There is One God
His name is Truth
He is the Creator
He is without fear and without hate.
Emperor Akbar–perhaps atoning for the sins of his grandfather Babur–asked for copies of this, and other Sikh hymns, to ascertain whether or not they were anti-Islamic. Pleased with what he read, he extended royal patronage to the Sikh community in the form of a land grant. The Sikhs dug a tank on this land for pilgrims to bathe in, and later a temple was constructed within it–the foundation stone of which was laid by a Muslim saint from Lahore, on the invitation of Arjun, the fifth Guru. (This was the Harmandir, one day to be nicknamed–after Maharajah Ranjit Singh smothered it in bullion–the Golden Temple.)
The period of Sikh-Muslim harmony came to an abrupt end with Akbar’s death. Jahangir, the new emperor, had always been suspicious of non-Muslim sects, and of the Sikhs in particular. ‘For years,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘the thought had been presenting itself to my mind that either I should put an end to this false traffic, or he [the Guru] should be brought into the fold of Islam.’ When Jahangir’s son Khusrau rebelled from his father, he was sheltered by Guru Arjun in Amritsar. Jahangir needed no further excuse: ‘I fully knew his heresies,’ he said of the Guru, ‘and I ordered…that he should be put to death with torture.’ Arjun was taken to Lahore, and tortured till he could no longer stand. He died of his wounds as he was bathing in the River Ravi.
Over the next hundred years, state repression by the Mughals gave Sikhism its final and definitive form. To combat the armies despatched to the Punjab from Delhi, the Sikhs perfected the art of guerrilla warfare. At first, they lived in soldier communities, singing heroic ballads instead of peaceful hymns; later, they lived like bandits, pillaging Afghan and Mughal baggage trains. Alarmed by Sikh separatism, Emperor Aurangzeb had the ninth Guru executed.
For Sikhs, the death of two of their Gurus at the hands of the Muslims was not just an unmitigated tragedy. It compelled the tenth Guru, Gobind, to recognize two prosaic truths. First, that violence should be met with violence: ‘When all other means have failed, it is permissible to draw the sword,’ he wrote to Emperor Aurangzeb. Second, that his people needed more than the spiritual wisdom of their leaders. They needed to feel they were a people apart–neither Hindu nor Muslim–with special rules, a rigid organization and an instantly recognizable uniform.
In 1699, Gobind called a meeting of Sikhs during the spring festival of Baisakhi. Here, he announced the formation of a militant new group, the Khalsa. Instead of Nanak’s kirtan (hymns), Sikhs were now to be identified by five visible symbols of their power: kesh (uncut hair tied up in a turban), kangha (comb), kach (shorts), kara (steel bracelet) and kirpan (sword). He also announced that the Adi Granth would succeed him as the eleventh and final Guru. From now on, Sikhs were to be led, not by the few, but by the rule of the collective, by their communally scripted holy book, and by the social cohesion of the Khalsa.
The attempt to give the Sikhs unity saved the movement from disintegration. Moreover, with Emperor Aurangzeb’s death, and the subsequent collapse of the Mughal empire, there was opportunity for regional powers to assert their independence from Delhi. In 1799, exactly one hundred years after the Khalsa was founded (and three hundred years after Guru Nanak emerged from the river), a one-eyed teenager called Ranjit Singh conquered the Punjab and established the first Sikh kingdom. The Gurus had sown Punjabi nationalism through their Punjabi-language songs, Sikh rules of attendance, and regional consciousness. Ranjit Singh marched into Lahore proclaiming himself not just a Sikh leader, but a pan-Punjabi patriot–one who celebrated Hindu festivals, married Muslim wives, and kept at his court ministers of all religions. Guru Nanak had criticized the ruling power of Kings but Ranjit Singh declared himself Maharaja.
