A pop analysis of the Indian national movement(s) , particularly in the Punjab

The various resistance movements that sprung up against British colonial rule in India are often portrayed as part of one homogeneous project of holistic nationalist awakening by later nationalist historians. This was far from the truth in many cases, where the discontent, both its source and its scope, were entirely local in character. This holds true for example for the Santhal rebellion, the Chuar uprising, the revolts at Trichy or Kittur, or Gaidelou and her Nagas, and many other cases (apologies for not being able to locate and thus cite good online references for all of these). Even the great War of 1857 (which in a delicious demonstration of the politics of history writing has been variously termed "the Sepoy Mutiny" or the "First War of Indian Independence" depending on which end of the "colonial apologist - vehement nationalist" spectrum one lies), where the Marathas and Mughals, the two great (but decaying) political forces of the subcontinent the British dispossessed to build their empire, collaborated with disgruntled upper Indian soldiers in the British Indian regiments, to give the colonialists hell for sometime.  As it were, it turned out to be quite a human rights disaster, with unspeakable atrocities perpetrated on both sides, and a far cry from the mass political movements organized in the next century by the likes of Gandhi (though this again ultimately led to the Partition Holocaust of 1947).

This is not to deny the global factors - the overwhelmingly unfair nature of colonialism, and the nascent consciousness of a pan-Indian nationhood.  The leaders of the later Indian nationalist movements did usually have grand plans of nation-building, though how much of this percolated down to grass root levels, especially before Gandhi turned on his charm on the Indian masses, will always remain a question. The general consensus is that nationalist feelings in India in the modern/European sense of the word (that a more or less uniform people with their own language, culture and history needed to have their own living space with their own government) were crystallized in Bengal in the agitations that followed the Partition of Bengal in 1905. It was a wily move to divide a province along primarily religious lines that backfired for the British, but also sowed divisions that were to haunt India in the longer term. The Bengali part of the history is very clear to me, being very familiar with the cultural and political movements that had been shaping Bengal for more than a century of British rule before that.  What I am not so well-informed about is the Punjabi side of things, which is what this article was originally supposed to be about (before I digressed). I suspect that the historic causes and motivating factors in these cases were quite different, in keeping with my overall theme that local factors were often as strong as cliched global questions of colonialism vs nationalism, when it came to propelling people into different modes of political action.

The popular perception within India is that most of the revolutionary/militant nationalist movements that gathered momentum in the early part of the 20th century in India originated either in Bengal or Punjab. This more conventional side of the resistance movement is not so well known in the West where people tend to think of Gandhi and his passive resistance methods as being all there is to do with Indian nationalism (maybe because it's more "exotic") . Ethnic Bengalis and Punjabis make up the bulk of revolutionary terrorists/ militant freedom-fighters that perpetrated (or in most cases, just planned to perpetrate) violent acts against the British Raj.  Marathis and Hindi-speaking North Indians rank next in this popular stereotypical ethnic hierarchy of British-bashing that many educated Indians of my generation seem to take a lot of undue pride in, and that popular Bollywood biopics with greatly distorted historical narratives sometimes spin yarns out of (especially when things are not going so well with Pakistan).  The reason that Bengalis contributed so substantially to anti-colonial resistance movements is more or less clear to me : Bengal was the first province to come under direct British rule, its biggest city Calcutta was also the "second city" of the British empire, European ideas and infrastructure percolated into the rest of India through this great port city. It is no wonder that a native elite that had grown rich and powerful through trade with the British,  was also soon "infected" with European ideals of nationhood and political freedom. Also the discontent among the common people was more as the exploitation was more sustained, systematic, and more prolonged.  Similar things must have happened with the Marathis on the West Coast in the Bombay Presidency (of course coupled with their recent Maratha heritage of bygone political power and glory).

