Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik alias Meeto

 

The Historian and the Indian Census

Accounts of Religion in Late Nineteenth Century Punjab

 

n 1947 India simultaneously achieved independence from colonial rule and was divided on the basis of religious identity. The partition of the country into the post-colonial nation states of India and Pakistan was accompanied by the bloodiest episode of violence in the history of the subcontinent. A million people perished in a communal carnage in which innocent Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were slaughtered, and over ten million were displaced in the largest peacetime mass migration the last century had witnessed. The state of Punjab was the site of much of the trauma and violence of Partition. Varied explanations have been offered for the tragedy of Partition, but one that endures despite the efforts of progressive historians, is the idea that Indian Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate and identifiable nations. This line of argument privileges primordial and essentialist religious identities and can be summed up by the words of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Partition’ in which he describes the Hindus and Muslims as ‘…two people fanatically at odds, / With their different diets and incompatible gods.1 Although primordial explanations that read modern bounded identities of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ back into the past are politically persuasive and convenient, it is equally important to focus on the process of identity formation.  It is only through this exercise that one can see how identities are constructed and strict boundaries are drawn up between groups. Moreover, it is equally important to consider evidence that contradicts the narrative of a growing social and political distance between communities and recognize the existence of cultural strains that transcend community boundaries. This paper attempts a critical reading of the censuses of Punjab in order to recover evidence for the shared cultural and religious practices of pre-Partition Punjabis.

This essay uses the censuses of Punjab and India conducted between 1870 and 1921 to develop an understanding of contemporary religious identity.  At the same time, it attempts to grapple with some larger questions about the census itself. How far did the census, which was an important ‘technology of modernity’ introduced into the subcontinent by colonialism, serve to transform and solidify identities? Did the census constitute an internally coherent and hegemonising discourse? To what extent is the information contained within the census compatible with its analytical categories? Answering some of these questions with a specific focus on the Punjab census will help to develop a picture of religious identity as it existed at the turn of the nineteenth century Punjab, and also engage with ongoing academic debates about the impact and character of colonial rule in India.

The essay is divided into three sections. The first is an exploration of the political and intellectual context in which census operations developed. The second examines the way the census reports of Punjab treat the question of religious identity, and the information on religious identity captured within them. The final section offers some tentative conclusions about both the nature of religious identity and the nature of the census-taking exercise in late nineteenth century Punjab.

 

 

Census Operations: The Political and Intellectual Context

The colonial state in India had been going through a process of transformation since the Great Rebellion of 1857. The Rebellion led to a great deal of rethinking on the part of the British regarding their role and place in India, and directly precipitated a crisis of the Raj and a crisis of liberalism in Britain. The gradual result of this was a conception of empire grounded even more firmly in notions of Indian ‘difference’, and a revitalized conservatism that gave empire a central place in Britain’s vision of itself.2 One liberal principle, which acquired a fresh lease of life in the wake of the Mutiny, was that of religious toleration. The Queen’s Proclamation repudiated ‘any desire to impose convictions on any of our subjects’, and ‘enjoined abstinence from interference with the customs and beliefs of the Indian people’.3 

If the Raj was committed to non-interference with the cultural traditions of the Indians, they had to first establish what these cultural traditions were. Determined to strengthen the knowledge-base of the Raj, the Victorians set out to order and classify India’s ‘difference’ in accordance with scientific systems of ‘knowing’. The study of India was thus made part of a larger scholarly enterprise in which the Victorians, as children of the Enlightenment, sought rational principles that would provide a comprehensive way of fitting everything they saw in the world around them into ordered hierarchies. The exigencies of empire spurred on this creation of knowledge, and the hierarchical relationships of imperialism helped shape the categories within which that knowledge was constructed.4 

The census was symptomatic of the Victorian urge to ‘know’, ‘classify’ and ‘count’. Census operations were not reserved just for the colonies. They were instituted in almost all European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries and were usually prompted by concerns about depopulation and increasing poverty.5 In Britain, the census was instituted with the passage of the Population Bill in 1800. In his speech in the House of Commons, Charles Abbot, who was responsible for introducing the Population Bill, stressed two objectives. Firstly, to know accurately the current size of the population, and secondly, to know the trend of the population: ‘by showing the increase or diminution of baptisms, burials, and marriages’ in order to provide a ‘correct knowledge’ of ‘increasing or decreasing demands of subsistence’.6

When the census was transplanted in India, classificatory schemes familiar to the British at home were not entirely absent. Occupation, for instance, played an important role in the British ordering of Indian society. However, categories meant to signify India’s difference, above all those of caste, religion, community and tribe were placed at the heart of the country’s social system. Class, by contrast, which Victorian Englishmen regarded as the great divide in their own society, was nowhere to be found in British accounts of India’s peoples.7 Moreover, as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai points out, while the British census reserved its most ‘invasive investigations’ for Britain’s social margins, ‘in the colonies, by contrast, the entire population was seen as ‘different’ in problematic ways, this shift lying at the very heart of Orientalism’.8 That the qualitative difference between census operations in colonial and metropolitan contexts was widely recognized in the late nineteenth century itself, becomes apparent by the following extract from a newspaper: ‘In India, … the census means something at once less and a great deal more than in a European or an American country….Indeed it must be frankly stated that in important respects the Indian census has not yet reached the standard of the best European  models. But on other and wider aspects, as a vast depository of ethnical, linguistic, anthropological and linguistic inquiry….the imperial census of India stands alone in the world.9

The Indian census grew out of the district gazetteers, which compiled material about the castes and tribes of the Indian countryside and included descriptions of customs, kinship behaviour, and ritual forms. The fact of foreign domination meant that from the very beginning the gazetteers were charged with duties fundamentally different from those carried out by the census officials in Europe. The district gazetteers and the censuses were, if anything, studies of an alien civilization. The census in the colonies was much more ethnographic than in the metropole and reflected the firm belief of the British that caste and religion were the ‘sociological keys’ to understanding the Indian people.10 