By the time the British began making plans to annex the Indus, Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the most powerful and flamboyant ruler in western India. The letters that Alexander Burnes wrote to his commanders in Calcutta are telling for the envy that seeps through every page. The British may have been in control of large swathes of India, but they were paltry penny-pinchers in comparison to the lavish style of native rulers. The court of Ranjit Singh, Burnes wrote, ‘realized every notion of Eastern bounty and grandeur that we imbibe in early life’. The elephant mounts of the ‘English Gentlemen formed a sad contrast to the burnished, glittering, gold-howdars of the Seikhs’. The British gaped in astonishment as the Maharaja introduced them to his ‘Regiment of Amazons’–seventy female dancers dressed as men in yellow silk. With ‘covetousness’ they gazed upon the Maharaja’s massive Koh-i-noor diamond that had belonged to Taimur, ravager of the Punjab, and was engraved, Burnes wrote, with the names of Aurangzeb and the eighteenth-century Afghan Ahmed Shah. The Maharaja then scattered the tatty British group with gold dust and for two days afterwards the entire party, loath to wash, was distinguished ‘by their glittering and bespangled faces’. Never was the stark disparity between the British and an indigenous power clearer.
Burnes himself saved the gold-embossed letter of welcome that the Maharaja sent him, with its polite Persian phrases expressing gladness at the alliance between the Sikhs and British (‘friendship, the reservoir of pleasure in the garden of happiness’). After Burnes’s death it became a token of Oriental splendour in London, and his brother had great difficulty in getting it back from the various ladies who clamoured to see it; ‘Runjeet,’ he wrote to Burnes’s publisher, ‘seems to be a great favourite with the fair.’
Ranjit Singh ruled the Punjab by coming to an accommodation with the Muslim population. For the anarchic decades preceding his reign, Muslims and Sikhs had traded insults–the Afghan armies desecrating the Golden Temple’s tank with dead cows, the Sikhs using Aurangzeb’s mosque in Lahore as a stable. When he became Maharaja, Ranjit Singh made some efforts to smooth away the differences. He had two Muslim wives, a Muslim foreign minister and Muslim courtiers. In his army there was a Sikh cavalry, Muslim artillery and Muslim and Hindu infantry. Even the architecture of his holiest structures was a diplomatic amalgam of Mughal and Hindu designs. A Pakistan social studies textbook from the 1980s told schoolchildren that:
Muslims and Hindus are completely different in their way of life, eating habits and dress. We worship in mosques. Our mosques are open, spacious, clean and well-lit. Hindus worship inside their temples. These temples are extremely narrow, enclosed and dark.
Ranjit Singh’s Golden Temple–with its dome, spires, wide-open spaces, ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’, sacred water and holy book–seems designed to confound such prejudice.
Throughout the subcontinent there are high-and low-caste temples and churches, but in Sikh gurdwaras, as in Islam, all classes worship side by side. At Amritsar, menial tasks such as mopping and sweeping are performed–not by low-caste Hindus, as they would be almost anywhere else–but by Sikh volunteers. Guru Nanak particularly stressed the importance of the langar, the communal kitchen, and the only sound that can compete with the hymns being sung in the temple, is the clatter of steel plates being washed and stacked. Day and night, Sikh volunteers cook, serve and clean, and thousands of people turn up to eat the holy fast food that they serve. Even here though, caste has not disappeared. The Sikh Gurus only ever married within their own caste, and today there is still an impermeable division between the Jat Sikhs–high-caste landed farmers and business people–and the low-caste converts to Sikhism, called Mazhabis.
At Nankana Sahib the Sikh pilgrims had spoken to me in reverent tones of the Golden Temple’s ‘constant music’, and coming from Pakistan I am anticipating Qawwali-style revelry. But this is no frenzied Sufi shrine. There is no mystical dancing, not even any modest head-waggling. Indian Punjab gave the world the boob-jiggling bhangra and giddha, but inside the Golden Temple not one Sikh is moving to the beat. The experience is shared, yet self-contained; the aesthetic of music and food, gold and water, is designed to be soothing on the ear, stomach, eye and soul. From the middle of the pool of wa
ter the gleaming, shimmering gold-plated temple rises. White colonnaded walkways surround it on all four sides. Pilgrims circulate barefoot, stopping to listen to the hymns, to sleep, or to take a holy dip.
