Punjab in History and Historiography

Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and

Practice
Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir

Print publication date: 2012

Print ISBN-13: 9780198078012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198078012.001.0001

(p.xv) Punjab in History and Historiography

An Introduction

This volume seeks to consider the notion of Punjabiyat, a loosely defined term
often used to describe a sentiment of belonging or attachment to Punjab and/or
the foundations of a shared, cross-religious, cross-caste, cross-class culture. Is
there an ‘idea of Punjab’ or ‘ideas of Punjab’ that help ground—as Punjabi—
people from the region, now scattered across the globe? Or that connect those in
Indian and Pakistani Punjab, divided by what is for most of them an impermeable
border? In other words, despite political, social, religious—indeed, historical—
differences, are there notions of Punjabiyat/Punjabiness that constitute Punjab
as a region conceptually in history, culture, and practice? The essays in this
volume, through their careful analyses of aspects of Punjabi social, cultural,
political, and religious history, taken collectively suggest that there are, indeed.

Part of the impetus for this collection is that volumes on Punjabi culture/s or
histories—especially of its modern period—have not been commonplace in
academic circles. One is more likely to come across (p.xvi) titles that delve into
specific aspects of its culture or people, for instance works on ‘Sikh religion’ or
the ‘Sikh people’, ‘Islamic identity’ or ‘Hindu reform’ in their Punjabi regional
context. Such endeavours are entirely valid and reasonable, and perhaps even
necessary, but it is difficult to comprehend the elision if not erasure of Punjabi
identity from academic writing. Given that it has been easier for diasporic
Punjabis to evoke a much wider and an inclusive Punjabi identity than it has
been for Punjabis residing in India or Pakistan, one wonders if this elision is yet
another result of the political divisions that have marked Punjab’s twentieth-
century history? Have these divisions, whether of 1947 or the postcolonial
period, made other identity markers more apt or emotionally more satisfying
than the idea of belonging/originating/associating with a region? Or could it be

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that Punjabi identity is particularly open to appropriation, and even

incorporation within other identities—for instance Sikh identity in Indian
Punjab?

We think this is the right moment to re-imagine and re-configure Punjab and
notions of Punjabiyat, not only in light of a complex past, but also on the
threshold of a globalizing future that is reconstituting both subjects and
subjectivity. Each essay in this volume attempts to do this to some extent, while
engaging with a specific aspect of Punjabi history and culture. Taken as a whole,
the volume both presents critical and varied analyses of Punjab’s complex
cultures and helps reflect on Punjabiyat in its many manifestations.

It is of course difficult to measure, calibrate, or concretize the multiple ways in

which Punjabiyat was—and is—lived, experienced, and vitalized. However we
wish to make an effort to capture a somewhat elusive, often unstable and
shifting ‘idea of Punjab’. If we can propose a raison d’être for this volume, it is
surely the need to explore this ‘idea’ in its myriad forms. The temptation is to
define it as a primordial, patriotic feeling localized around a region and its
culture. But that would be misleading, historically speaking, as Punjab neither
had a stable region nor a single culture. In this volume, the perspectives
presented on Punjabiyat include in their reach people physically present in
politically split but geographically contiguous Punjab and those who left its
environs long ago yet continue to call themselves Punjabi and/or engage in and
identify with aspects of its culture/s. The emotions associated with Punjabiyat
might be ethereal, but that does not (p.xvii) make them unreal. The idea of
Punjab, or Punjabiness might live in the imagination, but such is the nature of
identity. The attempt in this volume is not to lend s(t)olidity to the concept, but
to capture its variability in different forms, and over a period of time, including
its contemporary manifestations.

Methodological Foundations
This volume marks a point of departure in the study of Punjab by emphasizing a
cultural history of the region and its peoples. The turn towards cultural history is
now established and is particularly apposite in contending with questions of
what constitutes communities, peoples, selves, or how these are represented. As
a volume that brings together diverse perspectives on Punjabi cultures, the term
‘culture’ is understood in the widest possible sense—mentalities and social texts,
symbols and cultural representations, elite and popular cultures, social codes
and their performance and reception1 —and a variety of methodological and
disciplinary techniques have been employed for its analysis. For example, as we
use the term, it also refers to the material cultures of a period, or even a culture
specific to class/es. Thus the Annales school’s foundational emphasis on studying
mentalities—mental habits and the barely perceptible changes therein,
especially in the longue duree—continues to be of vital significance. The
anthropological perspective on studying cultural codes of societies, whether

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through ‘thick description’ or by analysing the symbols and rituals of a culture is

equally important, as is the desire to study cultural texts for their meanings; so
too is Foucault’s notion of discursive practices as sites both for constituting
power and for its subversion. Each of these methods has been crucial to
contemporary scholarship on Punjab, as they have to studies of identities.
Beyond these foundations, the power of discourses, signs of change, and modes
of subversion are a significant constituent of this volume as well, as are insights
from literary criticism. The latter have facilitated the deconstruction of social
and discursive practices and the de-centring of cultural texts, loosened societies
and cultures from stable moorings, and encouraged an examination of diverse
voices.

(p.xviii) Cultural texts are surely an important site of analysis in the essays
that follow, and texts have been interrogated not only for their meanings, but
also for how they work, their manifold reception, and their appropriation to new
and different ends. The linguistic turn with its emphasis on cultural self-
expression through language, and the feminist perspective, which has helped
unravel the gendered aspects of language, have been influential theories whose
impact will also be visible in the following pages. Indeed, the essays in this
volume use these and other methods to provide compelling and sophisticated
analyses of the cultural foundations of historical change.

Most of the contributors in this volume, though not all, are historians, and
though the interdisciplinarity that the linguistic and cultural turns in history
have encouraged is undoubtedly evidenced here, so is the historian’s
preoccupation with context. Readers will thus find the specificity of social or
political milieus carefully laid out for them, rather than an adherence to post-
modernist trends that pursue the study of cultural texts and artefacts as free-
floating signs, capable of generating endless interpretive possibilities. We use
the term practice to capture this emphasis on context, particularly to draw
attention to the importance of historical time, and to ground cultural praxis in
temporal frames and social networks.

Our underscoring of practice is also grounded in the work it allows us to do in

analysing the relationship between ideality, ideology and lived histories. How are
the ideals of a society transmitted among its various constituents, and how are
they appropriated, accepted, inverted or abandoned? How do some ideals
become commonplace, so much a part of life that their fabrication or artifice is
naturalized? On the other hand, how do societies move to newer ideals, insert
change in the midst of the mundane and the ordinary? While a discussion of the
nature of historical sources falls outside the scope of this introduction, we would
nonetheless like to note that a number of our sources, especially the textual
ones, speak of ideal societies in order to construct them. Some are also
concerned with ideologies, narratives structured in distinct ways to propagate
specific agendas. The intertwining of myth, legend and history in our sources is

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a particular challenge. Their untangling requires us to tease out the various

strands in the narratives (p.xix) of the past, and pushes us to decipher how our
contemporary notions of myth, legend, and history as distinct categories of
analysis are not shared by our historical subjects. Coaxing sources to yield more
than the obvious is a challenge to most historians, and by emphasizing practise
we hope to point to our sensitivity towards the issue of sources and their
interpretation in given social locales. This volume thus foregrounds both
(Punjabi) cultures in practice and the practice or method of the scholar of
Punjab. We turn now to contextualizing the latter—scholarship on the Punjab—
by providing a historical and historiographical framework in which to locate the
essays in this volume. But first, we think it critical to define our subject of study:
what, after all, constitutes Punjab? Do its land, people, language (s), cultural
practices, religious beliefs, and/or material cultures constitute the region? Or
are these rather categories of representation, while the region is constituted by
our imagination? Let us turn, then, to the fundamental question of territoriality.

Territoriality
The idea of Punjab—as is that of any region—is grounded in complex concepts of
territoriality. While these concepts are perhaps as varied as those who hold them
dear, we focus attention on three concepts of territoriality in particular. We
identify these as the historical, the spatial, and the imaginary. While we
disaggregate these concepts from one another in order to facilitate our
discussion, it must be underscored at the outset that in practice, in the way that
people identify with a region as a geographic/territorial entity and incorporate
this into their notions of self—into their identity—these three aspects of
territoriality easily meld into one another producing precisely the complexity of
experience that the essays in this volume all point to.

Any understanding of Punjab’s territoriality in historical terms is a complicated

matter, not least because of a glaring anachronism common to both popular and
scholarly treatments of the region. Namely, that the term Punjab emerged only
in the late sixteenth century—in references to a sarkar-i-Punjab (the Government
of Punjab) and a suba-i-Punjab (Punjab province) in Mughal documents2—yet it
(p.xx) is used to refer to a geographic entity in the northwestern part of the
Indian subcontinent (presumably a ‘land of five rivers’, from the literal
translation of the Persian term) irrespective of the era under discussion. Even as
careful a scholar as J.S. Grewal, whose research has been central to establishing
the historicity of the term, has published such works as, Social and Cultural
History of the Punjab: Prehistoric, Ancient, and Early Medieval.3 Undoubtedly,
this anachronistic use of the term serves to reify the notion of a coherent region
stretching back to time immemorial—a notion that must surely be interrogated
rather than assumed. This is not to suggest, however, that historians have taken
a static view of Punjab’s territoriality. Rather, what is perhaps more evident in
the existing scholarship is the recognition that embedded in the term from its
earliest use is a relationship between a geographic entity—one that is taken to
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be relatively stable—and administrative entities—whose contours have shifted

over time. The latter sometimes map quite comfortably onto the former, and
sometimes less so.

