peaceful during the bloodshed of Partition as well as during the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Up to the present day, this area is characterized by bhaichara or brotherly harmony. Anna Bigelow examines the nature and impact on civic life of inter-religious exchange at local shared sacred sites whose patronage, management and devotional traditions are shared by multiple religious communities.12

 

The Ingredients of Shared Punjabi Culture

The previous section of the paper has referred frequently and interchangeably to the ‘shared’, ‘composite’, ‘popular’, and ‘syncretic’ culture of Punjab. These various terms have been used to suggest a culture and set of practices that transcended community boun-daries. In terms of dress, food, music, leisure, entertainment and even language to a certain extent, a whole range of distinctly Punjabi preferences and practices can be readily discerned. Moreover, these commonalities and shared attitudes are not confined to the non-religious aspects of life. In sharp contrast to the narrative of religious polarization, there is a powerful sense in which Punjabi religious expressions have flowed across religious divisions.13

An extremely important source for the study of Punjab’s shared culture is the colonial census. This is ironic because the census was instrumental in introducing new fixed and bounded definitions of religious identity and became the basis for the increasing competition between communities for access to employment, education and political representation. However, the census also documented the gaps between the categories the British thought governed social and religious behaviour and the way people actually lived their lives. Census officials constantly came up against evidence that defied the logic of imperial taxonomies which regarded the Punjab as constituting separate and well defined religious groups. The bewilderment of these scholar-officials is characterized by the words of Denzil Ibbetson, the Commissioner of the 1881 Census of Punjab: ‘on the borderlands where these great faiths meet … the various observances and beliefs which distinguish the followers of the several faiths in their purity are so strangely blended and intermingled that it is often impossible … to decide in what category the people shall be classed.’14 Successive census reports show that large numbers of Hindus regularly undertook pilgrimages to what were apparently Muslim shrines, many Muslims conducted part of their life-cycle rituals as if they were Hindus, and equally, Sikhs attended Muslim shrines and Hindu sacred spots.

The worship of Sufi pirs was one common practice that brought together many Punjabis. Both Ibbetson and E.D Maclagan, the authors of the Punjab Census Reports of 1881 and 1891 respectively, gave detailed descriptions of shrines of saints such as Sakhi Sarwar Sultan and Baba Farid which were the focus of the shared piety of Punjabis. Sakhi Sarwar’s shrine at Nigaha in the Dera Ghazi Khan district was described as containing the tombs of the saint and his wife, a shrine to Baba Nanak and a temple to Vishnu, and held up as ‘exemplifying the extraordinary manner in which religions are intermingled in the Punjab’.15 Major Aubrey O’Brien, a court appointed trustee of a Muslim shrine, commented on the popularity of the Sakhi Sarwar shrine and the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of the congregation: ‘Men, women and children, Sikhs, Hindus and Mohammedans alike, come from all the districts in the Punjab. There are traditions to suit each and all are welcomed by the Mahommadan servants of the shrine.’16 Baba Farid’s shrine at Pak Pattan in the Montgomery District drew enormous crowds of Hindus and Muslims for its annual fair and was repeatedly mentioned in census reports. Ibbetson described the numerous saints that had a following in Punjab as ‘generally Mahomedan’, but adds that they were worshipped by Hindus and Muslims alike with the ‘most absolute impartiality’.17

There were also innumerable local goddesses and cults which were subscribed to by Punjabis across communities. These included Guga Pir, whose primary prowess lay in overpowering snakes and curing snakebites; and Sitala Devi, the ‘Cool One’ who was said to cure small pox. There was also the cult of the Panj Pirs or Five Saints, although who the five saints of the quintet were could vary: sometimes they were the five Pandavas, sometimes the five holy personages of Shia Islam, sometimes a selection of Muhammadan saints. In the centre and west of the province there could be found ‘a queer admixture of Hindu and Musalman objects of worship’, and the same list of the Five Saints could contain Sakhi Sarwar, Guru Gobind Singh, Durga, Vishnu and Khwaja Khizr, or Guga Pir, Balaknath Thakur, Sakhi Sarwar and Shiv.18

The Punjabi literary tradition was another site which spoke of the cultural coherence of Punjabis. A major component of this tradition was the qisse (stories) of Puran-Bhagat, Sassi-Pannun, Sohni-Mahiwal and Heer-Ranjha. While historically qisse had been circulated orally, they also began to appear in published form in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Their circulation in textual form took place alongside their continued public performance in rural   and urban contexts. The Heer-Ranjha texts were composed, transmitted and circulated among members of all religious communities in the Punjab. These qisse privilege saint veneration above other forms of religiosity and a concept of piety that does not conform to clear-cut and normative understandings of religion. In doing so, they too challenge the emphasis within existing historiography on the sharpening of religious boundaries during the late nineteenth century and point to a ‘shared nexus of piety’ subscribed to by all Punjabis irrespective of their religious identity.19