One of the main points of coming to Amritsar is to bathe. The men strip off out in the open, down to their underpants, and plunge into this soup of gold. Women go into a covered section. Sikhs emphasize that all faiths are welcome in their temple, and so when a Sikh lady from Southall beckons me in, I follow after her. It is an odd experience, after so many months of covering every inch of my skin from view, to stand completely naked in a pool of holy water, surrounded by other naked women. I would be wary, too, of immersing my body in this water–holy rivers in India are generally sluggish with sewage–had I not been told of the rigorous water purification system recently installed here. Amritsar’s name means ‘ambrosial nectar’ and in recent years the Golden Temple management has taken this description literally.
A genial Sikh member of the Gurdwara Management Committee takes me on a day-long tour to witness with my own eyes the ‘world-quality filtration system’. In the basement of a building behind the Golden Temple, the massive, brand-new plant is humming to itself. ‘The water purification system is two years old and imported,’ he says, pointing to the MADE IN USA sticker on the side. The water circulates three times around the complex, before it is transported across the city by canal to a sand filtration tank. Later that afternoon, we walk there together, out of the stampede of the city to a quiet lane where water rushes through an underground reservoir. This tank, in turn, feeds five other gurdwaras: each thus blessed with a full, deep pool of precious river water.
The abundance of water is not just symbolic. It is this very commodity–sucked out of the Indus and poured on to the land–which made the Punjab rich: the canal system that every ruler upheld in the name of taxation; the irrigation-fed land reclamation of the British; the post-colonial water disputes between Pakistan and India; the gold necklaces purchased by rich farmers to hang around the necks of their plump Punjabi wives. I think of Gobind’s taunt to Aurangzeb: ‘I shall strike fire under the hoofs of your horses, I will not let you drink the water of my Punjab.’ Land as rich and fertile as this needed soldiers to defend it.
Guru Gobind formed the Khalsa and did battle with the Mughals. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had a French-trained standing army which in 1827 did what no Punjabi army had yet done, and prevented an army of Afghans from crossing the Indus. The British had to wait until the Maharaja’s demise before invading, but when they did, Ranjit Singh’s military became the backbone of their own pan-Indian army. Even after the British left India, the Punjabi Sikh contingent has remained an unassailable force in the region. In Pakistan, particularly, the powerful triangle of Punjabi water, wealth and military prowess controls the country.
Under British colonial rule, the Sikh–and Punjabi–reputation for martial valour did not decline; if anything, it was enhanced. Barely a decade after the British conquered the Punjab, Indian soldiers in northern India mutinied. The Punjab rebellion was sporadic; and many chiefs sided with the British against the north Indians. Britain responded by recruiting large numbers of Punjabis to the army, considering them the finest of India’s ‘hardy’ races. ‘All Sikh traditions, whether national or religious, are martial,’ stated an army recruitment manual in 1928. During both World Wars, up to half the Indian Army was comprised of Punjabis; Punjabi Muslims dominated, followed by Sikhs. Even now, in a classic statement of Raj nostalgia, a Sikh veteran of the British Army tells me, ‘Still today, every Sikh would lay down their life for the Britishers.’ Official Sikh policy now, however, is to denigrate collaboration with the British. The Temple Management distributes a free booklet stating that the British tricked Sikhs into believing that the imperialists ‘were allies of the Khalsa, come to Asia in fulfilment of a prophecy of the Guru’.
In the nineteenth century, the link between the military and the Punjab was assured by the British policy of granting a plot of irrigated land to soldiers upon retirement. This soon became the principal incentive for joining up. In western Punjab, the British built a network of irrigation canals, precisely in order to increase the land available. West Punjabi nomads were evicted from the grazing grounds, and ‘surplus’ populations brought in from central India. (Much of the bitter violence at Partition was a fight to retain, or claim, this valuable land.)
In a direct continuation from the colonial era, it was Punjabi military men who assumed power in the independent nation. For over half its life, Pakistan has lived under army rule–an army that is still three-quarters Punjabi. With Punjabi ex-servicemen taking jobs in the civil sector, Punjabi farmers taking more than their fair share of Indus water, and army farms and businesses buying up land and power all over the country, every Pakistani who is not Punjabi complains of Punjabi imperialism.