To engage with Punjab’s territoriality in historical terms, thus, is to anchor the

nebulous geographic entity Punjab in time and place: to give it concrete
boundaries; to historicize it. Scholars do this most typically by identifying the
contours of the various administrative and/or political entities that have
constituted Punjab. In the process, they have shown that these administrative
borders rarely map onto the geographical conception of Punjab as the land of
the five rivers (or six rivers and five doabs, or interriverine tracts). To put this
somewhat differently, what is most evident in this scholarly approach is that
there is a clear ‘idea of Punjab’ in geographical terms against which historians
(and other scholars) measure the administrative units. Thus, for example,
although Mughal sources appear to use suba-i-Lahore and sarkar-i-Punjab
synonymously, modern historians generally agree that the Mughal suba of
Lahore and the northern parts of suba Multan and the western parts of suba
Delhi, taken together, is likely a better representation of ‘Punjab’.4 By the same
token, despite the strong association of Sikh political power with Punjab, it is
well recognized that Ranjit Singh’s kingdom of Lahore does not map comfortably
onto the geographic entity Punjab because after 1809 it did not include areas
south of the Sutlej river and subsequently included parts of Jammu, Kashmir,
and territories (p.xxi) across the Hindu Kush mountains (Kabul), all of which
scholars take to be distinct from Punjab (Figure 1).5 What the disjuncture
between actual administrative units and the latent notion of Punjab prevalent in
scholarship reveals is, of course, that the latter—the idea of Punjab as a
geographical entity—borrows heavily from modern, colonial territorial divisions
(Figure 2). The influence of modern conceptions of Punjab in the assessment of
all periods of Punjab history notwithstanding, British colonial Punjab itself is not
coterminous with modern conceptions of Punjab in geographical terms, as
outlined above. After all, the colonial entity included Peshawar, Leia, and Hazara
at annexation in 1849, and Delhi and its environs were added to the province in
1858. Indeed, the history of colonial Punjab in territorial terms is one of constant
remappings, the most dramatic of which is undoubtedly the vivisection of the
province in 1947 into Indian and Pakistani halves. The postcolonial history of
Indian Punjab has been no less unstable, with first the separation of the PEPSU
states, then the creation of a new capital in the city of Chandigarh, and the
subsequent trifurcation of the state in 1966 into Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal
Pradesh.

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(p.xxii)
(p.xxiii) Despite these shifting
contours of Punjab as an
administrative entity, the essays
in this volume do not focus so
much on this territorial
instability of the region as on
the geographical stability of the
‘idea of Punjab’ as it has
emerged in the modern period.
Put another way, and as Farina
Mir has argued elsewhere,
Map of the Sikh Empire, 1839. Courtesy
despite the waxing and waning
Farina Mir
of Punjab’s administrative
borders, ‘the Punjab has a
geographical–cultural core…
whether conceived as an axis
connecting the major cities of
Amritsar, Lahore, and Multan,
or more broadly as the five
doabs and the cis-Sutlej
territory [the area to the south
of the Sutlej river, up to
Delhi]’.6 Indeed, this
geographical–cultural core
corresponds to the rather stable
—even if nebulous—notion of
Map of Colonial Punjab (post 1901).
Punjab that is a subtext in
Courtesy Farina Mir
discussions of the region’s
territoriality. And it is this
notion of Punjab’s territoriality that the essays in this volume engage more
directly, rather than those of administrative borders. Having said that, the
essays also show that this rather stable entity was not in any way insular or
unconnected from the regions around it. In particular, the essays by Anshu
Malhotra and Christopher Shackle point to the importance of cultural
continuities with Sindh, to Punjab’s south-west. Both essays hint that these
continuities may point to a cultural inheritance from Sindh, or at minimum
Sindhi influence on Punjab’s literary culture—an influence that has to date been
muted in scholarly understandings, at best.

If engaging with Punjab’s territoriality requires moving through history to see

what this meant at different junctures, then it also requires moving through
space. That is, the notion of Punjab explored in this volume extends study of the
region to include not only the Punjab of the Indian subcontinent, whether early

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modern, colonial, Indian, or Pakistani Punjab, but also the places where the ‘idea
of Punjab’ has travelled, and along with it ideas of Punjabiness. We
conceptualize this expansion of scope as thinking about Punjab spatially, rather
than simply in geographical terms. Thus, we include in this volume an essay by
Tony Ballantyne on a particular Punjabi migrant experience—that of Sikhs who
migrated from Punjab to Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Ballantyne’s essay
examines the construction of a Sikh identity in Britain in the latter half of the
twentieth century, focusing on Sikh representations of themselves as a distinct
community to the British state. This was a deliberate process, and as Ballantyne
shows, it had certain outcomes that might (p.xxiv) be read as ‘costs’. One, for
example, was that it privileged a particular vision of Sikhism, marginalizing
other voices, experiences, and representations of the faithful. Another was that
it privileged a religious over a regional identity, thus providing little ground for
inter-racial or inter-faith alliances that might have more effectively furthered
Sikh political and socio-economic aims. While Ballantyne limits his analysis to
the consequences of Sikh political action in the British context, we might add
that to think of Punjab in these spatial terms—to ignore, as it were, boundaries
or limits as identified on a map—is also to emphasize a recursivity between the
Punjab and its diaspora, both historically and to this day. That is, the experience
of Punjabi migrants has transported Punjab—as a set of ideas and practices—to
other parts of the globe, and the diaspora has similarly played an important role
in Punjab’s (and India’s) history. One need only think of the revolutionary
nationalism of the Ghadar Party, started on the west coast of North America in
the early twentieth century, or the significance of the diaspora in supporting the
Khalistan movement, or the economic impact of migrant labor remittances on
Punjab (both Indian and Pakistani) to recognize this recursivity.7

If Ballantyne’s essay on the Sikh diaspora in Britain reminds us that we should

not think of Punjab as isolated from other parts of the world, then Simona
Sawhney’s essay is crucial to understanding how changing conceptions of other
parts of the world influence thinking in Punjab, both historically and today.
Sawhney’s essay seeks to juxtapose contemporary acts of public violence in
Lahore with those of the nationalist figure Bhagat Singh and his comrades. It is
a jarring contrast, no doubt, given the iconic status of Bhagat Singh as
nationalist hero and the revulsion caused—certainly in liberal circles, but surely
beyond, as well—by the depraved violence unleashed on Lahore’s citizens in the
past few years, particularly its religious minorities such as the Ahmadiyya and
the Shi‘i. But Sawhney uses the juxtaposition to great effect. Her essay not only
elucidates facets of Bhagat Singh’s politics, but posits the significance of
changing conceptions of the West between Bhagat Singh’s time and our own.
Among this essay’s strengths is how it helps shape an understanding of local
politics in the light of these conceptions, showing how the local and nationalist
politics of the early twentieth century were (p.xxv) never insular, but rather
interwoven with conceptions of the West that helped sustain them. The sad irony

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is that the earlier politics of death and hope that she elucidates has largely
become a politics of death alone.

To turn the discussion to the imaginary aspects of territoriality is only to make

explicit what has thus far been implicit in this discussion. That is, as significant
as administrative borders or lines drawn on maps—perhaps even more
significant—is how Punjab figures in people’s imaginaries. Indeed, connections
with the landscape seem critically important to Punjab’s inhabitants and to
Punjab’s history, whether gauged through relationships to land within Punjab,8
or in the way that landscape is evoked when people move beyond its borders.
David Gilmartin takes up the issue of the landscape in his discussion of the
making of Pakistan and in particular Pakistani Punjab. As Gilmartin points out in
the opening of his essay, ‘the creation of Pakistan has often been portrayed as a
process peculiarly divorced from the history of the land that is today Pakistan’.
Given the significance of land, literally and figuratively, to this event, this
historiographical oversight is indeed astounding. In his essay, Gilmartin brings a
history of the land into the historical narrative of colonial Punjab in new ways—
in environmental terms, that is—and shows how changing relationships with the
land, in conjunction with the new colonial dispensation, had resounding effects
on Punjabi notions of self and community by transforming notions of biradari
(brotherhood, kinship system, or descent group), a key facet of Punjab’s social
organization.

If life on the land, and thus a relationship to it, was transformed for many during
the colonial period, then colonialism’s end severed that relationship altogether
for scores of people. The numbers are staggering and despite being well known
are worth repeating: an estimated 12 million people were on the move in Punjab
in the summer of 1947; that is 12 million people whose lives were severed from
familiar places and landscapes. Yet, for many of Partition’s refugees, while the
physical relationship with land/place was irrevocably lost, their ‘Punjab’ would
live on in their imaginaries, and in the new worlds they constructed for
themselves. One example of this is the names given to some of the refugee
colonies of Delhi: (p.xxvi) ‘Gujranwala’, ‘Bhera’ or ‘Punjabi Bagh’. Another
example is the persistent conversation opener posed to Punjabi settlers in Delhi,
even 60-odd years on from Partition: ‘tussi pichhon kithon de ho?’ (Where are
you from [with clear reference to a ‘before’: picchon]?). Such imaginings extend
beyond refugee communities, and are to be found in migrant communities the
world over, whether marked in their restaurants (London’s plethora of ‘Lahore
Kebab House (s)’, or New York’s ‘Lahore Deli’, for example), their sweet shops
(London’s famous Ambala mithai-makers, for example), or their neighbourhoods
(for instance, Vancouver’s ‘Punjabi Market’ area). In each case, an imaginary is
at work that maps Punjab without giving credence to international borders
either within the subcontinent or beyond it. While no single essay in this volume
addresses itself to this imaginary, it is without doubt at play in all of the essays
included herein. Indeed, it would not be pushing our point too far to suggest that
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the region is constituted as much by people’s limitless imaginaries as by the

borders that define it on any map or the land that such representations signify.

Language and Literary Cultures

We argued above that Punjab has a geographical–cultural core, one that has
been relatively stable compared to the shifting contours of the region in
administrative terms. Undoubtedly, one of the key conceptual foundations of this
cultural core is language. The relationship between region and language,
however, is not entirely straightforward. To be sure, we are positing a
relationship between Punjab (land) and Punjabi (language), and Punjabis
(people). But we are keenly aware that it is a complicated one, and we attempt
here to draw out some of that complexity as it relates to language.