Interestingly, many census officials saw the material being collected by them as being of ‘immense value to students of socio-logy’. They saw the colonial ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the people under its rule as a ‘reproach’ to the establishment, not only because it involved a ‘loss of administrative power’, but also because it deprived ‘European Science of material it greatly needs’.11 Many census officials, for instance H. H. Risley, had direct links with the departments of anthropology in European universities. Some census officials seemed to be aware of the problems of an anthropological approach, and the chapter on religion in the Census of India 1901, begins with the following warning: ‘The tutored anthropologist is worse than the untutored missionary. He knows the game only too well; he sees what his theory of origins allows him to see and he unconsciously shapes the evidence in the collecting so as to fit the theory!12

Religion was the area in which the divergence between the Indian and British Census was most marked, partly prompted by Britain’s enduring insistence that India was divided into two religious communities  those of Hinduism and Islam. As Thomas Metcalf points out, ‘the British came to believe that adherence to one or the other of these two religions was not merely a matter of belief, but defined membership more generally in a larger community. To be Hindu or Muslim by itself explained much of the way Indians acted.’13 In the census, and more generally in politics, the British came to define Hindu and Muslim identities as ethnic categories, encompassing all members of the two communities equally, and defining their common relationship to the political system. In keeping with this, the Indian census used religion as one of its fundamental categories, and as a basis for organizing data and attempting to understand Indians.14 

Significantly, and in direct contrast to the trend described above, the census in Britain never recorded data on religion, apart from one survey in 1851. This was despite the fact that in early nineteenth century Britain, religious affiliation mattered intensely. Anglicans, Dissenters and Catholics had been set apart from each other since the time of the Reformation. Until well into the nineteenth century the state awarded the right to vote on the basis of religious affiliation.15 Yet, however much religion may have informed British life, it was never imagined, apart from the exceptional case of Ireland (for which the census did record religious data), as having the power to shape the entire society into opposed ‘communities’. One could argue that the project of nation-building that Britain was involved in at this time encouraged an emphasis on homogeneity and themes that united Britons. In direct contrast to this, India had come to be understood as a land ‘of many nations’, and of ‘various and varying races’, as Disraeli described its people. While explaining the meaning of the imperial title, Viceroy Lord Lytton described India as ‘multitudinous in its traditions, as well as its inhabitants, almost infinite in the variety of races which populate it, and of the creeds which have shaped their character’.16 As an article that appeared in The Times proclaimed, the basis of a ‘right understanding’ of Indian government ‘must be exact knowledge of the population not only as a whole, but in its manifold ethnographic, communal and geographic divisions; and this can be obtained only by a full and careful periodic enumeration’.17 This colonial understanding of India and Indian diversity, which gave centrality to religious community and caste, was institutionalized in the census.

 

Religious Identities in the Punjab Census: Overlapping Realities, Neat Categories

Most of the ways in which the census was conceptualized and institutionalised in India become clear while studying the censuses of Punjab between 1868 and 1921. However, a detailed reading of the census reports also yields many fresh perspectives. A lot of what one reads is surprisingly subversive, contradicts the ‘grand narrative’ of the census itself, and calls into question some of the established academic analyses of the census in India. Furthermore, the information captured in the census forces a re-examination of the easy division of the Punjab into straitjacketed religious communities. The faithfulness, with which the census officials describe what they see, even when it contradicts their own assumptions, is also extremely significant.

The British conquest of Punjab completed in 1849, initiated a series of complex social, political and economic transformations. The British replaced the existing ruling class and ended the Sikh government founded by Ranjit Singh in 1799. With the new agrarian policies introduced by the British came the commercialization of agriculture, the collapse of peasant prosperity, and the impoverishment of small landholders due to innovations of fixed assessments, freedom of contract and individual property in land.18 In the urban centres of Punjab, this period saw the emergence of a professional middle class, which was a product of English education. This class began to seek employment in the colonial bureaucracy and in professions like law, teaching and medicine. The British also introduced new modes of communication and late nineteenth century Punjab saw a dramatic increase in journalistic activity and publications. Another important element introduced into Punjab largely due to the new British presence was missionary activity. Christian missionaries were the greatest allies of the government in spreading English education. They used the press as an effective medium of communication for evangelization and in the process they aggressively denounced indigenous beliefs and practices, social evils and morals of the Punjabis. In the popular mind the missionaries were closely allied with the rulers, and their socio-cultural program carried a sharper edge because of this real or supposed alliance.19 These rapid changes in Punjab led to a period of social, intellectual and cultural upheaval. Late nineteenth century Punjab saw a mushrooming of social reform movements and movements of religious revival for example, the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj, the Singh Sabha, and the Ahmadiya movement. Questions relating to social and religious practices and the definition of community boundaries were fiercely debated by these groups, as they attempted to adjust to the new reality created by the colonial presence.

The census reports on the Punjab written in the late nineteenth century provide a snapshot of this rapidly changing society. Reports compiled by the likes of Denzil Charles Ibbetson, E. D. Maclagan, and H. A. Rose, included in their narrative sections, examples of some of the finest ethnographies to be written by colonial scholar-officials during the Raj. Although colonial officials all over India were given the task of collecting ethnographic material and local histories of their subject populations, not everywhere were district officers transformed into anthropologists of merit.20 It is precisely because of this transformation in Punjab that the census becomes such a useful and fascinating source for the study of religious identities in the region. Ibbetson and his successors belonged to the second generation of the Punjab school of colonial administrators. The first generation of British officers in the province in the 1850s and 1860s had arrived as conquerors and rulers and saw the Punjab as virgin territory to be moulded and transformed at the hands of a select few. They believed in a heavy handed and paternalistic style of rule and a rough and ready dispensation of justice. The second generation, by contrast, saw themselves as more detached and scientific administrators. Some of them like Ibbetson, were ‘competition-wallahs’ and belonged to the emerging meritocracy of imperial administration. These were men of exceptional literary and administrative talent and were predisposed to sociological analysis. They set out to record the several customs and traditions of the Punjabis. The extent of detail they were interested in become apparent from the following request circulated by Ibbetson among officials in Punjab: ‘What I would beg you to do is this: whenever you come across any interesting facts regarding any caste or clan, or its customs, make a rough note of them at once, and on the spot, before they are forgotten, send it to me.’  He continues by saying ‘I am most anxious that you should believe that no notes can possibly be too fragmentary or too trivial to be worth sending to me.’21