The cultural solidarity of Punjabis could also be seen during festivals like Holi and Muharram. Many non-Hindus participated in Holi, and many non-Muslims especially women, took part in Muharram processions. In Lahore and Amritsar the spring festival of Basant was celebrated by all three communities. The particularly Punjabi harvest celebration, Baisakhi, was similarly shared.

 

Fractures and Continuities

In the late nineteenth century, this shared culture became the target of reformist groups like the Arya Samaj and Tat Khalsa. Shared practices had developed through a process of religious and cultural synthesis resulting from the historic encounters between the Islamic, Hindu and Sikh traditions in Punjab. This cultural synthesis was unacceptable to reformers who were concerned with the clear definition and defence of religious boundaries. Consequently, they launched a vigorous attack on all practices that seemed to blur religious boundaries and dilute distinctive religious traditions.

The Tat Khalsa reformers, for instance, attempted to establish a normative Sikh tradition and do away with the plurality within Sikhism. Their energies were directed at establishing a separation between the Hindu and Sikh cultural universe and constructing a set of life cycle rituals and cultural practices that marked out the Sikh community as distinct. Consequently, they discouraged Sikh participation in festivals such as Holi, condemned Sikh veneration of Sakhi Sarwar and Guga Pir, and censured the undertaking of pilgrimages to non-Sikh shrines. Gyani Dit Singh, a prolific pamphleteer of the Tat Khalsa, wrote tirelessly to condemn the popular religious practices of Punjabis, both because he considered them superstitious and because they resulted in the intermixing of religions and castes. Bhai Vir Singh, a supporter of the Singh Sabha movement also condemned popular religion, and was particularly critical of Sikh women. In his novel Sundari he accused them of turning away from the ‘true gurus’ and teaching ‘someone else’s religion’ to their offspring. ‘Your children will grow up to be half baked like you  Sikh on the head, Brahmin around the neck and Muslim below the waist’, he informed them.20

The propaganda of the urban reformers did have an impact on Sikh mentalities. Anil Sethi’s research demonstrates that many who had Sarwar as a family saint joined the Khalsa. On the eve of the 1911 census, Sikh newspapers instructed the Sikhs not to return themselves as Sultanis or as Sultani Sikhs. In their view, ‘Sultani Sikh’ was a ‘meaningless phrase’, a contradiction in terms since the former appellation denoted an Islamic identity and Sikhs could not be Muslims.21 The Arya Samajists also condemned what they saw as superstitious and immoral practices within Hinduism. Letters written to the Arya Patrika often raised the issue of Hindus attending Muslim shrines. They emphasised the need to ‘convince our Hindu brethren that it is repugnant to their religious doctrines and authorities nay it is a sin  to pay homage at [Muslim] tombs and shrines’.22

Religious controversy and competition in urban Punjab is a familiar and well documented story. The Arya Samaj and the Tat Khalsa reformers used newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, bazaar sermons and public debates to popularize their version of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’ tradition, and condemn all practices that ran counter to their idealized view of community and culture. The urban ulema also sought to purge Sufism of ‘un-Islamic’ elements, and conjured up visions of a golden age when Islam was unsullied by syncretic practices. Religious controversy and an increased communal awareness was only intensified by the British understanding of Punjabi society through religious categories. The atmosphere of communal hostility was characterized by the occurrence of fifteen major riots between 1883 and 1891 over cow slaughter, and controversies arising due to the coinciding of the Hindu festivals of Ram Lila and Muharram. The shuddhi or ‘reconversion’ campaigns of the Arya Samaj, through which they attempted to bring Hindus who had converted to Islam, Christianity or Sikhism back into the fold, specifically attacked liminal groups. This also added to the atmosphere of communal tension.