We speak of Punjabi in the singular, but it is of course constituted as a language

by a number of dialects. Linguists have mapped this out in technical detail, so
we need not do so here.9 What is perhaps more helpful for the purposes of this
volume is to think of Punjabi as a language constituted by a range of mutually
intelligible dialects spoken in the area from the environs of Delhi to those of
Peshawar, including (although not exclusively): Majhi, Siraiki, Malvai, Puadhi,
(p.xxvii)

Kangri, Doabi, Hindko, Pothohari,

Dogri, and Lahnda (Figure 3).10
This definition allows us to see the
cultural continuities that mark this
area without imposing too singular
a view of the language (s) spoken
there. One sees this approach
taken, in some ways, by
Christopher Shackle in his essay,
‘Punjabi Sufi Poetry from Farid to
Farid’, where while recognizing
dialectical differences between the
compositions of various authors—
most notably the Farids of the
title, Baba Farid (d. 1265) and
Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901)
—Shackle draws them into a
single tradition, that of Punjabi
Sufi poetry. Shackle’s essay is self-
consciously revisionist, seeking to Map of the Punjabi language area,
question a dominant paradigm showing major dialects. Courtesy Farina
(p.xxviii) in the scholarship on
Mir
Punjabi Sufi poetry established by
Lajwanti Rama Krishna in her
1938 publication, Punjabi Sufi
Poets, that posits a rise and fall of Sufi poetry and casts Sufis ‘as religiously
universalized exponents of a shared pre-modern Indian spiritual understanding’. In
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contrast, Shackle argues for an era of vibrant Sufi literary production that ranges from
the late-twelfth century Sufi Baba Farid to the late-nineteenth century Sufi Khwaja
Ghulam Farid. More importantly, perhaps, he recontextualizes their literature away
from Krishna’s emphasis on its ‘universalism inspired by the monism of Vedanta’ by
arguing that it is critical to see this literature in its Islamic context. This is not, of
course, to deny that Punjabi Sufi poetry had a profound impact beyond Sufi and
Muslim circles, or that there could be ‘theological equivalences’ between Vedantic
monism and certain Sufi ideas, as Malhotra discusses in her essay in this volume.
Rather, it is to suggest that we be more attentive to the context in which Punjabi Sufi
poetry was produced. Shackle’s essay not only does this, but also posits an argument
for why the Islamic context of Punjabi Sufi poetry’s production became opaque,
suggesting that it was the result of Punjabi Sufi poets and their poetry being
appropriated in the modern period to contemporary political exigencies.
Shackle’s essay is an important reminder that in examining a regional literature,
we do not want to collapse important distinctions that were germane to the
context of its production. Thus, without undermining the notion of a regional
literature, we can recognize distinct strands within that tradition. We can
suggest, thus, that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries two distinct
literary traditions emerged in Punjab. One was of the Sufis, who expressed their
mystical experience in poetry that deployed the dominant Punjabi dialects Majhi
and Multani. By using symbols and metaphors in their poetry that were steeped
in the practices of everyday life—such as the spinning wheel, a prospective bride
collecting her dowry, or popular characters from Punjab’s ubiquitous qisse (epic
stories/romances), such as Hir and Ranjha—Sufis produced an emotional
connection with their listeners. The other was the Sikh tradition, which from the
time of Guru Nanak had turned to the nirguni bhakti that was spreading across
north India for spiritual inspiration and sustenance. The languages of this
universalist bhakti, Sant Bhasha and later Braj, (p.xxix) were the preferred
modes of transmission of Sikh literature.11 There were, nevertheless, many
points of intersection between the two, whether the mode of ‘masquerading’ in
feminine voice adopted by male poets when addressing the beloved (God),12 the
use of bridal mysticism, or the presence of Baba Farid’s poetry in the Adi
Granth. Indeed, Shackle, who in his essay briefly explores the historical and
literary problems of the Farid verses in the Adi Granth is more aware than most
of the complex relationship between the two traditions, being one of the few
scholars to have worked on both.

As the discussion above suggests, Punjabi linguistic and literary cultures are
marked by pluralities. They are also marked by ironies, not least of which is their
relationship to the state. Members of all of Punjab’s religious communities—
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian—speak Punjabi, and have done so historically.
Although it has been a vibrant vernacular tradition since the time of Baba Farid,
Punjabi has never enjoyed state support. Mughal rulers reinforced the policy of
their Sultanate predecessors to use Persian as the administrative language in
the areas where Punjabi was spoken, a practice continued by Mughal successor

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states, including Ranjit Singh’s early nineteenth-century kingdom. While the

colonial period should have seen the adoption of Punjabi as the language of
administration in colonial Punjab because of colonial language policy, the
colonial state chose to use Urdu as the official language in its stead.13 Part of the
colonial rationale for not using Punjabi was the plurality of its scripts (Indo-
Persian, Gurmukhi, and Devnagari), none of which dominated. While the use of
Devnagari for Punjabi was relatively rare in the nineteenth century (or before or
since), Indo-Persian and Gurmukhi were both so common that neither could
easily be adopted over the other. Each of these scripts was also implicated in
language–community claims by the latter half of the nineteenth century, which
further complicated the issue (Indo-Persian–Muslim; Gurmukhi–Sikh; Devnagari–
Hindu). If the absence of state patronage meant little in the way of the
standardization of modern Punjabi (it might be noted that most modern Indian
vernaculars were standardized through their relationship with the colonial
state), then the late-nineteenth century context of communal claims on language
(s) sealed its fate in this regard. (p.xxx)

Vernacular languages were politicized in new ways in the late nineteenth

century that had implications for Punjabi as a ground for cross-communal ethno-
linguistic claims. Sikh reformers, particularly those associated with the Singh
Sabha (a Sikh socio-religious organization established in 1873), promoted
Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script as the language of Sikh aspirations. Similarly, at
about the same time—the 1880s—Hindus, particularly those associated with the
Arya Samaj (a Hindu reform movement established in 1875), sought to bring the
Hindi–Hindu–Hindustan triumvirate that animated United Province politics to
bear on Punjab politics. Muslims too played their part in these partisan politics.
Thus, we see petitions in the late nineteenth century from Muslim organizations
to the colonial state advocating for Urdu as ‘their’ language. One such example
is provided by the Anjuman-i-Hamdardi Islamiya, which petitioned the Hunter
Commission in 1882 to maintain Urdu as the official language of Punjab.14 This
political terrain produced a number of ironies, some of which surface in the
essays in this volume. Simona Sawhney’s essay, for example, points to the
tension between Bhagat Singh’s advocacy for Hindi and his simultaneous
conviction in the emotive power of Punjabi for its speakers. Although exploring
this latter point is beyond the scope of Sawhney’s essay, it nonetheless reminds
us that despite the divisive terrain of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century
language politics, the affinity of Punjabi speakers for their language remained
vital.

Alyssa Ayres’s essay follows a different set of ironies around language, these in
postcolonial Pakistan, where despite Punjabi dominance of the Pakistani state,
Punjabi is the only major regional language in Pakistan with no official status.
Ayres focuses her attention on what she terms a ‘Punjabiyat movement’, which
she defines as ‘seeking to “restore” a role for Punjabi, justified entirely in terms
of aesthetics and pursued through the development of a respected Punjabi-
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language written public sphere’. Ayres helps us understand what is at stake in

this movement, which defies the logics of the usual explanation for language
movements: nationalism. As Ayres rightly points out, the arbiters of this
movement enjoy political power and influence, suggesting that this is not their
motivation. She provides a sophisticated analysis that relies on notions of
(p.xxxi) symbolic capital. Ayres focuses specifically on Pakistani Punjab, but her
argument has relevance for a broader cross-border perspective, in at least two
specific ways. First, it underscores the affective ties that undergird for many a
relationship to Punjabi despite the minimal state space accorded to it in much of
its postcolonial history. Put somewhat differently, despite the absence of any
official status for Punjabi in Pakistan and the divisive language politics that
wracked Indian Punjab in the aftermath of independence until the state was
further partitioned in 1966, Punjabi continues to have immense emotive power
for its speakers in both countries, and for migrants from Punjab—and often their
descendants—the world over. Second is a countervailing trend. Namely, that in
the contemporary period there has been an impact of the absence of state
support and the instrumental advantages of other languages—whether Urdu in
Pakistan, Hindi in India, or English in both countries; for some the ties of
language are indeed eroding. Thus, the Punjabi movement that Ayres documents
in Pakistan is one that has never enjoyed widespread popular support. Similarly,
one can note that in places like Delhi, young urbane professionals today are less
likely to be proficient in Punjabi than their parents’ and grandparents’
generations. This, however, seems not to undermine their identity as Punjabi.
Thus, we might posit that while the link between language and territory was
surely critical to establishing Punjabi subjectivity historically, it is not
necessarily constitutive of all contemporary Punjabi experience.

Colonialism in Punjab
Interrogating the idea of Punjab becomes particularly salient if we consider how
historians have engaged with Punjabi history, particularly its modern period. It is
perhaps not surprising that the workings of the colonial state—its administrative
and technological innovations, for example—and the sheer power of its imperial
interventions in Punjab have been a mainstay of postcolonial history writing on
the region. As a people still coming to terms with the short but transformative
hundred years of colonial history and its consequences, it was imperative to
examine how the colonial state had instituted (p.xxxii) its power. The
peculiarities of the paternalistic ‘Punjab School’ of administration were
understood and explained in terms of the colonial state seeing Punjab as the last
bastion of conquest, and the colonial rulers’ paranoia of being hemmed in by a
turbulent frontier and the designs of powers beyond it.15

An important element of the colonial state’s Punjab project, if we can call it that,
was to recognize/shape the ‘tribal’ character of the province’s ‘agricultural
classes’ and to nurture them as the ‘natural’ leaders of Punjabi society, both of
which were to the disadvantage of kirars, moneylenders, and traders, most of
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whom were Hindu.16 The colonial state did this through legal and administrative
structures that had a profound impact on Punjabi society. Two interventions that
stand out in particular are the division of Punjabis into ‘agricultural’ and ‘non-
agricultural’ tribes and the application of ‘customary law’ for all Punjabis.17
Generally viewing Punjabi land-owning Jats (and Rajputs) as a flat, seamless
category of middle-ranking peasants encouraged such policies.18 Indeed, the
colonial understanding of caste in Punjab viewed it as a system of ranking social
hierarchy, one that pertained to social customs and purity/pollution taboos in
particular. These customs and taboos were thought to have less traction among
Punjab’s Jats—something belied by contemporary scholarship, including
Oberoi’s essay in this volume—than among its urban mercantile classes; it was
these urban mercantilists who were seen to preserve the ideals of caste.19 In
other words, notions of agricultural/non-agricultural, tribe/caste became
foundational to colonial policies in Punjab. Among the consequence of such
categorization was the enactment at the fin de siècle of the Punjab Land
Alienation Act which proscribed ‘urban castes/classes’ from owning agricultural
land. In sum, the consequences of these policies were that they favoured the
land-owning castes and classes over urban professional and trading ones.

The workings of the British Raj then—its apparently limitless power to intervene
and change things—whether in taming nature by creating the famous irrigation
canals or in compartmentalizing people through their census and other
ethnological/ethnographical logics have received due attention.20 This research
continues to be significant, even as newer research further unravels the
workings of (p.xxxiii) colonial institutions such as the police and the army or
dismantles the apparently monolithic structure of the colonial state.21 While
disaggregating the colonial state and, increasingly, looking beyond it through
histories grounded in social and cultural perspectives, there are significant ways
in which these two impact areas of Punjab historiography—that is, the state’s
attempt at socio-legal restructuring and its will to refashion the landscape—have
come together as well.