The first major census of Punjab was conducted in 1868. At this early stage, the census was quite brief and did not include ethnographic descriptions of communities. Over the next three decades, the census reports became increasingly voluminous and came to include detailed descriptions of religious communities, caste groups, and their customs and rituals. However, even the first census used religion as a fundamental category, and compared the growth and decline of the population according to religion.22 Clearly, in the minds of the census official, Punjab society was organized on the basis of religion, and could only be understood through the lens of religion. The census of Punjab between 1868 and 1901 enumerated nine main religious groups: Musalmans, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews and a few who professed ‘No religion’. Questions over who could be included in each category were fiercely debated both by colonial officials and by the people who were being enumerated. However, the categories themselves were not usually questioned.

An important theme that one finds in the first census of Punjab, and which recurs in each subsequent census report, is that of the lack of accuracy of returns. From one decennial census to another, the figures of a single religious community in the same locality could increase or decrease without any visible correlation to the average birth-rate or mortality. This lack of accuracy troubled almost all census officials, and they offered varying explanations for this. The 1868 census explained the inaccuracy by pointing to the fact that in the province ‘only 22 persons in a thousand can read and write’, and on the ‘general tendency among the people’, ‘in common with most Eastern countries’ ‘to be inaccurate in their statements about the simplest facts’.23  Interestingly, the next decennial census, while still concerned about the lack of accuracy of returns, offers a very different explanation: ‘The difficulty of an Indian Census springs mainly from two sources; the infinite diversity of the material to be dealt with, and our own infinite ignorance of that material.’24

On reading the reports on the censuses of Punjab, the first thing that strikes one is in fact ‘the infinite diversity of the material’. Clearly, the Punjab was an area of diversity unsurpassed in the remainder of the subcontinent: three main religious traditions, Hinduism, Sikhism,  and Islam, infinite local saints and shrines, three languages, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, each with its own script, and then the infinite local groupings of community and kinship. A perceptible tension within the census is the colonial official’s desire to understand this diversity, iron it out, and explain it by organizing it into charts and tables, and his frustration because explanations and neat categories were elusive, and unable to capture the reality on the ground.

The most detailed explanations about the census definitions of particular religious groups were offered by Sir Denzil Ibbetson, the author of The Panjab Census Report of 1881. It is worthwhile to explore Ibbetson’s views on religion and religious identity in Punjab in detail, because his ideas became the basis for much of the work that came after him and gained an almost canonical status. While laying out the ‘Census definition of Hindus’, Ibbetson began with a preamble, which warned of the ‘absolute impossibility of laying down any definition or indicating any test by which we may distinguish him who is a Hindu from him who is not’.25 Having said this however, Ibbetson cheerfully proceeded to lay down a definition and offer an explanation for it. ‘Practically’ he wrote, ‘the rule we adopted was this’:

Every native who was unable to define his creed, or described it by any other name than that of some recognized religion or sect of some such religion, was held to be and classed as Hindu. The assumption at the basis of this rule is that the Native of India must be presumed to be Hindu unless he belongs to some other recognized faith.26 

The report of the Census of India 1891 referred to the creed which ‘under the title of Hinduism, is returned by more than 72 per cent of the population of India’. It reiterated that the ‘clumsy name is only justified by convention’, and further ‘Primarily and historically, it [Hinduism] is the antithesis of Islam. Religion, in the etymological sense of the word, it [Hinduism] is not, and never was. The binding element is only educed by active opposition on the part of some other form of faith, such as Islam.’27 While Hinduism was taken to be the ‘Native’ religion of India, Islam was viewed as being decidedly ‘foreign’, despite the fact that Islam had a history of over a thousand years in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Clearly, census officials viewed Islam and Hinduism as being in fundamental opposition to each other. Subsequent sections of this essay will consider how far such an understanding of the two religious traditions resonated with the ground reality of turn of the nineteenth century Punjab as described by these same census officials.

Denzil Ibbetson began his chapter on ‘The Religions of the People’, in the Panjab Census Report of 1881 with the following words: ‘The religion of the people is, with the doubtful exception of their caste, by far the most interesting matter that I have dealt with in this report.’ He adds that ‘volumes have already been written on the subject’, but goes on to say that they ‘fail utterly and entirely in conveying to the reader the faintest idea of the religions which they describe as actually practised by their million followers in the villages of the country’. ‘The books on Hinduism’, he continued, ‘describe Hinduism as it ought to be, Hinduism as it once was, perhaps Hinduism as it now is among the pandits and educated Brahmans of the holy cities; but they do not describe Hinduism as it is in the daily life of the great mass of the population.’28 

Having stated his resolve to describe not a normative version of the various religions of Punjab, but the religions as they were actually practiced, Ibbetson proceeded to render a fascinating and nuanced description of the very eclectic customs and traditions of the Punjabis. He went to great lengths to show ‘how small a part’ ‘the esoteric doctrines of the various faiths in their purity’ ‘play in the everyday belief and practice of the Panjab peasant’, and ‘to indicate generally what that belief and practice are’. Ibbetson wrote that ‘Creed is in the Panjab rather a social than a religious institution’, and that it is ‘so difficult in many cases to draw the line between one Indian creed and another; for the distinctions of faith, being based upon and attended by no deep spiritual conviction, are marked by a laxity and catholicity of practice which would be impossible to a bigot or an enthusiast’. He continues, ‘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.’ Ibbetson illustrated his assertion by showing that ‘the Musalman peasantry of the Delhi Territory are still in many ways almost as much Hindu as their unconverted brethren; that the Sikh of Sirsa is often a Sikh only in speech and habit; that the Hindu of Lahul is almost more a Buddhist than a Hindu.’29