Clearly, by the early part of the twentieth century the articulation of group identities in Punjab had gained a new stridency and force. Along with this came a stronger articulation and policing of community boundaries. Much work has been done to document these new fractures in Punjabi society. However, there were also continuities in religion and culture and not all trends in Punjabi society pointed towards increasing polarization and division. At the political level, the continuing popularity of the Unionist Party in the vast rural tracts of Punjab indicates that it was still possible, well into the 1940s, for Punjabi politicians to ally without regard for communal identities. Khizr Tiwana, a leading Unionist, dismissed the Congress and the Muslim League as being ‘predominantly Hindu’ and ‘entirely Muslim’ respectively, and projected the Unionist Party as representing the common interests of Punjabis irrespective of community. Their rhetoric emphasising the shared political interests of Punjabis was coupled with a commitment to the shared cultural values of rural Punjab and a commitment to the pluralism of rural culture.23

But how far was this true in the realm of culture? How successful were attempts of socio-religious reformers to manipulate popular religion and culture, and replace traditions that served to bring communities together with practices that served to distinguish communities from one another and mark clear boundaries between them? Did the practices and traditions that contributed to the ‘composite’ culture of Punjab disappear or is there evidence to show that there was no complete cultural transformation in Punjab?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Trying to recover evidence for the resilience of Punjabis’ composite culture and traditions is no simple task. However, it is evident that not all Punjabis perceived themselves in the religious categories of ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’ and even many of those who did so, held on to older, shared practices and customs. The continuing worship of Sufi pirs and saints was one aspect of the enduring hold of shared practices. But their worship was also attacked by reformists although the latter’s propaganda was not entirely successful in driving out these practices. In the 1911 Census after three decades of the Singh Sabha attack on Sakhi Sarwar, 79,085 Sikhs returned themselves as followers of the Pir24 and in the section titled ‘Hindu Sects Worshipping Muslim saints in addition to their own gods’ the 1921 Census enumerated 88,837 worshippers of the Pir. The resilience of the belief of some Punjabis in Sakhi Sarwar becomes even more clear on reading an article titled ‘A Panjab Saint’ written in 1934 by a lawyer from Lahore. The lawyer gives a detailed description of the continuing popularity of the Sakhi Sarwar cult and the ‘extensive’ following it has across Punjab. He documents that the ‘shrines are visited and offerings are made by Hindus, Sikhs and Musalmans alike and the Majawars or the Pujaris who accept these offerings are also Hindus, Sikhs and Musalmans’.25 For the Lahori lawyer, the worship of Sakhi Sarwar was politically significant and he described the worshippers of the pir as forming ‘a fraternity and model society, in which while retaining their own creeds, they pass as associates and brethren’, and suggested that it is on ‘principles like these that the foundations of the great Indian nation are to be laid’.26

The reformers also failed to ensure that people participated in only the festivals of their particular religious grouping. There had been a persistent campaign against Sikh participation in festivals like Holi and Diwali. But people refused to abandon festivities linked to the agrarian cycle, much to the ire of reformers who filled newspapers with letters condemning the continuing participation of Sikhs in Holi, and of Hindus in Muharram processions. Scholars have documented the incidence of communal violence due to conflict over festival processions and public space.27 However, festivals were also an opportunity for religious communities to demonstrate a commitment to coexistence and cooperation in an atmosphere which was rife with controversy and confrontation. In 1898 a Muharram procession in Multan became the occasion for riots between members of the Hindu and Muslim communities. In the same year however, in Lahore, Delhi and Ludhiana, Hindus and Muslims participated in each other’s festivals. The Civil and Military News in Ludhiana reported the ‘sincerity and cordiality of feeling with which the Hindus joined the Muhammadans in celebrating their festivals of the two Eids and the Muharram, and the enthusiasm with which the Muhammadans entertained the Hindus on the occasion of the recent Dussehra festival’. It went on to add, ‘experience has taught both communities that the eclat of the national festival depends, not only on living peacefully together, but also on joining each other in celebrating their festivals’.28 Such expressions of inter-community solidarity even in urban spaces which are usually seen as dominated by competition and conflict between religious groupings, are extremely significant. There is a need to document how far such practices continue, and whether or not they had all but disappeared by the 1940s.

David Gilmartin has documented the role played by the Sufi sheikhs of rural Punjab in spreading and popularizing the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand in the 1940s.29 Richard Eaton’s work on the shrine of Baba Farid at Pakpattan describes the shrine as playing a very different role  one that incorporated non-Muslims into its sacred landscape. From the point of view of the present enquiry, it is interesting that until the late 1930s, the shrine continued to integrate people of various castes and creeds into its activities. Many Hindu civic leaders and merchants attended the dastarbandi ceremony held in 1938 to mark the installation of a new Diwan at the shrine. Ganpat Rai, a businesman and representative of a large market in Pakpattan, offered nazranas on behalf of the mandi (market). Many Khatris were also in attendance at the ceremony and made offerings to the new Diwan.30 Clearly, when non-Muslims offered nazrana at the shrine, they might not have subscribed entirely to the Islamic conceptual structure of the shrine. However, their doing so is no less significant because of this, and was probably inspired not only by a belief in the charismatic powers of the shrine, but also out of respect for a local institution and out of a sense of civic responsibility.