In this context, David Gilmartin’s essay in this volume is important for linking
the power of the colonial state and its transformative capacities to cultural
changes that came to define the new rural elites. He draws on earlier research
to show how the colonial state produced an immense ecological transformation
of Punjab through technological innovation specifically, in creating the irrigation
canals.22 The drive for increasing agricultural productivity and thus revenues
was linked to marginalizing and criminalizing the pastoral/semi-pastoral
communities of western Punjab. Gilmartin notes the tensions between the
settled agriculturists and the pastoralists of Punjab and underlines the role of
Sufi pirs (saints/mystics) as intermediaries between the two. The pious pirs, as
Richard Eaton’s articles on Baba Farid’s establishment at Pakpattan have shown,
played a crucial role in the gradual Islamization and settling of these areas.23

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Subsequently, the sacred genealogies emanating from them became the

foundation for and affirmed the power of local families of substance.

Under colonialism the new rural elite, guided by the state’s moral universalism
that emphasized private property and individual responsibility, came to rework
genealogy as the fluid notion of biradari. While contractual law structured
dealings in property, customary law came to organize patterns of inheritance
and other matters that fell in the domain of personal law in large parts of
colonial India. Besides nurturing a loyal rural elite, these changes also created a
more patriarchal society. With the state’s insistence on the division between
agricultural and non-agricultural classes with the implementation of the Land
Alienation Act in 1900, sharp cleavages between the favoured rural elite and the
urban non-agricultural elite came into play, as demonstrated above. Rural low
class/caste tenants, labourers and artisans, and women were (p.xxxiv) also
losers in this peculiar social engineering. Gilmartin traces the impact of this
policy in the cultural adoption and adaptation of biradari, and the manner in
which it came to define social and political relations in colonial and
contemporary Pakistani Punjab. The tensions between Punjabi cultural identity
and the developmental policies of the Pakistani state, or between the Islamist
shari’at laws and skepticism about their need, in Gilmartin’s view, can be
partially traced to the rural elite’s social investment in the idea of biradari.
Through the subtle shifts in the social institution of this idea in the pre-colonial,
colonial, and postcolonial periods, Gilmartin demonstrates how we might
understand society through cultural transitions.

The collusion between the colonial state and indigenous elites that Gilmartin
illustrates through his analysis of the working of the concept of biradari has
been taken up by feminist historians, who have shown its particularly
detrimental effects on women. Though Gilmartin’s essay only hints at the
hardships women had to face due to the patriarchal institutions that were
constructed under colonialism, others have demonstrated the very real losses
that women suffered. The process of codification of customary laws, for instance,
in which the state and patriarchal elites collaborated, actively worked against
women’s usufructuary and other rights on land. Prem Chowdhry has shown the
effects that usurping women’s rights had on the widows of landed Jats,24 while
Veena Oldenburg has elucidated long-term changes in the institution of dowry
against the background of new revenue demands and the freezing of
patriarchally-informed customary laws.25 The changes in rural Punjabi society in
the colonial period thus remain a significant area of interest. Although the
essays in this volume do not directly address how historical change impacted
women per se, much of the work presented here obviously owes a debt of
gratitude to this feminist scholarship, and many of the essays are sensitive to the
changing contexts and expressions of patriarchy and gender relations.

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The historiography of modern Punjab thus has given a fair degree of attention to
the structures and institutions of the colonial state, particularly for their role in
making a rural elite. It has also focused (p.xxxv) attention on this rural elite,
showing for example how it participated and dominated the politics of the
province in the early twentieth century through webs of patronage and the
workings of the Unionist Party.26 The process of urbanization, however, or the
characteristics of urban classes have received much less attention. The impact
of the British Raj on urban areas was in fact enormous, in Punjab as across
British India, as a growing body of scholarship has shown.27 But this scholarship
has mostly focused on capital cities—both of presidencies and provinces. Urban
history, particularly in the Punjab context, is still in a nascent phase, and despite
the strides made, much is still to be done.28 We know little about the travails of
the urban poor, for example, and not much about the middle classes either.
Though some historians working on changing gender relations have drawn
attention to the new demands of domesticity among the emerging upper caste,
middle classes—speaking of the newly envisaged appropriate roles for women,
and the disciplining required in the ostensibly emancipatory programmes of
education that centrally shaped the middle classes or exposed its anxieties—
other aspects that defined middle class-ness have received far less attention.29
One exception is perhaps the over-explored area of the communalizing of the
middle classes, to which we will turn our attention shortly. Markus Daechsel’s
work therefore marks something of a departure, and his essay here carries
forward his earlier writing on the self-expression of the Urdu middle class of late
colonial Punjab.30

Daechsel examines the remarkable division between the agricultural/non-

agricultural classes mentioned above to show how in Punjab this pushed some
classes away from investing in land. However, the relationship of the middle
class to commercial or industrial ventures remained tenuous, with high-risk
financial institutions flopping more often than succeeding, as Daechsel’s brief
sketches of some of the representatives of this class illustrate. Daechsel notes
the dependence of the middle classes on patronage from both rural elites and
the state. Middle-class education programmes, even its reformism as seen in the
various anjumans (associations) that constituted a defining aspect of urban life
or the printing presses that shaped debates in the public sphere, remained
captured by key elitist patrons who imposed cultural norms in the ‘micro-fabric’
of middle class life. It is (p.xxxvi) in the changing relationship of the middle
class to material objects—its consumerism—that Daechsel discerns a class
coming into its own. He argues that as the middle class changed its relationship
from use-value of material objects to a more confident consumption of sign-
objects between the two World Wars, a more self-assured class took birth.

If Daechsel looks at middle-class culture, then William Glover shifts attention to

another dimension of urban life. His essay examines the meanings congealed in
the term ‘public space’ and the relationship between Punjabi publics and the
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spatial use of the corporeal city once municipal committees were established in
1862. Tracing the specific understanding of the term ‘public space’ from its
western European usage in the medieval period, Glover shows the particular
ways in which municipalities employed the term in Punjab (as elsewhere in
colonial India). Though in the pre-colonial period there were spaces in the city
that were accessible to almost all of its residents, spaces that were in many ways
physically similar to what the colonial government would call ‘public’ urban
space, the change in the situation, according to Glover, was in the instituting and
strict implementation of new laws and rules that defined how public space could
be used. Glover traces for us in Punjab a more general colonial phenomenon:
how colonial authorities interpreted the density and filth of indigenous Indian
cities as symptomatic of social malaise. His intervention, however, is to draw our
attention to the concomitant emphasis on transforming public spaces to
engineer a socio-cultural change among the denizens of the city. Once again, the
ambitions of Punjab’s colonial administration are laid bare. The most exciting
aspect of Glover’s essay is his reading of legal cases from nineteenth-and
twentieth-century Punjab where he analyses how the term ‘public’ was applied
to the spatial use of the city. Glover speaks of the ‘translation’ of the language of
‘public’, and therefore the contestation over the use of ‘public space’ among
Punjabis. He points to the increasingly sophisticated manner in which Punjabis
imbibed, transmuted and re-deployed the term ‘public’, with its baggage of
rules, delineating the complex processes that shaped the cityscape in the
colonial period. By showcasing Daechsel’s and Glover’s essays, we point to the
exciting new research on Punjab’s cities, their (p.xxxvii) physical appearance
and material cultures, and the classes who inhabited, transformed and
consumed the city.

Religious Identities in Punjab

As Daechsel notes, and as other writings on the reformist middle classes have
underscored, existing studies depict these classes as deeply divided along
religious lines. This historiographical representation is to an extent a discourse
of Partition, an event that has encouraged writing about Hindus, Muslims and
Sikhs as if they were self-contained communities with little interaction and
intermingling, even though they lived in the same region and grappled with the
same forces of economic, social, and political change. The emphasis on religious
community and identity is surely grounded in scholars’ desire to reflect the long
term or deep-rooted ‘communal’ antipathies that created purportedly rigid and
separate communities of Punjab. Without a sense of such a history, after all,
partition and its accompanying violence and the brutal uprooting of peoples
would seem a mystery condemned to be in the shadow of either atavistic
animalism or elided by pinning the blame on a few hate-inciting figures.

An examination of the historiography of Punjab reveals that scholarly energy has

been devoted not so much to cultural history, but much more to the cultural fault
lines in Punjabi society, concentrating on moments of rupture. We know why/how
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religious antagonisms became entrenched in society, but less about mental

states, for example, that encouraged the shared veneration of saintly lives.31 We
know how different religious communities came to see themselves as distinct
from each other, and how soured relations between them sowed the seeds of an
irrevocable political parting of ways. Indeed, these processes have garnered so
much attention that one might wonder, is there more to Punjabi culture/s than
antagonistic religious identities? Is there more to religious identities than
acrimony and debate?

While we hope to demonstrate the relevance of these latter questions in the

pages of this volume, there is no getting away from the divisive consequences of
sectarian politics. And, despite over a half century of interrogation into
communalism—often, however, with (p.xxxviii) a telos to Partition—much work
is yet to be done. The enlarged discursive fields in which religious communities
were constructed and the insidious ways in which refashioned religious rituals
and symbols became hegemonic, for example, must be better understood. We do
not wish to deny the ramifications of conflict, nor leave it unaccounted for.
However, we wish to underscore two points. First, that religious conflict/
communalism was always coterminous with a thriving cultural world where
religious difference—however contentious in some spheres—did not inhibit
common, shared praxis in others. Punjab historiography, buttressed by the
broader work of many of the contributors to this volume, is illustrating this with
increasing efficacy. The challenge that our historiography has yet to take up
effectively, however, is to push beyond understanding communalism and
Punjabiyat as parallel phenomena, and to interrogate the ways in which they
may be imbricated in one another, and how they together produce modern
Punjab.32 Second, that there was no teleological one-way street built into
identity politics leading inevitably to the partition of the subcontinent; the
politics of the late colonial period were always contingent. Thus, we argue for
examining the ‘processual’ and ‘in-the-making’ aspects of identity politics, which
in effect give any society the possibilities of multitudinous trajectories. Put
another way, to understand the reach of religion in shaping lives and cultures
without obsessively relating this to the deployment of communal identities in
arenas of politics is critical to how religious identities and cultures are studied in
this volume.

