Harking Back: Punjab’s ‘problem’ officer was most adored by the poor

Imagine a Lahore or a Sargodha ‘patwari’ office early in the morning and a knock on the door reveals a tall, well-built rugby enthusiast, a history scholar with a Tripos from Cambridge, sitting on his horse demanding in chaste Punjabi: “Show me all your revenue and land documents”.

A hundred years ago this person would be the Director of Punjab Records, an amazing person named Hugh Kennedy Trevaskis, known as a “most competent, loved and cherished” ICS officer of the Punjab, yet he was “a problem to his superiors and a joy to his sub-ordinates”. He was known as the “man who could suddenly without notice appeared on his horse outside the ‘patwari’s’ house deep in the Punjab countryside, always unannounced” early in the morning and checked all his books. His office was next to the Lahore Museum where every visitor was warmly welcome and served the same tea and biscuits as the ‘Gora Sahib’ was entitled to. He ended up being the Inspector General of Records and Director of Land Records of the Punjab.

In short he was a man who saw through the ills of colonialism and in meetings ‘bluntly spoke his mind’. One document tells us of the Governor of the Punjab instructing all officers at meetings ‘to be on their toes’ when Hugh Kennedy attended.

As one scans the colonial period of the Punjab, one sees him stand out, but avoided by the elite. His quote that “comic relief was indispensable for sanity in India, for you will find plenty of stupid people in Lahore’s bureaucracy” attracts researchers like me. This begs the question: Have things changed over the last 100 years since the 1920s? But for Lahore, the Punjab and the sub-continent, he stands out for cheerfully doing his work and achieving immense success. Then after 23 years in Lahore and the Punjab, Kennedy Sahib as he was known and he was Cornish not Irish, suddenly, and dramatically, resigned and returned to Cambridge to follow the ways of the Almighty by joining the church.

Just why would such a successful ICS bureaucrat suddenly resign and become a pastor? He put it very simply by saying that ‘the bureaucracy is for the elite, not the poor, for that is what the Almighty has ordained in every religion’. But our interest is not in the piety that he certainly possessed, but in Trevaskis the scholar of the Punjab and Lahore, as well as the man who because of his influence among the poor recruited the highest number of soldiers to fight in the First World War. There is an indication that he was unhappy over the treatment meted out to returning Punjabi soldiers.

But let us concentrate on the books he wrote about the Punjab, and more importantly about his view as to how history should be written. He was to write: “Indian histories are immensely dull because they describe the politics of the inorganic states and not about the life of the immense mixed multitudes, which is a museum of sociology and politics”.

History, he said, 100 years ago should not be about kings and queens and armies and conquests only, but about the poor and the people and everyday life and its origins. So it was that his first book ‘The Land of the Five Rivers’ - from the earliest times to 1890 - was published in 1928. My friend the Cambridge archivist Dr Kevin Greenbank was kind enough to let me read this rare book, and one cannot be thankful enough. It is one book than just cannot be put down.

Hugh Kennedy Trevaskis then followed this in 1932 with another two volumes titled: ‘The Punjab of Today’ which took the story on from 1890 to 1925. So these three volumes of ‘The Punjab Series’ for the first time saw a completely new way of writing history, where the land and its people mattered much more than their rulers, who he thought “cherished and then perished in the sands of futile political controversy”. It seems as if he was describing the way things are today.

In a way his writing of history of the sub-continent was followed many decades later by another Cambridge ‘great’, Sir Christopher Bayly, whose classic is the ‘The Local Roots of Indian Politics’, followed by ‘Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars of Northern India’. He was also a believer that the people and their lives matter more than the rich rulers and invasions and conquests.

There is now an increasing tendency to explore the people in towns’ and villages to understand their lives and how it grew out of the land on which they live. That is why the 1,000 pages of the three books by Hugh Kennedy Trevaskis are such an important part of our history, and tells us about how the poor interacted with the rich, and how the land ownership evolved out of the nomadic way of our ancestors. The sense of humour that can be seen in his life is evident from yet another book that he produced after joining the cloth, for that was titled: ‘Ten Years of Hell in a Country Parish’. The result was that every Sunday his sermon witnessed people driving in from far-off places to listen to his short by reasoned discourse. He was famous for his line: “Christ, and all prophets before and after, was for the poor, not the rich”.

It was Hugh Trevaskis who introduced the ‘co-operative movement’ in the Punjab, especially among small farmers. He advised them to sell their wares ‘collectively’, and, if possible, add value to them. In this he was a huge success and soon the high bureaucracy, invariably supporters of large landowners, complained that Hugh Sahib was sowing the seeds of trouble.

He was lucky enough to be supported by another Cambridge scholar from Kings’ College, Sir Malcolm Darling, who supported his strategy for the poor. Sir Malcolm has also written three books on the poor of the Punjab, all considered classics, they being ‘The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt’ (1925), then in 1930 he wrote ‘The Old Light and The New in the Punjab Village’ (1930) and ‘Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village’ (1934). He also retired quickly only to become the Director General of the BBC India Section.

So in Hugh Kennedy Trevaskis, no doubt a colonial ruler, but a practical bureaucrat, a scholar, a kind man who derived his strength from the actual experiences of the poor, who did more for the Punjab than any other bureaucrat. It was not without reason that when news of his resignation spread, people actually cried, so claims a newspaper ‘cutting’ in the archives. Some of his saying make immense sense even today. Let me end this piece by three of his sayings:

“A bureaucrat without a sense of humour is not a true bureaucrat, but a man who assists exploiters of the people”;

“A bureaucrat who derives inner happiness when the poor get what they deserve, is nearest the Almighty … that is his true earning”, and “To remain sane in the sub-continent, one must have a sense of humour, plus an ability to see through what it actually means”.