These examples of continuing co-existence and overlap across religious boundaries are intended to illustrate the nature of the enquiry I am proposing. They testify to the fact that developments in Punjabi history did not all flow inexorably towards Partition and division. At the level of culture and religion, new definitions of what it meant to be Hindu, Sikh and Muslim emerged owing to the efforts of reformers and the institutions introduced by the colonial state. However, older attachments to shrines and saints, ballads and poetry, and popular festivals allowed people to transcend the new boundaries that were being drawn. Sometimes this was done consciously as a political statement and sometimes because it had always been so.

 

Sources

In order to recover some of these expressions of continuing cultural co-existence and sharing one will no doubt have to play the role of a ‘ragpicker’ of history. Coexistence and interaction make poor record and barely find a place in the archive. I will therefore have to sift through district gazetteers and municipal records to see whether and to what extent people continued to come together across community boundaries for public festivals and celebrations. I will also need to examine reports of pilgrim communities and murid registers to assess whether or not there were dramatic changes in the number and profile of people who undertook pilgrimages to the shrines such as those of Sakhi Sarwar and Baba Farid. No doubt newspapers will provide some evidence of resistance to the parting of ways between communities, although once again, the Punjab press was notorious for being sensationalist and whipping up conflict and controversy. Another important source to study how far people held on to older cultural conceptions and inter-community networks would be the tracts of precisely those reformers who tried to disrupt them. The propagandist tracts of the Arya Samaj and the Tat Khalsa would give an indication of whether their efforts were successful, or whether on account of failure they needed to become more vociferous.

Another important source from which one can recover traces of the composite culture of Punjab is literature. A lot of the authors writing in the aftermath of Partition, held on to a vision of Punjab in which despite political undercurrents and religious controversies, the two communities had lived together for centuries in a workable harmony almost like cousins.31 Fiction writers of the post-Partition period have testified to this in novels such as Jhoota Sach, Tamas, Aag ka Darya, Kale Kos and Udas Naslein. In addition, it would also be useful to examine the literary landscape of pre-Partition Punjab to see what sort of themes authors focussed on, and what sort of picture of Punjabi society and culture emerged from their work.

Travelling across Punjab in 1945, Malcolm Darline, an old Punjab hand observed, ‘What a hash politics threatens to make of this tract where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are mixed up as the ingredients of a well made pilau.’32

It is the flavours that went into the making of that pilau that I wish to explore.

 

Notes

1   Intizar Hussain, The Seventh Door and Other Stories, p.13.

2   Ian Talbot, ‘State, Society and Identity: The British Punjab, 1875–1937’ in Gurharpal Singh and Ian Talbot (eds.), Punjabi Identity: Continuity and Change, p.8.

3   Indu Banga and J.S. Grewal (eds.), Early 19th Century Punjab: From Ganesh Das’s Char Bagh-i-Punjab.

4   Anil Sethi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries in the Punjab 1850–1920, Unpublished PhD Dissertation.

5   J.S Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab.

6   Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making.

7   Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th century Punjab .

8   David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan.

9   Nonica Dutta, Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats.

10 Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition; Anil Sethi, op. cit.

11 Farina Mir, ‘Alternative Imaginings: Shared Piety in Punjabi Popular Narrative, c. 1850–1900’.

12 Anna Bigelow, ‘Practicing Pluralism in Malerkotla, Punjab’

13 Roger Ballard, ‘Panth, Kismet, Dharm, te Quaum: Continuity and Change in Four Dimensions of Punjabi Religion’, in Pritam Singh and Shinder Thandi (eds.), Punjabi Identity in a Global Context.

14 Denzil Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography: Being Extracts from the Panjab Census Report of 1881, Treating Religion, Language and Caste, p.101.

15 Ibbetson, ibid., p.115.

16 Audrey O’Brien, ‘Mohammedan Saints of the Western Punjab’ in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol 41, p.519.

17 Ibbetson, op. cit., p.115.

18 E.D Maclagan, Census of India 1891, Vol XIX, The Punjab and its Feudatories, Part I, The Report on the Census, p.137.

19 Farina Mir, op. cit.

20 Quoted in Yogendra K Malik, Politics and the Novel in India, p.51.

21 Anil Sethi, op. cit., p.44.

22 Quoted in Kenneth Jones, op. cit., p.128.

23 Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India,  p.54–55.