The colonial period in Punjab was a turbulent one, and seminal studies have
focused on this era as a time when the language and form of religious discourse
were forever changed. After all, this was the time when various organizations
and movements including the Arya Samaj, the Singh Sabhas, the Ahmadiyya,
and numerous Muslim anjumans emerged, all composed of elites eager to gain
space and recognition in the new public sphere.33 The logic of their social and
cultural politics depended on mustering and maintaining the support of their
‘cadres’, engaging in bellicose rhetoric, the discursive domains of which have
been well documented and analysed. The impetus of this research is far from
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over, and as we continue to grapple with religious and ethnic conflicts in South
Asia—whether of our (p.xxxix) own making or those received as a legacy of the
colonial state—its momentum is not likely to abate.

C.S. Adcock’s essay in this regard disturbs and unsettles some of the given
assumptions about the nature of public discourse and the ostensibly entrenched
positions that various reform and political organizations were committed to. She
questions the assumed linkages often made by historians between the Arya
Samaj of the late nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries to
Hindu nationalism as it grew after the 1920s.34 The framing of the debate on
communalism by the Indian National Congress in terms of ‘Hindu Tolerance’,
that is, Hinduism as a ‘tolerant’ religion that did not condone proselytization, as
against the attack on Muslims by Hindu nationalists in this matter, had
significant consequences in polarizing public debate. The representation of the
early twentieth century by historians in similar terms—the continuum between
the Arya Samaj and Hindu nationalism—has obscured important moments in the
Arya Samaj’s history. One of these, for example, is that of the Arya Samaj
struggling to live up to its ideals of reform on caste.35

Adcock brings a new perspective to scholarship on the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi

programme—the proselytizing that earned the Samaj the dubious tag of
indulging in ‘semiticism’—by foregrounding the point of view of those who chose
to be ‘purified’ and ‘converted’. Shifting attention away from shuddhi as a
Hindu–Muslim question, Adcock highlights issues of dalit identity instead. This is
a particularly compelling approach given that the ‘dalit question’, as it were, was
at this time agitating reformers, nationalists and the ‘low’ castes themselves.36
She shows how ‘untouchability’ and Dayananda Sarasvati’s idea of caste based
on merit—the Vedic universalism of the Samaj—was often raised by converts.
The continuum between Muslims, untouchables and women as the other(s) of
the upper-caste Hindu male that her essay hints at opens up important questions
about those who claimed the nation. The careers of some of the polemicists and
controversialists she discusses ironically also point to the fluidity of identities in
so far as many of them changed the religions and reform organizations they
supported frequently enough to render meaningless the idea of loyalty to any
given identity; or, to think of this a little differently, it demonstrates the
accumulation of multiple identities. (p.xl) The ‘performance’ of controversy—
given that conversion theatricals were geared towards attracting public
attention—and by implication the ‘performance’ of identity in the public sphere
of colonial north India opened the question of identity to public moods, scrutiny
and participation. Conversion as a form of dissent and as creating novel
situations and rituals of belonging emerged as an arena for commenting on
society itself.37 In the context of Punjab, then, uncomfortable questions are
raised: were genuine moments that could have re-defined Punjabi attitudes
towards the dalit question not capitalized upon by their ostensible supporters?
Was the ‘communal’ issue more complex than the assumption of straightforward
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loyalties of defined communities/religiosities that we assume? To what extent did

it become imperative for dalits to define their identity in their own terms—
whether through their ‘traditional’ religion or by instituting or appropriating
newer identities such as Ad Dharmi, Valmiki Sabha, Buddhist, and Christian?38

A salient contribution of this volume are essays that examine the eighteenth and
the nineteenth centuries, opening up key concepts like ‘religion’ or ‘community’
or ‘piety’ for careful interrogation in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods.
Can the European Enlightenment’s universalizing of religion, and the
importation of that idea in the colonies be held responsible for obscuring
indigenous traditions that grasped and performed religiosity in different ways?39
Did the stance of the ‘Orientalists’, with their focus on textual traditions create a
warped understanding of Indian religious phenomena? Was ‘Hinduism’ never
studied on its own terms, marking as different the colonized and their religious
expression from their imperial rulers?40 The essays highlighted below show the
local lineages of holy men and regional traditions that so significantly defined
people’s relationship to the sacred. They also illuminate the interlocution,
appropriation and intermeshing with the greater Indic traditions that created
the templates on which the local was inscribed. The idea of a community was
also undoubtedly present, but what made the community distinct was a much
more complex process than the categories Hindu, Muslim or Sikh allow for. In
other words, it might be more useful to look at society in relational terms,
marking out distinctions not in sharp cleavages but in chains of connectedness.
(p.xli) One example of such a palimpsest would be the new state structure of
the Sikhs, built on the political and statist imaginary fed by the culturally
hegemonic Mughal state. Another would be the reach and play of the Pauranic
mythologies to understand and experience the world. Alternatively we can speak
of the sheer power of the holy personage in Punjab disbursing sacred charisma
on the temporal or spiritual efforts of humans. This could be a sant or a pir, a
living guru or a human conduit carrying forward saintly baraka (grace),
performing salutary and obligatory miracles, affirming life and its course for
most Punjabis.

The study of the Kukas by Harjot Oberoi, and the Gulabdasi sect by Anshu
Malhotra, point to ways in which the guru lineages (a parallel tradition being the
veneration of the pirs) played an important part in expressing piety in this
region. Though these essays also affirm the notion of Hindu, Sikh and
Musalman/Turak in Punjabi society, they are circumspect about using them as
self-evident categories. Oberoi depicts the centrality of the purity/pollution
binary for the millenarian Kukas (though they rejected the caste system) who
literally invested everything to maintain the symbolic purity of the cow. The
attack on the butchers of first Amritsar, then Raikot, and finally an apocalyptic
moment at Malerkotla in 1872 was not a case of ‘religious riot’ that we have
become familiar with in the colonial chronicles from the end of the nineteenth
century, but symptomatic of a state of anomie for the Kuka protectors of the cow.
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It was the mlechha (impure; barbarian) British with their increasing tolerance
for cow-slaughter that forced the hand of the Kukas, who rose against the
destruction of what they held to be inviolable. The Kukas drew inspiration from
the miracle-making guru Ram Singh, proximity to his physical presence and the
power of his teachings. The guru himself freely borrowed, adapted and
internalized from the Sikh tradition, whose imagined pristine past he wished to
recreate.

While the Kukas were keen on drawing boundaries in their own way and
distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, the Gulabdasis seemingly
welcomed all to their dera (establishment). These included men and women,
persons of all religions, the high castes and the low. Malhotra shows how the
charisma of the (p.xlii) guru was important in this rather literary sect whose
last decades, as those of the Kukas, intersected with the colonial period. It was
guru Gulabdas’s particular interpretation of Vedantic monism that encouraged
the openness of the sect that apparently embraced all. Malhotra re-explores the
concept of ‘syncretism’ to demonstrate the manner in which specific
appropriations from bhakti, Sufi and Sikh traditions created the multiple
inheritances that the sect revelled in.

Taking a slightly different approach, Mir looks at another instantiation of the

overlaps between bhakti, Sufi, and Sikh traditions in her essay on Punjabi
popular narratives. Mir’s main focus is on the representation of saint veneration
within Punjabi qisse, and Hir–Ranjha in particular. Through an analysis of a
number of late-nineteenth century Hir-Ranjha texts, she argues that saint
veneration is consistently represented as both a legitimate and a preferred form
of religious devotion. By historicizing these texts and their popularity, Mir
argues for their significance as historical sources, and as representations of
contemporary popular attitudes. In contemplating how best to analyse this
discourse and the historical practices it signifies, she argues for thinking of it as
a regional form of piety. Indeed, she argues that this is more helpful in thinking
about questions of religious identity in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-
century Punjab than the concept of syncretism, a concept that Malhotra finds
helpful for the same historical context.

Despite Malhotra’s invocation of syncretism and its value for analytical

purposes, that is not to suggest that her reading of the Gulabdasi sect shies
away from interrogating what might be described metaphorically as discordant
notes in the sect’s history. She attempts to decipher these discordant notes as
they emerge from the Gulabdasi Piro’s writings, which underline Hindu-Turak
(as Muslims are referred to in the contemporary literature) differentiation, on
the face of it a strange juxtaposition in a sect known for subversions of
orthodoxies. Piro’s putative ‘conversion’ from a Muslim to a Gulabdasi (Sikh/
Hindu) neophyte is a reminder that ‘conversions’, whether in the pre-colonial or
the colonial periods, demonstrated both the fluidity of identities as they also

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became occasions for plugging the porosity of community borders. Inclusiveness

and distancing were intrinsically part of the enterprise of crossing religio-
cultural borders. (p.xliii) Oberoi’s and Malhotra’s essays also link up with
Adcock’s essay on the important issue of the low castes and untouchables of
Punjab. While Oberoi shows that the Kukas had a number of Jat followers,41
Guru Ram Singh was from the artisanal Tarkhan caste and there were other
‘low’ caste disciples. On the other hand, though Gulabdas was himself a Jat,
sources show that his sect had many low caste and untouchable followers.42 This
fluidity tells us something about the intellectual, social, and religious subject
positions available to some low castes in nineteenth-century Punjab. Despite the
polemical dimensions the ‘untouchability’ question acquired in the late
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as Adcock shows, we know that these
social spaces continued to exist. The continuous histories of the Namdharis
(Kukas) and the Gulabdasis to our present times indicate that, even though the
sects may have changed in varied ways over time. The present flaring up of Sikh/
Ravidasi/dalit identity issues, clustered around various popular deras in Indian
Punjab and in the diaspora, point to the need to examine the history of these
older deras, which could scupper and subvert given ritual and social hierarchies
of Punjabi society.

Two more essays in this volume further complicate our understanding of how
community and religious identity came to be experienced and addressed in the
eighteenth century. Discussing the specific genre of history writing within the
Sikh tradition, the Gurbilas literature, they attempt to unravel how the notion of
a Sikh community was constructed and built. Before we take these up for
discussion, a few preliminary words about the flourishing discipline of ‘Sikh
Studies’ will help in apprehending them.