Lest one think that Ibbetson dismissed syncretic religious practices as being symptomatic of the ‘ignorant peasantry’ one need only read his descriptions of ‘Mahomedanism on the Frontier’ where he described the Baluchis as ‘singularly lax and unobservant of the ordinances of their religion; the Mahomedans of the left bank of the lower Indus as still retaining ‘a very large admixture of Hindu practice, reverencing and employing Brahmans and largely following the Hindu ritual at weddings and other similar ceremonies’; and ‘even the Saiyads and Pathans of those parts’, as not being ‘by any means free from the Hinduising influence’.30 

E. D. Maclagan, who authored the Punjab Census of 1891, pointed out that while many authors have written about ‘the large admixture of Hinduism that there is in the Mahomedanism of the common people’, not many have explored the amount of ‘Mahomedanism there is in their Hinduism’. He goes on to say that ‘Mahomadanism has strongly tinctured the religious vocabulary of the common people’ and refers to the ‘extraordinary indifference’ with which the deity is addressed in popular speech as ‘Maulah’, ‘Parmeshwar’, ‘Nirankar’, ‘Thakur’, ‘Ram’, ‘Khuda’, ‘Hari’, ‘Rabb’, or ‘Allah’.31 Maclagan described a number of sects, for instance, the followers of the Five Pirs and of Dadu, the Shamsis, the Madaris, who seemed to completely defy the notion of a clear division between Islam and Hinduism, and drew on both religious traditions.32 While most often Ibbetson and Maclagan manage to employ a matter-of-fact tone while describing the ‘laxity’ and ‘catholicity’ of popular religion in Punjab, they cannot escape the occasional derogatory remark, as epitomized by Ibbetson’s reference to the words of one Mr. Channing, who is quoted as saying ‘the Musalman of the villages “observes the feasts of both religions and the fasts of neither”’!33

Both Ibbetson and E. D. Maclagan also gave detailed descriptions of shrines of saints such as Sakhi Sarwar 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 to which Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims flocked, is 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 extra-ordinary manner in which religions are intermingled in the Punjab’.34 Baba Farid’s shrine at Pak Pattan in the Montgomery District which drew enormous crowds of Hindus and Muslims for its annual fair was repeatedly mentioned in census reports. Ibbetson described the numerous saints that had a following in Punjab as ‘generally Mahomedan’, but added that they are worshipped by ‘Hindus and Musalmans alike with the most absolute impartiality’.35 

A phenomenon that intrigued census officials no end was that of the ‘Five Pirs’. Maclagan noted that in some parts of the country Hindus were fond of representing themselves as followers of the Panj Pirs or Five Saints. Who these five saints were varied: sometimes they are the five Pandavas, sometimes the five holy personages of Shia Islam, sometimes a selection of Muhammadan saints. Maclagan added that in the centre and west of the province one meets with ‘a queer admixture of Hindu and Musalman objects of worship’, and the same list of the Five Saints will contain Sakhi Sarwar, Guru Gobind Singh, Durga, Vishnu and Khwaja Khizr, or Guga Pir, Balaknath, Thakur, Sakhi Sarwar and Shiv. He concluded that ‘the fact that a man describes himself as a Panjpiria implies generally that he is indifferent as to the saints whom he worships and is probably a man of the lower orders’.36

This brings us to an important question relating to the interface between religion and caste in late nineteenth century Punjab. While a syncretism of belief and practice was not confined to the lower orders of society, it seems to have been particularly pronounced among them. Untouchable groups like the Chuhras and Sansis in Punjab had extremely eclectic religious practices. They identified themselves as Sikhs, Muslims or Christians. Still others professed faith in Bala Shah or Lal Beg and combined elements of all the religious traditions mentioned above. In the Chuhras’ songs, one can hear distinct echoes of the Japji of Nanak, suras from the Quran and the Punjabi kafis of Baba Farid and Bulhe Shah. The songs of the Balashahis include characters such as Baba Nanak, Dadu, Mardana, Kabir, Brahman, Ram, Allah, the Pandavas, Joseph, Moses and fragments from a variety of folk stories. R. C. Temple, who in the 1860s initiated a project of collecting folklore from the Punjab, remarked: ‘The tenets of the Hindus, Musalmans and the Sikhs are thrown together in the most hopeless confusion’ with ‘the monotheism taught by the medieval reformers [underlying] all their superstitions’.37 Although the census recognized and recorded the eclectic and popular nature of the religion of groups like the Chuhras, it had difficulty categorizing it. If the Chuhras claimed a Muslim, Christian, or Sikh identity, they were returned as such, however, if they wanted to be identified as Bala Shahis or Lal Begis, they were usually bundled into the category of ‘Hindu’.  

 

The Punjab Census and Religious Identity: An Analysis

The picture of religion and religious identities that emerges from the census reports is one that forces us to re-examine the easy division of people into the boxes of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.  Punjabi Hindus and Muslims were clearly not always ‘fanatically at odds’ and neither were their gods always incompatible, as Auden would have us believe. In nineteenth century Punjab, thousands of Hindus regularly undertook pilgrimages to what were apparently Muslim shrines. Vast numbers of Muslims conducted part of their life-cycle rituals as if they were Hindus, and equally, Sikhs attended Muslim shrines and Hindu sacred spots. Traditionally, the Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab had been linked at all levels. Prakash Tandon, a Hindu khatri, while writing about the history of his Punjabi family points out: ‘We and the Sikhs had the same castes and customs, and they were always members of brotherhood – biradaris. In the villages we lived together and celebrated the same festivals….After all, we and the Sikhs came from the same stock; most Hindus had Sikh relations and inter-marriage was common.’38 Likewise, for middle-class groups more acquainted with ‘learned’ and textual traditions, formal boundaries of sect and community were less significant than personal exposure to specific influences or the overall religious traditions of their localities. It was possible, in mid century, for persons like Lala Lajpat Rai’s father, a school teacher from a Jain family at Ropar (and married to a lady with a fervent Sikh background) to be a firm believer in Islam before taking to Vedantism in old age.    