24 Harkishan Singh Kaul, Census of India 1911, Punjab Part II, p.39.

25 Ram Chand Manchanda, ‘A Panjab Saint’, Journal of the Panjab University Historical Society, Vol. III, Part I, p.71.

26 Ibid., p.75.

27 Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No 3,  pp.523–539; Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India.

28 Report on Native Newspapers Punjab, Jan.–Dec. 1898, Received up to 5th November 1898, Vol. XI No 45.

29 David Gilmartin, ‘A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 3,  p.415–436.

30 Richard Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.241.

31 Krishna Sobti in conversation with Alok Bhalla, ‘Memory and History’, in Geeti Sen (ed.), Crossing Boundaries, p.55.

32 Quoted in Mushirul Hasan, ‘Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of India’s Partition’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, No. 8, 1998, p.15.

 

 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ibbetson, Denzil, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography: Being extracts from the Panjab Census Report of 1881, Treating Religion, Language and Caste (Calcutta, 1883).

Kaul, Harkishan Singh, Census of India 1911, Punjab Part II (Lahore, 1912).

Maclagan, E.D., Census of India 1891, Vol. XIX, The Punjab and its Feudatories, Part I, The Report on the Census (Calcutta, 1892).

O’Brien, Audrey, ‘Mohammedan Saints of the Western Punjab’ in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 41, July–December 1911.

Report on Native Newspapers, Punjab, Jan.–Dec. 1898, Received upto 5th November 1898, Vol. XI No. 45.

Krishna Sobti in conversation with Alok Bhalla, ‘Memory and History’, in Geeti Sen (ed.), Crossing Boundaries (New Delhi, 1997).

Unpublished Dissertation

Sethi, Anil, The Construction of Religious Boundaries in the Punjab, 1850–1920, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation (Cambridge University, 1998).

Secondary Sources

Ballard, Roger, ‘Panth, Kismet, Dharm, te Qaum: Continuity and Change in Four Dimensions of Punjabi Religion’, in Pritam Singh and Shinder Thandi (eds.), Punjabi Identity in a Global Context (New Delhi, 1999).

Banga, Indu and J.S. Grewal (eds.), Early 19th Century Punjab: From  Ganesh Das’s Char Bagh-i-Punjab (Amritsar, 1975).

Barrier, Gerald , ‘The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 27, No 3, May, 1968.

Bigelow,  Anna, ‘Practicing Pluralism in Malerkotla, Punjab’, Items and Issues, Social Science Research Council, 3:1-2 (Spring, 2002).

Nonica Dutta, Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (New Delhi, 1999).

Eaton, Richard, Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi, 2000).

Fox, Richard, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (London, 1985).

Freitag, Sandria, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley, 1989).

Gilmartin, David, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London, 1988).

——, ‘A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 1998.

Grewal, J.S., The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge, 1990).

Hasan, Mushirul, ‘Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of India’s Partition’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, No. 8, 1998.

Hussain, Intizar, The Seventh Door and Other Stories (Colorado, London, 1998).

Jones, Kenneth W.,  Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th century Punjab (New Delhi, 1976).

Malik, Yogendra K., Politics and the Novel in India (Leiden, 1975).

Manchanda, Ram Chand, ‘A Panjab Saint’, Journal of the Panjab University Historical Society, Vol. III, Part I, April 1934.

Mir, Farina, ‘Alternative Imaginings: Shared Piety in Punjabi Popular Narrative, c. 1850–1900’. Paper presented at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Washington DC, April 5, 2002. www.ncsu.edu/tsac/mir.doc

Oberoi, Harjot, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (New Delhi, 1994).

Talbot, Ian, ‘State, Society and Identity: The British Punjab, 1875–1937’ in Gurharpal Singh and Ian Talbot (eds.), Punjabi Identity: Continuity and Change (Delhi, 1996).

——, Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Karachi, 2002). •

 

 

 

Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik) was doing her doctoral dissertation at Balliol College, University of Oxford, when she died in January 2006 at the age of 28. She had been awarded the prestigious Clarendon Fellowship. Before returning to academics, she worked in various capacities with organisations involved in developmental and gender issues, minorities and human rights, and peace movements.

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[Reproduced from In the Making, Identity Formation in South Asia, Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik) , 2007, pp 137, Rs 375 hb with the kind permission of Three Essays Collective publishers Gurgaon India.
Email Asad Zaidi: threeessays@gmail.com or info@threeessays.com]