Sikh Studies and Questions of Identity

Demographic, political and cultural factors have considerably influenced the
growth of Sikh Studies. The second Partition of Punjab, in 1966, created an
Indian state in which Sikhs constituted upwards of sixty per cent of the
population, a demographic shift that changed forever the status of Sikhs from a
small minority in colonial Punjab (a mere 7 per cent according to the 1891
census)43 to a conspicuous majority. The success of the Green Revolution in
Punjab in (p.xliv) the 1960s and the 1970s made it one of the most prosperous
states of India. Academic life in Indian Punjab developed apace with at least
three large universities, in Chandigarh, Patiala, and Amritsar. While much of the
research produced at these sites assumed—as it contributed to—the idea of a
Sikh nation, equally important was scholarship that examined or projected the
history of a region.44 The tension between these two projects—Sikh history and
Punjabi history—was particularly acute during the Khalistan movement in the
early 1980s, which demanded for itself a history of Sikh nationhood.45

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Other tensions and opportunities have also influenced the field of Sikh Studies.
One of these, for example, is the massive emigration from Punjab from the late
nineteenth century which created a need for host communities to incorporate
this diaspora in what have often been evolving discourses on multiculturalism.
The large migrations from the Sikh community, and its success in terms of both
economic well-being and integration in host societies—the latter demonstrated
by Ballantyne in this volume—has meant a significant presence and growth of
Sikh Studies in Western academia. In recent years the discipline has engaged in
debates about Sikh identity and opened questions about the perennial
ambivalence of identities and the state of flux in which they are constantly
negotiated.46 The discipline has encouraged a range of research into the pre-
modern period, spurred on in the first instance by locating and studying texts
and manuscripts associated with the gurus.47

Gurinder Singh Mann makes a critical intervention in precisely such scholarship,

as well as in the broader analysis of Sikh Studies in his essay, ‘Guru Nanak’s Life
and Legacy: A Reappraisal’. Here, Mann focuses attention of scholarship on the
first Guru, in particular, assessing the state of scholarship on this seminal figure
in Sikh and Punjabi (and Indian) history, and uses this as an opportunity to
explore the future possibilities of research in the broader field of Sikh Studies.
His essay provides a reconsideration of the foundational work of W.H. McLeod
and suggests the ways it has perhaps unduly influenced Sikh scholarship
decisively. While cognizant of McLeod’s significant achievements both within
and for the field of Sikh Studies, Mann is nonetheless willing to underscore the
(p.xlv) interpretive strategies or paths that McLeod’s scholarship foreclosed;
he, in turn, presents us with a glimpse of those that he sees as most vital to an
understanding of the Sikh religion and Sikh social history. Two of Mann’s
revisionist stances are of particular note. First, based upon his reading of the
earliest Sikh scriptures, Mann overturns the traditional quietist image of Nanak
to present him as an energetic and self-conscious religious and social institution
builder. Second, he asserts that the Jats, and some artisanal castes, were an
important component of the earliest Sikh community under Nanak, in contrast to
the scholarly consensus that Jats entered the Sikh fold in large numbers only in
the seventeenth century.48 Mann’s analyses, thus, nudges historians to re-
examine the given contours of Sikh history. At minimum, he opens up the
question of re-assessing important phases in Sikh history: the role of various
gurus in building the Sikh community; and the complex interplay between
Punjab’s political, social and cultural histories and Sikh history. Different genres
of Sikh literature—the janam-sakhis, rahit-namas, the gurbilas eulogies, as well
as the various recensions of the Adi Granth—allow for a careful analysis of the
evolving dynamics of the Sikh community. Some will surely find Mann’s analysis
provocative, as they may his prescriptions for future research. We see his essay
as marking our contemporary moment as both a crucial and transformative
juncture—one in which we can both take stock of the past and look forward to

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the future—in the field of Sikh Studies, rife with possibilities as a new
generation of scholars enter the field and new institutional spaces are garnered
for the study of Sikh and Punjabi history.

Among the many accomplishments of Sikh Studies as a field is the way it has
complicated our understanding of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first half
of the nineteenth centuries, particularly through scholarship that has
highlighted the power of the Khalsa—as an idea, an incipient organization, and
as an imperial darbar (court).49 Sometimes the intimate relationship between the
history of the Sikhs and its historians, contemporary as well as those of earlier
generations, has also led to more polemical efforts to exhibit a continuous
history of Sikh ‘nationhood’, its locus apparently embedded in old manuscripts,
but also dressed in newer nationalist sensibilities. (p.xlvi) However, as
research has become more sophisticated, particularly in its examination of what
went into the making of Sikh senses of the self, the Sikh community’s
relationship to its past has also become more nuanced.

Louis Fenech in this volume studies the complex and fascinating history of the
Zafar-namah (Epistle of Victory) attributed to the tenth guru Gobind Singh.
Dismissing the banality of questions that try to establish whether the tenth guru
did/did not, could/could not have written the Zafar-namah, or whether he would
have entered into a dialogue with the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Fenech is
more interested in the history of the Zafar-namah itself. Fenech simultaneously
unpacks the manner in which Gobind Singh’s court and his literary composition
can be placed within what he calls a ‘larger South Asian Islamicate’ culture, and
how over time the text came to stand for the guru in the Sikh imagination. From
what was purportedly the guru’s letter to the emperor, this text’s transition and
transformation into sacred writing, and its emplacement within the Dasam
Granth is the unfolding story of Sikh subjectivity and selfhood. Fenech’s adept
handling of diverse sources, drawing out the contours of the Perso-Islamic
heritage of north India even as he shows how a sense of Sikh community was
born, enriches our understanding of this period as it does of Sikh identity.

In a similar vein, Anne Murphy examines Kuir Singh’s Gurbilas Patshahi Das and
delves into the larger Pauranic mythological world that animated this genre of
literature, showing at the same time the interpretive load a term like
‘community’ carried in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.
Focusing on Kuir Singh’s portrayal of the martyrdom of the ninth guru Tegh
Bahadur, Murphy too weaves her discussion around the persistent and troubling
question of conversion. Noting that the idea of religion in this period and region
must be seen to be relational (rather than as dualistic, as it developed in the
west), Murphy investigates what Turak, Hindu or Sikh meant at this time. She
delineates the concept of ‘commensurability’ to give a perspective on how
Turaks were constructed as the others of Sikhs in this literature, but also how

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the commensurable institution of conversion mirrored aspects common to both.

(p.xlvii)

Conversion and the Politics of Difference

The heuristic load that the term ‘conversion’ carries in Punjab is then explored
in three different essays in this volume, pertaining to different but linked periods
(Murphy’s, Malhotra’s, and Adcock’s). In recent years in the historiography of
South Asia, the term ‘conversion’ has been complicated to show many gradual,
novel, and complex ways in which communities or individuals change their
religious affiliations.50 The term is no longer deployed primarily to open up the
domain of the evangelizing ambitions of the Christian missionaries, though this
continues to be an area of investigation,51 or to discuss the apparently
intractable problem of the spread of Islam in India, though path-breaking
contributions have been made in this area.52 In the context of Punjab these
essays show that there were ways in which the idea of conversion
simultaneously hardened community boundaries even as it allowed the
breaching of those divisions. Murphy’s essay, by elaborating the theme of
‘martyrdom’ explored in Fenech’s earlier work,53 dwells on how martyrdom
developed as a central thematic in Sikh representations of the self through the
trope of ‘conversion’. Yet the moment of conversion, even if presented as a
choice between martyrdom and ignominy, inexorably drew the self close to its
supposed other. The gradual reifying of the idea of conversion within the Sikh
tradition (along with that of martyrdom) pushes us to investigate its meanings in
the changing political contexts of Punjab. Significantly, the representation of
‘conversion’ against the background of conflict over political power, as was the
context of Gurbilas literature, directs attention to the insight provided by Talal
Asad; he argues for the importance of power and its configurations in any
analysis of religion in a socio-historical situation, rather than perceiving religion
as a universalist phenomena standing on its own.54 Thus the changing
understandings of Hindu, Sikh, and Musalman/Turaks in Punjab must also be
seen to be contingent upon the political situation at a given time, even as
accretions of cultural markers contributed to identity.

The saga of Haqiqat Rai as represented in the nineteenth century that Malhotra
discusses briefly in her essay highlights how Hindu and Sikh groups came to
associate conversion with the abuse of (p.xlviii) political power by the Turaks
in Punjab. Malhotra elaborates this idea in her discussion of Piro, showing how
by the mid-nineteenth century the conversion trope could plausibly be displaced
to any supposed abuse of power by the ‘Musalmans’—even when the Sikhs ruled.
However, the putative conversion of the Muslim Piro to the Gulabdasi sect points
to how this conversion also allowed for the reifying of religious identities, if only
to exhibit in the larger context the speciousness of divisions in the first place.
This latter attitude—that religious divisions were specious—had a long history
within bhakti literature, and was used to mock the ritual-oriented religiosity of
authority figures. Finally, Adcock examines the shrill polemics of the early
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twentieth century and shows that those who thrived on controversies that
demarcated community boundaries, themselves moved between different
identities. Taken together, these essays complicate both the term conversion and
its articulation in Punjabi society. Indeed, conversion, it seems, was implicated in
the complex and multi-dimensional ways in which modern communities came to
be constructed.

Anna Bigelow, who delineates the symbolic power of three shared sacred sites in
contemporary Indian Punjab draws out another aspect of inter-community
relations, namely what she calls ‘pro-social encounters’. All the sites she
discusses are associated with different expressions of Islamic piety—the dargah
(tomb) of Hyder Shaikh in Malerkotla, shrines commemorating events from the
life of the famous Chisti Sufi Shaikh Farid in Faridkot, and a maseet (mosque) in
Gobindpura. Rather than reading tolerance at these places as the outcome of
passive non-interference, Bigelow suggests in her analysis of shared sacred sites
that it is the positive effort on the part of various interested parties to work
towards promoting peace that makes space for varied—and not contestatory—
interpretations of the power of the sacred. Importantly, this desire for harmony
does not mean the erasure of difference. In fact, different ritual specialists and
those with a stake in a site’s continuing religious life often understood the power
of the sacred in separate ways. What is critical, and Bigelow’s essay lays this out
clearly, is people’s ability to make space for alternate and pluralistic
understanding of a site’s religious meaning. (p.xlix)

What Bigelow has observed in the course of her fieldwork and discussed with
theoretical clarity, has been a kind of movement in contemporary Indian Punjab.
It seems the dominant Punjabi Jat-Sikhs and their Hindu neighbours have over
the last decade restored and rebuilt over two hundred mosques destroyed in
partition riots. This has been accomplished either with their resources and
initiative, sometimes at the behest of the Jamaat-e-Islami, and at times with the
help of funds remitted from relatives in the Sikh diaspora. It is with this
background that the latest case of the Ghumman family’s similar effort in
Sarwarpur has received celebratory acknowledgement.55 Is this the case of post
colonial Indian Punjab’s remorse over the extremities of violence during the
Partition? Undoubtedly this gesture of symbolic amity has enormous power, not
least because Punjab saw the worst of partition violence. However, this
magnanimity for a mere 1.5 per cent Muslim population of the state, many of
whom are migrant labour, must be put in perspective. On the one hand it shows
how the trend of hardening of religious lines and political posturing on the issue
since the demolition of the Babri Masjid is bucked in Punjab, exemplified by the
pro-social encounters that Bigelow highlights. On the other hand, it must be kept
in mind that the miniscule Muslim population of Indian Punjab is not a threat in
terms of numbers, economic presence, nor does it spawn a fear of cultural
conquest, both of which are anti-Muslim bogies favoured by the Hindu Right.
The saga of conflict in Indian Punjab is being played out with a sharper edge in
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relation to the dalits, who have larger numbers and represent greater prosperity.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that pro-sociality encourages people to look at
themselves as tolerant and multi-dimensional.