Although the census officials of the Punjab give detailed descriptions of what can be seen as the ‘syncretic’ nature of popular religion in Punjab, they were unable to conceptualize this syncretism, and took for granted the separate and monolithic religions of Islam,  Hinduism and Sikhism. They saw syncretic practices as being ‘concessions’ to a second religious tradition, and referred to them as ‘queer admixtures’. The inability or unwillingness to theorize syncretism meant that census officials viewed syncretic communities as problematic and somehow inauthentic. Census officials pushed these groups under either the heading of Islam or of Hinduism. A Bombay census official’s attempt to do away with the dilemma of choice, by providing a category ‘Hindu-Mahomadan’ was greatly criticized and not seen as a viable solution.39 A similar logic informed the reluctance of census takers in allowing the Chuhras to identify themselves as Lal Begis or Bala Shahis.

The reason for this in administrative terms is abundantly clear. Although the censuses of Punjab recorded data that defied the logic of a simple tripartite division of society on the basis of religion, in the ultimate analysis the point of the census was to simplify a complex landscape and make it knowable. In a candid admission, a census official declared that ‘the Census is not concerned with personal religion, but is an attempt to record religion in its communal aspect, merely distinguishing those who lay claim to one or other of the recognised sectional labels without looking too closely into the validity of their claims.’40 The ‘recognized sectional labels’ told the British something about the land they governed, something which did not require the subtle distinctions in everyday worship. Moreover, most colonial officials in the Punjab were evangelicals, men driven by deep conviction and belief that Christianity was the only true religion.41 They saw religion as having a clear belief structure, distinct boundaries and a set of identifiable rituals and observances. In India however, they found an immense ‘fluidity’ and what E. D. Maclagan called ‘shiftiness in outline’ as far as religion was concerned.42 In the context of India, the census officials relied on observance and external markers rather than belief, while ascribing particular religious identities to individuals. A Sikh who did not ‘wear long hair and abjure smoking’ was returned as Hindu, even if he claimed a Sikh identity for himself.43 As H. H. Risley conceded in the Report of the Census of India 1901, ‘The rule was that every man’s statement as to his religion was to be accepted, but in practice the enumerators often followed their own views in the matter, and in either case, the manner of drawing the line varied greatly in different parts.’44

The census official’s confusion over how to categorize people and which religion to slot them under stemmed partly from the colonial official’s own biases and understandings of religious boundaries and definitions. However, this confusion was also caused by the fact that during this period the Punjab was going through a process of immense social churning and transformation. Punjabis were in the process of contesting and negotiating their religious and social identities. Fluid and contextual understandings of religious and social identity were slowly being replaced by more reified understandings, and there was an increasing preoccupation with questions regarding religious authenticity and purity. This process was partly caused by census taking exercises, which forced people to define themselves in one way or another, but was also a function of the missionary presence, the introduction of representative politics by the colonial state, and the emergence of new arenas of competition between different social groups over questions like access to education, employment and political power. This process is clearly reflected in the census reports, which describe the activities of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious reformers and revivalists, as well as Christian missionaries.

The Arya Samaj, the Singh Sabha, and the Tat Khalsa were preoccupied not only with questions relating to the reformation of their religious practices and the need to do away with ‘superstitious’ and ‘backward’ practices, but also with the drawing of boundaries between the several religious communities. These processes were influenced by the existence of the census, and consequently, attempts to influence the census. The Arya Samajists wanted all Hindus to return themselves as ‘Aryas’. Some groups within the Sikh community, for instance the Singh Sabhas, had cooperated with the Arya Samaj but by the turn of the century there was a parting of ways and the Sikhs began to claim a separate and distinct identity for themselves as evidenced by Kahan Singh’s influential tract titled Ham Hindu Nahin or ‘We are not Hindu’.45 This process was undoubtedly spurred by the fact that till the 1901 Census only Khalsa Sikhs were defined as Sikhs. However, formal identification with a particular religious group was not enough for the reformers and they campaigned vigorously to make Punjabis give up their eclectic religious practices. Ditt Singh, a leading polemicist of the Tat Khalsa, tried to root out the attachment of Sikhs to Hindu rituals, Brahmans and the worship of saints and pirs. Ditt Singh wrote at least ten books and tracts against elements seen as endangering the Sikh religion. He strongly condemned the practice of worshipping Sakhi Sarwar and Goga Pir, and insisted that worshipping the pir went against Sikhism, and that Sikhs should not worship a ‘Muslim’ saint. 46 

Similar ideas were echoed by members of the Arya Samaj. An Arya writing to one of the main Arya Samaj papers argued, it is imperative 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’.47 Such concerns were not merely doctrinal, they were equally determined by Hindu fears of a declining population as revealed in the census. Hindu reformers reacted violently to the suggestion that the 1910 census should both widen the category of ‘Sikh’ and eliminate Untouchables from the Hindu category. Any demographic decline was seen as having political consequences in an age of growing democratization.  The Arya Samaj responded by initiating a vigorous campaign to convert low-caste Muslims and Sikhs through its shuddhi movement.

The census also provides evidence which demonstrates that the efforts of reformers to construct clear boundaries between religious communities and to prescribe strict codes for religious communities were often resisted. Rivalries between religious groups increased in this period and played themselves out in the polemical wars of words fought between the self-appointed representatives of the several religious traditions. But not all the strains within the Punjabi landscape pointed towards increasing divisions between communities. The census shows that many aspects of the religious and spiritual universe of Punjabis transcended community boundaries and continued to do so well into the 20th century. The 1911 census reported 79,085 Sikhs returning themselves as followers of Sakhi Sarwar and this after a campaign of more than thirty years to wean Sikhs away from ‘Muslim’ saints.48 Similarly, the section titled ‘Hindu Sects Worshipping Muslim saints in addition to their own gods’ in the 1921 census, enumerated 88,837 worshippers of the Pir. As an observer writing in the Journal of the Panjab Historical Society testified: ‘However hostile the official relations were between the various religious systems that shared between themselves the masses of the worshippers in the land, the worship of saints formed a bond of union’ between different, sometimes hostile groups.’49