From 1953 onwards, the post-colonial Indian state began to address the imbalance of Punjabis in their army by recruiting from areas, like Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, that the British had not considered ‘martial’–and by ceasing to recruit Sikhs. Pakistan, however, maintained the colonial status quo. To this day the lack of recruitment from outside the Punjab creates an imbalance of power–and it is a policy with a dangerous history. In 1971, discrimination against Bengali soldiers contributed to the secession of East Pakistan as Bangladesh (the other factor was West Pakistan’s racist annulment of the election after it was won by a Bengali). Yet even after losing half the country and suffering humiliating defeat in a war against India, the army has continued to consolidate its Punjabi interests. Pakistan–say Sindhis and Baluchis–‘is a country run by and for Punjabi soldiers’.
Travelling through the irrigated croplands of the Punjab to Lahore, I meet a good many Pakistan Army officers, including several generals who have worked with both of the last two military dictators. But it is during the taxi ride south from Lahore to Nankana Sahib that I come to understand why the army is such a compelling career choice for ordinary Punjabis. The driver tells me that both his father and grandfather were landless peasants from western Punjab. He himself spent five years in the army, during which time he was trained as a clerk and driver, and given a firearms’ licence. This has enabled him to work since then as a secretary, taxi driver and security guard, and even now he and his family receive free medical treatment (this in a country with severely impaired public health care). If, like his brothers, he had stayed in the army until retirement, he would have been given some land or cash as well. ‘Faida to hain,’ he says emphatically: There are many advantages. He pulls a piece of paper out of the glove compartment and hands it to me. It is a leave certificate. He stole a big pile of them before he was discharged, and now he fills one in whenever he travels out of Lahore. ‘Guarantee,’ he says: if the Police think he is a vacationing soldier they do not dare ask for bribes. The army, then, functions for its members like a bootleg welfare state. (It functions for the officer class as a guarantee of luxury and privilege.) No wonder that Pakistan’s soldiers guard the institution so jealously–even to the extent of deposing elected politicians.
Punjabis dominate the army, and the army has a monopoly over the country’s natural resources. In 1960, thirteen years after the religious and social division of the Punjab at Partition, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty. The three eastern rivers–the Ravi, Sutlej and Beas–went entirely to India, which promptly dammed them to channel every last drop of water into irrigation. Pakistan’s Punjab was given the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, and it has appropriated and guarded these rivers, making them the muscle and centre of the country. Even now the ramifications of the Indus Waters Treaty create cross-border tension: in 1999, India announced that it was damming the Chenab, one of Pakistan’s three rivers, just before it crossed the border. No Pakistani politician can forget April 1948, when India cut off Pakistan’s irrigation canals at the start of the sowing season. The Indian dam, given the go-ahead in 2007 after the World Bank appointed a neutral expert to
arbitrate on its justness, is supposedly for hydroelectricity but Pakistan fears the capability that its neighbour now possesses: of unleashing the weapon of water deprivation.
It is a weapon, say Sindhi farmers, that is already being used against them by Punjabis. As Sindh receives very little monsoon, farmers rely on the state to deliver water to their fields. With over 80 per cent of Pakistan’s cropland requiring irrigation, water is a powerful political tool. The Pakistan Government, like the British colonial government before it, has invested heavily in the irrigation infrastructure, by which means they are able to control society. Sindhis claim that the dams built since Partition have been designed (by the army) so that Punjabis can take the lion’s share of the water. Nobody who has visited the Delta and seen the trickle of water which is all that remains of the river there, could disagree.
Dams also have powerful advocates in the capital because of the lucrative kickbacks they provide for politicians, bureaucrats and engineers. (For this reason, bribes to get into WAPDA, Pakistan’s water management department, are the highest in the country.) Local development analysts have long argued that Pakistan needs less capital-intensive, technology-heavy, foreign-expertise-reliant irrigation systems. Dams, they say, are highly wasteful of water, time and money (international consultants push local costs up by 40 per cent; international tenders by another 300 per cent; water resource management is the second-largest contributor, after defence, to Pakistan’s foreign debt). What is needed instead, they say, is better management of local water resources and more effective irrigation systems.
Empires of the Indus Page 16