In contrast to the edifices of amity being constructed in Indian Punjab, Pakistani

Punjab is perhaps going through the worst period of intra-community conflict in
its history. In a country that is more than 95 per cent Muslim, it is astounding
that the tag of ‘kafir’ or infidel is being bandied about to brand people.56 It is not
just Hindu, Sikh and Christian minorities who are victimized, but also the Shi‘i
and Ahmadiyya ‘minorities’.57 Increasingly the divisions between the Wahabi and
the Barelvi factions of the majority Sunni sect are coming to the fore, seen for
instance in the targeting of the shrines of revered (p.l) Sufi saints; suicide
bombers targeted Data Ganj Baksh’s shrine in the heart of Lahore on 1 July 2010
and Sakhi Sarwar’s shrine in Dera Ghazi Khan on 3 April 2011. As Ayesha Jalal
has shown, the idea of jihad has undergone unimaginable metamorphosis in
recent years. From a concept that was historically deployed in the South Asian
context as much to promote peace as war, it is now understood primarily as an
individual’s right to fight not just the ‘West’, but others perceived to be enemies
and infidels. The ethical aspect of the concept, the greater jihad, has given way,
as has the right of the state to initiate it.58 The attack on the Sufi shrine
represents a desire to sunder a quintessentially shared feature of Punjabis’ piety,
the faith in the shrines with their spiritual sweep and miraculous powers.59

Simona Sawhney picks just this ominous moment of violence—of young men
willingly sacrificing life for a cause perceived as greater than themselves by
exploding bombs at an Ahmadiyya mosque—to inquire into an earlier
phenomenon of ‘revolutionary terrorism’. While the romance of sacrifice and
death are linked with the idea of patriotic exhortation directed at the youth,
Sawhney turns to the writings of the young man gifted with clear thinking—
Bhagat Singh. Using the canvas of a range of writings emanating from the
radical, socialist and democratic traditions of the West in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, Bhagat Singh displayed an astonishing
cosmopolitanism in order to forge a democratic nationalism. What makes a hero
and what gives the hero the right to inflict violence, including on the self, were
issues that troubled Bhagat Singh. The similarities with Gandhi were only too
visible, but so were the enormous differences. Similarly the case for drawing
parallels with the present manifestations of terrorist violence is there, but so are
very significant distinctions. One of the distinguishing points that Sawhney
highlights with subtlety is the manner in which the perception of the ‘West’ has
undergone a change. From a beacon of hope and cosmopolitanism, the West is
viewed by many youth growing up in the third world today as the seedbed for
spawning prejudiced neo-imperialists. Hope and cosmopolitanism have had a
conjoint death. And the line dividing the romance of death with its sheer

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brutality erased. The projected essentialism of cultures then seems the

unfortunate fallout of a globalizing world. (p.li)

Punjabiyat and the ‘Idea(s) of Punjab’

In this volume, then, we bring together essays with disparate and related
themes, from historical and contemporary times, collectively investigating or
alluding to different facets of a lived Punjabiyat. By encouraging our
contributors to think about aspects of Punjabi culture and history, we hope we
have added to the strength of a growing discipline of cultural history from an
important region in South Asia, the complexity of whose cultural and historical
inheritance has not received adequate attention. We have not only emphasized
the amorphous and shadowy nature of our nodal idea of Punjabiyat, but also
underlined that for all its ambiguity, the notion is real in so far as it exercises
people’s imaginations, emotions, experiences, and a sense of self. For far too
long, we contend, the idea has been ignored because it does not fit into given
neat boundaries, whether political or religious. The messiness inherent in the
plethora of new questions, or in rethinking older engagements with newer
insights, is a welcome disorder that we hope this volume ushers.

While we have spoken of the nebulousness of Punjabiyat, we would also, perhaps

paradoxically, argue that it is pervasive; indeed, its pervasiveness may play some
role in its vitality as an identity going largely unexplored. Punjabiness slips into
so many aspects of popular culture that there seems to be no need to explicate it
separately. Punjabiyat’s wholehearted embrace by the Bombay film industry is a
case in point. Bollywood’s hybrid Hindi-Punjabi-Urdu lyrics, the musical genius
of some Punjabi emigrants recognized and nurtured by the film industry, or the
use of lilting Punjabi folk melodies and tunes that carried the flavour of Punjab,
as for example in the unforgettable beats of O.P. Nayyar, indicate this ubiquitous
presence. Something similar is happening with Punjabi poetry. The perennial
popularity of Bulleh Shah in Punjab has now become a larger phenomenon with
broad celebration of his compositions in both India and Pakistan thanks to the
reach of cinema and music. From the film Bobby’s (1971) adaptation of Bulleh
Shah’s poetry—beshak mandir masjid todo Bulleh Shah yeh kahta (made by Raj
Kapoor, the Peshawar-born thespian of the foremost family of migrant Punjabis
in Bollywood)—to Rabbi Shergill’s 2005 chart buster Bulla ki Jaana, (p.lii) to the
recent Ranjha Ranjha kardi main ape Ranjha hoi from the film Raavan (2010;
directed by the Tamil Mani Ratnam), Bulleh Shah has become synonymous with
Punjabi sufiana kalaam. The celebration of the Hindu upper caste Khatri identity,
often lovingly (if garishly) depicted in extravagant marriages and rituals, is the
most recent expression of second and third generation Punjabis in the Bombay
film industry whose parents/grandparents came from Punjab.60 In recent
decades Punjabi identity in diaspora communities too has been partly coalesced
by musical experimentation, creating hybridized sounds nevertheless sutured to
ethnic identities.61 This has helped shape South Asian identity for numerous
youth growing up in western and other countries. However, the very ubiquity of
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this apparently familiar and loved (or denigrated) Punjabi culture should not
mean that it does not require rigorous study.

By delving into variegated aspects of Punjab’s culture and history, we hope to

elucidate the idea of Punjabiyat, as well as to complicate it. We do not imagine
the volume as a source for a definitive list of criteria that might tell us what it
means to be Punjabi. Nor is this volume an attempt to posit a simple, hydraulic
relationship—historically or today—between Punjabiyat, on the one hand, and
communalism, religious conflict and violence, on the other. Lived realities are, of
course, much more complex than such a dichotomy allows for. And certainly, we
are acutely aware that Punjabiyat and the articulation of oppositional or
conflictual religious identities are implicated in the same historical processes. At
the same time, however—and undoubtedly underscoring the complexity of the
issue at hand—we want to gesture towards the potential of Punjabiyat to act as
an antidote to the politics of antagonism.

Our endeavour is to foreground the complexities of such issues, and to put

forward different perspectives on and approaches to engage with them. In doing
so, we hope this volume will both historicize and complicate the idea of Punjab
and Punjabiyat, and provide an important comparative perspective for the study
of Indian regions.

Notes:
(†) This Introduction has benefitted from careful readings by David Gilmartin and
Gurinder Singh Mann. We would like to thank them for their helpful comments.

(1) The following discussion has benefited from theoretical insights on cultural
history in Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction: History, Culture and Text’, (p.liii) in Lynn
Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989, pp. 1–22; Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn:
Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999.

(2) J.S. Grewal, ‘The Historian’s Panjab’, in his Miscellaneous Articles, Amritsar:
Guru Nanak Dev University, 1974, pp. 1–10.

(3) J.S. Grewal, Social and Cultural History of the Punjab: Prehistoric, Ancient,
and Early Medieval, New Delhi: Manohar, 2004.

(4) This is evident in Muzaffar Alam’s The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North
India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, for example. One also sees this
reflected in Chetan Singh’s Region and Empire: Panjab in the Seventeenth
Century, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.

(5) J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990, pp. 99–127.

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(6) Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British
Colonial Punjab, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2010, p. 27.

(7) On the Ghadar movement, see the seminal study by Harish K. Puri, Ghadar
Movement: Ideology, Organization & Strategy, Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev
University, 1983. On the Khalistan movement, see Giorgio Shani, Sikh
Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age, New York: Routledge, 2008, esp. pp.
40–99. On remittances from the Gulf to Pakistan, see Jonathan Addleton,
Undermining the Centre: The Gulf Migration and Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1992.

(8) This could include anything on a spectrum between deeply-sedimented

emotive ties to native place/locality, on the one hand, to itinerancy, on the other
hand. On ties to native place/locality, see Mir, The Social Space of Language,
chap. 4. On itinerancy in Punjab, see Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Predicaments of
Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in Nineteenth-century Northwestern India’, in
Claude Makovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds),
Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia
1750–1950, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003, pp. 163–214.

(9) The clearest linguistic exposition of the language is Christopher Shackle,

‘Panjabi’, in Dhanesh Jain and George Cardona (eds), The Indo-Aryan Languages,
New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 581–621. We should note that Shackle considers
Siraiki a separate language, but for the purposes of this volume we choose to
subsume it in Punjabi not for political, but rather for historical reasons. The
Siraiki movement is a modern phenomenon, dating from the 1970s, and is
situated in a very particular context of Pakistani politics. To treat it as a separate
language for the period under study in this volume, which ranges from the
medieval to the contemporary periods strikes us as (p.liv) anachronistic. On
the movement, see Christopher Shackle, ‘Siraiki: A Language Movement in
Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies, 11 (3), 1977, pp. 379–403; and Tariq Rahman,
‘The Siraiki Movement in Pakistan’, Language Problems and Language Planning,
19 (1), 1995, pp. 1–25.