While writing about the colonial government’s intervention in religious disputes in the North Western Provinces, Katherine Prior emphasizes that ‘Hindus and Muslims could and did think of themselves as Hindus and Muslims and not just in circumscribed terms of locality, sect or profession’. She goes on to say, ‘in eighteenth century north India each town, city and village seems to have had a ‘corporate tone’ or public character which was identifiably Hindu or Muslim and which was set by the relative economic and political strengths of its Hindu and Muslim inhabitants’.50 This line of argument seems to run counter to what we learn about religious identity from the censuses of Punjab. However, part of the difference in understanding might arise from the fact that Prior’s work is based in urban settings, while a lot of the data for the census came from rural locales. The urban and the rural landscape can be seen as two parallel universes. While it is true that urban centres may be read as having either a ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ corporate tone, or at least that there were struggles to ensure that this became the case, the rural landscape continued to be less polarized along religious lines. Kinship and faction provided competing sources of identity. Villages seem to have had a more regional and local based identity, which often meant that people frequented local shrines and joined in religious celebrations regardless of their sectarian or religious affiliations. 

The difference between the rural and urban realities was reflected in the existence of two different political traditions in the region. Communal issues and identities dominated urban politics.  By contrast, in the countryside common economic interests and tribal loyalties held sway. This difference was partially engendered by the differential impact of colonial rule. In the cities the British had inadvertently stimulated communal competition. In the countryside they had created a framework in which intercommunal cooperation thrived. The edifice of this framework was the Punjab Alienation of Land Act (1901) which divided the population into what it called ‘agriculturist’ and ‘non-agriculturist’ tribes. The non-agriculturist tribes which included the moneylending groups were forbidden from acquiring land in the countryside. This measure not only prevented the expropriation of land from impoverished landlords, but also encouraged inter-communal political cooperation by giving expression to the common economic interests of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim landowners. Although the categories of ‘agriculturist’ and non-agriculturist’ were extremely important in terms of British perceptions and policies in Punjab, the importance assigned to religion must be underlined. This centrality assigned to religion is amply demonstrated in the census.

There are two distinct strands in the discourse of the Punjab census generally, and in Ibbetson’s writings in particular. One is based on careful investigation and detailed observations of the Punjab and the other resorts to some amount of generalization and a search for religious essences. On the one hand, Ibbetson recognized the Punjab to be a highly particularistic environment, appreciated the diversity and fluidity of its religious traditions, and gave due emphasis to material and political factors in the shaping of religious identity. For instance, while describing the spread of Islam in the Punjab, he wrote about a variety of different factors operating together, as did E.D. Maclagan. He referred to forcible conversions but also described conversions as being motivated by material concerns: ‘The local traditions tell us that in many cases the ancestor of the present Musalman branch of a village community adopted Islam “in order to save the land of the village”. In other cases the ancestor is said to have been taken as a prisoner or hostage to Delhi, and there circumcised and converted against his will’.51 Ibbetson also described conversions inspired by the activities of Sufi saints like Baha-ul-Haqq of Multan, Baba Farid of Pakpattan, and Sakhi Sarwar. Moreover, he recognized the impact of colonial policies on the formation of religious identities, and the pragmatic nature of identity-formation. This can be illustrated by his reference to the tendency of the number of Sikhs to decline in peace time, due to the colonial belief that Sikhs made better soldiers than Punjabi Hindus, which leads Punjabi Hindus to identify themselves as Sikh during war time.52 

At the same time, however, Ibbetson’s writings are not entirely free of ‘colonial’ language and biases. For example, while writing about the ‘external characteristics of the several religions’ Ibbetson remarked: ‘the most marked characteristic of the Hindu was thrift, of the Sikh bravery, of the Buddhist honesty, and of the Mohamedan pride’.53 He declared that the Sikh was ‘more independent, more brave, more manly than the Hindu, and no whit less industrious and thrifty; while he is less conceited than the Musalman, and not devoured by that carking discontent which so often seems to oppress the latter.’ He continued: ‘It is curious how markedly for evil is the influence which conversion to even the most impure form of Mohamedanism has upon the character of the Panjab villager; how invariably it fills him with false pride and conceit, disinclines him from honest toil, and renders him more extravagant, less thrifty, less contented, less well-to-do than his Hindu neighbour.’54 If one can find such contradictory approaches, tensions and ambivalences within the writings of one colonial official, it becomes difficult to talk in terms of a monolithic and internally coherent ‘colonial discourse’. Having said that, one cannot lose sight of the fact that it was not the census’s detailed reports and descriptions that formed the basis of policy, but rather the neat tables and statistics found within its binding.

According to Gerald Barrier, fifteen major riots occurred in Punjab between 1883 and 1891 over issues such as kine slaughter and religious processions.55 Interestingly, these riots find no mention in the census. Historians of India have often argued that the colonial archive is replete with detailed and gory descriptions of what it understood to be religious disputes. The argument runs that colonial records were more than anything else a narrative of violence, which portrayed Indians as spontaneously combusting into violence, and the British as working tirelessly to keep a fragile peace. It is very difficult to adopt this line of argument while studying the census of Punjab. The Punjab Census while buying into some colonial clichés, for the most part, faithfully records the existence of tremendous overlap and ambiguity as far as religious identity is concerned. The detailed descriptions found in the census reports, rather than constituting a narrative of violence, are replete with references to shared sacred spaces, mixed congregations, common gods, and a general ‘laxity and catholicity’ of religion.

