The divided land

Rajmohan Gandhi’s book on the history of undivided Punjab is likely to be an inhabitant of the bookshelves of historians, intel­lectuals, mustachioed royal households of the Punjab, and others with an investment in the region. Reading it from the perspective of a lay person with no personal ties to the history of Punjab has been full of pleasant surprises.

The book is organised as a strict chronology of events, of the “then what happened” variety. This has two pos­sible effects. The first effect is experienced while glancing through the book casually, where the reader is instantly transported back to the horror of fact-laden school-time his­tory textbooks. The hand that turns the page must periodi­cally thump the forehead and rub drooping eyes awake. As it turns out, casual reading is a poor strategy for such a book and may prevent you from reading it altogether. Reading the book with a fine-ish tooth comb on the other hand, is far more rewarding.

In his introduction, the author poses questions, par­ticularly on the legacy of Par­tition, that invest the Indian reader in the story of Punjab. Gandhi argues that denying ourselves a“Punjabi his­tory” that predates Partition, denies us the chance to truly understand ourselves. For many of us, this may be a rev­elation. By bringing Pakistani Punjab into our Bollywood and tandoori-chicken tainted view of Punjabi culture, the book helps the reader to shed stereotypes before embark­ing on the complex historical discussion to follow.

We see Punjab as a fertile, frontier land, ruled by the Kushanas, the Mauryas, the Guptas, and the Sultans of Delhi, and fought over by the Mughals, Afghans and Brit­ish — outsiders all. Amazingly, it is only in 1799 that a ‘son of the soil’ ruled Punjab for the first time — the remarkable, one-eyed Sikh ruler, Ranjit Singh. Gandhi discusses why undivided Punjab’s Muslim majority failed to seize power after the death of Aurangzeb. He contends that by collat­ing histories from the time of Aurangzeb’s death, a clearer picture emerges about the growing dominance of the Sikhs, the lack of opposition to British rule on the part of the Muslim majority, why Punjab responded with reluc­tance to the Gandhian move­ment, and the tragic events accompanying the Partition of Punjab in 1947 (here Gan­dhi also documents numer­ous incidents of ‘insaniyat’ triumphing over bloodlust). The author is expectedly invested in the hypotheses he presents as questions at the beginning of the book. While these may be debat­able, what allows the reader to lend him an ear is that he refrains from interpreting the stories he chronicles.