(10) We should note that of these dialects, Lahnda alone is no longer common in
linguistic discussions of Punjabi dialects. Shackle, for example, does not include
it in his exposition of the language in his essay, ‘Panjabi’. Today, linguists
generally use the term to refer to a distinct Indo-Aryan language. One finds a
number of such references in Dhanesh Jain and George Cardona (eds), The Indo-
Aryan Languages, New York: Routledge, 2003. See, for example, pp. 240, 545,
652, and 898. This dovetails with colonial linguist George Grierson’s analysis in
his famous linguistic survey of Indian languages, where he identified Lahnda as
the language spoken in Western Punjab. See George Grierson, Grierson on
Punjabi [reprint of Punjabi sections of Linguistic Survey of India, vol. 9], Patiala:

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Languages Department, 1961 [1919]. For our purposes, however, we follow the
tradition of Punjabi literary criticism that views Lahnda as a dialect of Punjabi,
one particularly significant to medieval and early modern literary production.
See, for example, Mohan Singh Uberoi’s foundational text, A History of Panjabi
Literature (1100–1932), Jalandhar: Bharat Prakashan, 1971 [1933].

(11) Denis Matringe, ‘Hir Varis Shah, A Story Retold’, in Vasudha Dalmia and
Theo Damsteegt (eds), Narrative Strategies: Essays on South Asian Literature
and Film, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1998, p. 19.

(12) Carla Petievich, When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-
Muslim Poetry, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

(13) The reasons for this are explored in Farina Mir, ‘Imperial Policy, Provincial
Practices: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth Century India’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 43 (4), 2006, pp. 395–427.

(14) See Mir, The Social Space of Language, pp. 84–5.

(15) P.H.M. van den Dungen, The Punjab Tradition: Influence and Authority in
Nineteenth Century India, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1972.

(16) N.G. Barrier, The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill of 1900, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1966.

(17) On designating ‘agricultural’ and ‘non-agricultural’ tribes, see Barrier, The

Punjab Alienation of Land Bill. On the creation of customary law, see Neeladri
Bhattacharya, ‘Remaking Custom: The Discourse and Practice of Colonial
Codification’, in R. Champakalakshmi and S. Gopal (eds), (p.lv) Tradition,
Dissent, and Ideology, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 20–51; and
David Gilmartin, ‘Customary Law and Shari‘at in British Punjab’, in Katherine P.
Ewing (ed.), Shari‘at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988, pp. 43–62.

(18) It should be noted that some colonial officials had more nuanced
understandings of Jat identity. Denzil Ibbetson, for example, noted important
distinctions within this group.

(19) Anshu Malhotra, Gender, Caste and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class
in Colonial Punjab, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 24–34.

(20) On the canal colonies, see Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism 1885–
1947, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. On colonial ethnographic
logics, see Richard Fox, The Lions of the Punjab, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985.

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(21) See, for example: Arnaud Sauli, ‘Circulation and Authority: Police, Public
Space and Territorial Control in Punjab, 1861–1920’, in Markovits et al. (eds),
Society and Circulation, pp. 215–39; Rajit Mazumder, The Indian Army and the
Making of Punjab, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003; and Tan Tai Yong, The
Garrison State: the Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–
1947, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005.

(22) Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism.

(23) Richard Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba
Farid’, and ‘Court of Man, Court of God: Local Perceptions of the Shrine of Baba
Farid, Pakpattan, Punjab’, in his Essays on Islam and Indian History, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 203–46.

(24) Prem Chowdhry, The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural
Haryana 1880–1990, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. For how the
laws affected ‘high caste’ widows, see Anshu Malhotra, ‘Ascetic Widowhood or
Widow Remarriage? Dilemma for the New Punjabi Elite’, in her Gender, Caste
and Religious Identities, pp. 82–115.

(25) Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural
Crime, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

(26) Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947, New Delhi: Manohar, 1988.

(27) See, for example, on Calcutta, Lahore, and Bombay, respectively: Swati
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial
Uncanny, London: Routledge, 2005; William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern:
Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008; and Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: The Indian
Making of British Bombay, 1854–1918, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. (p.lvi)

(28) In addition to Glover 2008, see Ian Talbot, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The
Aftermath of Partition for Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957’, Modern Asian
Studies, 41 (1), 2007, pp. 151–85.

(29) Malhotra, Gender, Caste and Religious Identities.

(30) Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middleclass

Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan, London: Routledge, 2006.

(31) There are, however, increasingly scholarly correctives to this. See Anna
Bigelow’s essay in this volume as well as her, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing
Pluralism in Muslim North India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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(32) Our thanks to David Gilmartin for this point, whose own work is at the
vanguard in this respect.

(33) K.W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century

Punjab, New Delhi: Manohar, 1975; David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab
and the Making of Pakistan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988;
Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and
Diversity in the Sikh Tradition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; Bob
van der Linden, Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya
Samaj and Ahmadiyahs, New Delhi: Manohar, 2008; Spencer Lavan, The
Ahmadiyah Movement: A History and Perspectives, New Delhi: Manohar, 1974;
and Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious
Thought and its Medieval Background, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989.

(34) For such a stance, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist
Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of Identity-Building,
Implantation and Mobilisation, Delhi: Viking, 1996.

(35) Jones contended that in his Satyarth Prakash Dayananda Sarasvati, the
founder of the Arya Samaj, argued for caste based on the merit of a person
rather than birth, advocating an ‘open social system’. See Jones, Arya Dharm, p.
33. For a different view that argues for Dayananda’s ambivalence on caste
reforms, see Anshu Malhotra, ‘The Body as a Metaphor for the Nation: Caste,
Masculinity and Femininity in the Satyarth Prakash of Dayananda Sarasvati’, in
A.A. Powell and S. Lambert-Hurley (eds), Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and
Colonial Experience in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006,
pp. 121–53.

(36) On the dalit Ad Dharm movement of Punjab, see Mark Juergensmeyer,

Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Social Vision of Untouchables, Delhi: Ajanta
Publications, 1988.

(37) On the diverse aspects of ‘conversion’ and the different modes and
motivations for such an occurrence, see Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan
(p.lvii) Clarke, ‘Introduction’, in Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke
(eds), Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations, and Meanings, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 1–21.

(38) John C.B. Webster, Religion and Dalit Liberation: An Examination of

Perspectives, New Delhi: Manohar, 2002.

(39) On the manner in which religion developed as a transhistorical and

transcultural category see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and
Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993; and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World

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Religions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. On the usage of the term
‘Hinduism’, see Heinrich von Stietencron, ‘Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a
Deceptive Term’, in his Hindu Myth, Hindu History: Religion, Art and Politics,
Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2005, pp. 227–48. On different components
constituting Hinduism, see Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer, ‘Hinduism: The Five
Components and Their Interaction’, in Heidrun Bruckner, Anne Feldhaus and
Aditya Malik (eds), Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer: Essays on Religion, Literature
and Law, New Delhi: Manohar, 2004, pp. 401–19.

(40) Gauri Vishwanathan, ‘Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism’, in

Gavin Flood (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003, pp. 23–44.

(41) Though Jats are placed as shudras in the Hindu caste hierarchy, they were
the powerful land-owning dominant caste of Punjab.

(42) These included the later fiery Singh Sabha supporter Ditt Singh, the harijan
Tara Singh and the prostitute Piro.

(43) Census of India 1891 – Vol. XIX – The Punjab and Its Feudatories, Calcutta:
Government Printing, 1892, p. 88.

(44) This is seen, for example, in the bi-annual journal The Panjab Past and
Present started by Ganda Singh of Punjabi University, Patiala in 1967; and the
The Journal of Regional History, established in 1980 and published by Guru
Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.

(45) J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990; and Harnik Deol, Religion and Nationalism in India: The Case of the
Punjab, London: Routledge, 2000.

(46) Some aspects of these debates have been captured well in J.S. Grewal,
Constesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition, New Delhi: Manohar, 1998.

(47) The literature here is too vast to be referenced fully except mentioning a
few outstanding examples. W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Tradition,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Gurinder Singh Mann, The Making of
Sikh Scripture, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; and Pashaura Singh,
Life and Work of Guru Arjan: History, (p.lviii) Memory, and Biography in the
Sikh Tradition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

(48) W.H. McLeod, ‘The Development of the Sikh Panth’, in his Exploring
Sikhism: Aspects of Sikh Identity, Culture, and Thought, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2004, pp. 49–69.

(49) Louis E. Fenech, The Darbar of the Sikh Gurus: The Court of God in the
World of Men, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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(50) Robinson and Clarke, Religious Conversion in India.

(51) Robert E. Frykenberg (ed.) Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-

Cultural Communication Since 1500, London: Routledge, Curzon, 2003.

(52) Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

(53) Louis E. Fenech, Martyrdom in the Sikh Tradition: Playing the ‘Game of
Love’, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

(54) Talal Asad, ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz’,

Man, 18 (2), 1983, pp. 237–59.

(55) Khushwant Singh, ‘Rebuilding Secularism, Gandhi Style’, Hindustan Times

(New Delhi), 13 June 2010, p. 15; Chander S. Dogra, ‘Shades of the Old Punjab’,
Outlook (New Delhi), 5 July 2010, pp. 58–61. More recently, a Muslim industrial
house based in Malerkotla—the Sohrab Group of Industries—running the Hars
Charitable Trust has restored a church targeted in the wake of the threat to
burn Qurans (in the USA). ‘Muslim Trust Restores Church’, The Times of India
(New Delhi), 20 September 2010, p. 13.

(56) Amir Mir, ‘Just Who is not a Kafir?’ Outlook (New Delhi), 19 July 2010, pp.
54–6.

(57) A controversy erupted over the branding ‘kafir’ on the coffin of the young
Hindu Prem Chand of Pakistan who died in a plane crash near Islamabad.
Mohammad Wajihuddin, ‘Don’t Use the K Word’, The Times of India (New Delhi),
20 September 2010, p. 13.

(58) Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008; Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008.

(59) See Farina Mir’s essay in this volume.

(60) Srijana Mitra Das, ‘Partition and Punjabiyat in Bombay Cinema: The
Cinematic Perspective of Yash Chopra and Others’, Contemporary South Asia, 15
(4), 2006, pp. 453–71.

(61) Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Musical Recall: Postmemory and the Punjabi
Diaspora’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, vol. 24, 2004, pp. 172–89.

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