Before concluding it would be worth looking at some of the questions with which this essay began. How far did the census work to institutionalize a new strict understanding of identity, in place of what might be seen as earlier more ‘fuzzy’ definitions? While the narrative sections of the census were quite comfortable with ‘fuzzy’ and ‘fluid’ religious boundaries and eclectic and syncretic religious traditions, the statistical tables of the census were unable to deal with these sorts of overlaps and ambiguities. The census employed religion as a fundamental category and mapped, counted and compared religious communities in endless tables dealing with issues ranging from population, civil condition, occupation, language, to infirmity. Also, the census definition of what it meant to be Hindu or Muslim was something new. Muslim identity for instance, was viewed as an ethnic category. Earlier ideas of the Muslim community emphasized the well-born ashraf elite, now however, all Muslims regardless of social status, geographic location, and linguistic orientation, were viewed as constituting a unified whole. The creation of this concept of a ‘community’ of equal and likeminded Muslims was also helped by the increasing power of the press and pamphlet literature in the subcontinent. Similarly, the census established ‘Hindu’ as a unified category and imputed ‘a rarefied unity to Indic religious orientations and practices that had not previously existed’.56 The census thus created a concept of religious community more detailed and more exact than any existing prior to it. Earlier rulers in India, for instance the Mughals and the Marathas, did a great deal to map and measure the land under their control for revenue purposes. However, they did not conduct any known census of persons. ‘Enumeration of various things was certainly part of the Mughal state imaginaire as was the acknowledgement of group identities, but not the enumeration of group identities.’57 

Moreover, the data tabulated in the census became the basis for the distribution of political power and government patronage. Religious communities were always measured in terms of numbers and numbers were equated with political power. The fusion of religious identity with numerical strength, as symbolized by the enduring categories of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’, and that in turn with political power was heightened by constitutional reforms. In 1909 the British introduced separate electorates for the Punjab Legislative Council. The ideological structure from which colonial rule stemmed offered no significant place for a direct relationship between individual and state.58 Rather, the imperial state empha-sized a ‘representational mode of government based sociologically on communities and interests [,] with [particular] individuals representing those entities’.59 This meant that while making claims for political power, individuals had to represent themselves as the ‘natural leaders’ of their particular community, and as speaking for the interest of their entire community. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste was to a large degree a colonial ‘invention’. ‘Under colonialism’, he writes, ‘caste was ….made out to be far more  far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform  than it had ever been before.’60 This line of argument is equally, if not more, convincing if applied to the colonial transformation of religious identity. In Punjab, religion was always seen as more fundamental than caste or tribe. Even though the colonial officials in Punjab privileged the ‘tribe’ as the focus of rural identity through the construction of the category of ‘agriculturist’, it was broader conceptions of identity based on an ‘imagined community’ of communalism that received sustained official encouragement.

While the census did not ‘invent’ the categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ and ‘Sikh’ it changed their definitions, enumerated them, and also made them the basis for political power and patronage as symbolized by the separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims. The census not only invested religious categories with new forms of social, economic, legal and political meaning, but also exercised a growing catalytic effect. It established a cycle of description, action and change, followed by another description. The census was drawn into the world it described and became one more arena for conflict and manipulation. This can be illustrated by the campaigns of the Arya Samaj and the Singh Sabhas to influence census categories and definitions. The census grew increasingly intertwined with political issues and became the basis for dramatic political decisions like the Partition of the subcontinent along religious lines. The boundaries of the two new nation states of India and Pakistan were drawn by relying on the data generated by the decennial census.

The historian can work with the census at many different levels as a source of information, as an object of study that reveals official mindsets and provides insights into ‘colonial discourse’, and as an instrument of the Raj which initiated a series of transformations in Indian society. The Punjab census illustrates that the census was not a passive data-gathering instrument. It did not merely count what is. Census officials first had to create categories and define them. But this was no simple process and the realities that census takers en-countered collided with their imperial taxonomies, which assumed Punjabi society was divided neatly into separate religious categories. Although the aim of the census was to simplify a complex land-scape and make it knowable, in fact, the information captured by it provides a fascinating account of contemporary Punjabi religious identity, in all its diversity and fluidity. In providing evidence for the strength and resilience of the shared religious culture of Punjabis, the census is surprisingly subversive of its own categories. Clearly, it does not constitute an internally coherent discourse, and forces the historian to acknowledge that the more discerning authors of the census were critical of its own assumptions, aware of its shortcomings, and conscious of the way the act of description tends to create its own categories of reality. It testifies to a certain degree of sensitivity on the part of colonial officials to the composite culture of Punjab, as well as the capacity of that culture to endure despite strong attempts at redefinition and reform. By dissuading the historian from subscribing to essentialisations of both colonialism and Indian realities, the census becomes a particularly challenging source to work with.

 

Notes

1   Quoted in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, p.189.

2   Thomas Metcalf, The New Cambridge History of India: Ideologies of the Raj, p.43.

3    Ibid.,  p.48.

4    Ibid.,  p.67.

5    D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain,  p.12–13.

6    Quoted in ibid., p.91.

7    Thomas Metcalf, op. cit., p.114

8    Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Peter van  der Veer and Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, p.317.

     9    ‘The Completed Census of India’, The Times, Oct 10, 1893, p.8, Issue 34078 Col. C, The Times Digital Archive.

     10  Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays,  p.242.

11  Denzil Charles Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography: Being Extracts from the Panjab Census Report of 1881, Treating of Religion, Language and Caste,  p.2.

12  Census of India 1901, Vol. 1, Part I  Report, by H. H. Risley and E. A. Gait,  p.351.

13 Thomas Metcalf, op. cit., p.132.

14  Kenneth Jones, ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’ in Gerald Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives.

15 Thomas Metcalf, op. cit., p.133.

16  Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), The Invention of Tradition,  pp.193–194.

17  ‘The Recent Census of India: Its Results Explained’, The Times, Wednesday, May 24, 1911, pg. 48, Issue 39593 Col. A, The Times Digital Archive.

18  J. S. Grewal, The New Cambridge History of India II.3: The Sikhs of the Punjab,  p.130.

19  Ibid., p.130.

20  Charles Morrison, ‘Three Styles of Imperial Ethnography: British Officials as Anthropologists in India’, in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, Vol. 5 (1984), pp.141–169.

21  Ibbetson, D. C. J., Memorandum on Ethnological Inquiry in the Punjab,  p.2.

22  Report on the Census of Punjab 1868,  p.23.

23  Ibid., p.2.

24  Denzil Charles Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography: Being extracts from the Panjab Census Report of 1881, Treating of Religion, Language and Caste,   Preface.

25  Ibid., p.101.

26  Ibid., p.101.

27 Census of India, 1891, General Report, by J. A. Baines,  p.157–159.

28  Denzil Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography, p.100.

29  Ibid., p.101.

30  Ibid., Para 274, Chapter IV.

31  Census of India 1891, Vol. XIX, The Punjab and its Feudatories, Part I, The Report on the Census, by E. D. Maclagan, p.132.

32  Ibid., pp.132–138.

33  Denzil Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography, Para 276, Chapter IV.

34  Ibid., p.115.

35  Ibid., p.115.

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

37  R. C. Temple, quoted in Vijay Prashad, ‘The Killing of Bala Shah and the Birth of Valmiki: Hinduisation and the Politics of Religion’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 32, 3 (1995), p.295.

38  Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century, pp.10–11.

39  Census of India 1911, Vol. 1, by E. A. Gait, p.118.

40  Census of India 1921, Vol. 1, India, Pt. I, Report, p.108.

41  N. Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May, 1968), pp.523–529.

42  Census of India 1891, Vol. XIX, The Punjab and its Feudatories, Part I, The Report on the Census, by E. D. Maclagan, p.103.

43  Ibid., p.91.

44  Census of India 1901, Vol. I, Part I, Report, by E. A. Gait, and H. H. Risley, p.378.

45  Kenneth Jones, ‘Ham Hindu Nahin: Arya–Sikh Relations, 1877–1905’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp.457–475.

46  N. G. Barrier, ‘Vernacular Publishing and Sikh Public Life in the Punjab, 1880–1910’, in Kenneth Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India, pp.220–226.

47  Quoted in Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab, p.127–128.

48  Census of India, 1911, Vol. XIV, Punjab, Part I  Report, by Pandit Harkishan Singh Kaul,  39.

49  J. Horovitz, ‘Baba Ratan, the Saint of Bhatinda’, in The Journal of the Panjab Historical Society, Vol. II, No. 2, p.97.

50  Katherine Prior, ‘Making History: The State’s Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North-Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp.183–185.

51  Denzil Ibbetson, Outlines of Panjab Ethnography, Para 274, Chapter IV.

52  Ibid., p.135.

53  Ibid., p.102.

54  Ibid., p.103.

55  N. Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, p.528.

56  Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Imagining Community: Polemical Debates in Colonial India’, in Kenneth Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, p.231.

57  Arjun Appadurai,  op. cit., p.329.

58  Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, p.191–192.

59  Bernard S. Cohn, op.cit., p.166.

60  Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India,  p.13.

 

Bibliography

Official Publications

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

Census of India 1901, Vol. 1, Part I  Report, by E. A. Gait and H. H. Risley (Calcutta, 1903).

Census of India 1911, Vol. 1, by E. A. Gait (Calcutta, 1913).

Census of India 1891, General Report, by J. A. Baines (London, 1893)

Census of India 1901, Vol. XVII, Punjab Report, by H. A. Rose (Simla, 1902).

Census of India 1911, Vol. XIV, Punjab, Part I  Report, by Pandit Harkishan Singh Kaul (Lahore, 1912).

Census of India 1921, Punjab and Delhi, Part I, Report, by L. Middleton and S. M. Jacob (Calcutta, 1922).

Ibbetson, Denzil Charles, Memorandum on Ethnological Inquiry in the Punjab (Shimla, 1882).

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

Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72, by Henry Water-field (London, 1875).

Report on the Census of Punjab 1868 (Lahore, 1870).

Unpublished Thesis

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

Printed Secondary Works 

Barrier, Gerald (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives (Delhi, 1981).

――, ‘The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May, 1968), pp.523–529.

――, ‘Vernacular Publishing and Sikh Public Life in the Punjab, 1880– 1910’, in Kenneth Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (New York, 1992), pp.200–226.

Bisset-Smith, George T., The Census and Some of its Uses (Edinburgh, 1921).

Bose Sugata and Jalal Ayesha, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi, 1999).

Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi 1987).

Dewey, Clive, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993).

Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of British India (New Delhi, 2003).

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

Glass, D. V., Numbering the People: The Eighteenth Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Hants, England, 1973).

Gilmartin, David, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London, 1998).

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

Horovitz, J. ‘Baba Ratan, the Saint of Bhatinda’, in The Journal of the Panjab Historical Society, Vol. II, No. 2 (Calcutta, 1914),  pp.97–117.

Jones, Kenneth, ‘Ham Hindu Nahin: Arya–Sikh Relations, 1877–1905’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp.457–475.

――, Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab (London, 1976).

Metcalf, Barbara Daly, ‘Imagining Community: Polemical Debates in Colonial India’, in Kenneth Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (New York, 1992).

Metcalf, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1998).

Morrison, Charles, ‘Three Styles of Imperial Ethnography: British Officials as Anthropologists in India’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, Vol. 5 (1984), pp.141–169.

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

Prashad, Vijay, ‘The Killing of Bala Shah and the Birth of Valmiki: Hinduisation and the Politics of Religion’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 32, 3 (1995), pp.287–325.

Prior, Katherine,  ‘Making History: The State’s Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North-Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Cambridge 1993), pp.183–185.

Ranger, Terence and Eric Hobsbawm (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992).

Talbot, Ian, Punjab and the Raj: 1849–1947 (Delhi, 1998).

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

Tandon, Prakash, Punjabi Century (London, 1961).

Van der Veer, Peter and Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, 1993).

Newspaper Reports

‘The Recent Census of India: Its Results Explained’, The Times, Wednesday, May 24, 1911, pg. 48, Issue 39593 Col. A, The Times Digital Archive, Infotrac Web (http://web2.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/1/1/1/purl=rc6_TTDA).

‘The Completed Census of India’, The Times, Oct 10, 1893, p.8, Issue 34078 Col. C, The Times Digital Archive, Infotrac Web (http://web2.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/1/1/1/purl=rc6_TTDA). •

 

                                               

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]