However the situation in Punjab was very different.  I will not go into the cliches about how diametrically opposite the provinces of Bengal and Punjab are within a South Asian context  in terms of geography and people (and instead refer you to the grossly cliched but somewhat gripping "Freedom at Midnight" for that).  Consider the following fact : by the time India won its freedom in 1947, Bengal had been under direct British rule for 190 years, and the Punjab for only 90 years (technically they were annexed by the British only after the second Anglo-Sikh war of 1848).  Punjab is far from the coasts,  and therefore also from the port cities that served as centers of European influence. Punjab was however a rich province, and strategically at the heart of all the previous overland invasions of India by various belligerent groups from Central and West Asia - and had seen a succession of empires founded and destroyed on its soil since ancient times - the Indus civilization, the somewhat nebulous Aryans, Greeks, Mauryas, Afghans, Turks, the Mughals, and finally the Sikhs. Whoever controlled Punjab and the adjoining Delhi also had a good shot at dominating the rest of the subcontinent.  It is therefore a rich and heterodox culture (with at least three dominant religions) quite used to political maneuvering, shifting allegiances, and violent conflict, that we are talking about here.  The province was strategically important to British plans of empire building too - because of its enormous riches, in terms of both men and materials, and as a stepping stone to Afghanistan.

What factors could foment the crystallization of fierce national opinion in the Punjab within a few decades of British rule then, and unite Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in a common quest for a while? One oft-cited reason which might have more than a grain of truth to it, is the "martial culture" of the Punjabi people and their religion. Sikhism, the indigenous religion, has a tradition of military saints, who fought to establish the religion in its early days against odds imposed by various Islamic rulers. This culture of martyrdom and warfare (something brought upon the people by repeated attempts of invasion through the "northwest passage") meant that the people had all the religious and cultural metaphors to draw upon when it came to resisting foreign invasion (the British colonial project was essentially that).  In fact it is the British, who in an interesting ploy, capitalizing on native stereotypes, and buoyed by the late 19th c. European obsessions with "racial science", classified Indians into "martial" and "non-martial" races. The former were supposed to produce men of natural fighting abilities and a temperament that was loyal to the high command.  The Sikhs, the Gorkhas, the Nagas or the Rajputs, Jats, and Marathas fulfilled these criteria.  To this day the regiments of the Indian army are largely drawn from these populations (it's like having a pan European army, where the Germans or the Russians have their regiments, but the Italians or Poles don't).  The Bengal regiment (which was made largely of men from upper India, as in modern UP and Bihar, who were not really ethnically Bengali by the way) was dissolved  right after 1857 - because it had played a key role in the uprising then.  So these people were no longer of "martial stock" because  they had failed to demonstrate adequate loyalty and "stability of temperament". Anyway, so after the dust had settled in the Punjab, and the Sikhs had been defeated by the British Indian army (which again mostly featured the Bengal regiment), the British went about setting up a Sikh regiment that stood loyally by them only a decade later, in 1857 when some other regiments (like the Bengal regiment) revolted.  Ever since then the Punjabi Sikhs became an important and staple feature of the British Indian army, and to this day of the modern Indian army.   This I will argue was also an important factor behind the Punjabi discontent with British rule.

The Sikhs stood loyally by the British in 1857 because in the perception of their leaders, the British were ringing in the death knell of their arch nemesis - the Mughals.  However the expected compensations and rewards for this loyalty never came.  Punjab had been annexed into British India, and was now subject to the same centralized administration, high taxation, few civil liberties, and systematic exploitation that was the norm in the rest of India. Sikh regiments were employed in warzones in the rest of the British empire -  the Opium wars, Afghanistan, East and South Africa, and finally in the Middle East and even Europe in  WW1.  Sikh soldiers must have keenly perceived the racial hierarchy that existed in the British Indian army, and how the high posts and high pays were always dominated by British officers irrespective of fighting abilities.  Their deployments all over the empire also meant that a large and influential Sikh diaspora also began to form - in parts of Asia and Africa, but also very tellingly in the Pacific coast of North America. The earliest Indian immigrants to the US and especially Canada (which was part of the Commonwealth) must have been Sikh.  Canada at the beginning of the 20th c. pursued a "white-only" racialized immigrant policy.  This is why the "Komagata Maru" incident and the subsequent Sikh disenchantment with white man's racism leading to the formation of the Ghadar party happened.  An irreversible process had been put in motion, and race relations would never be the same after that.

The central argument of my thesis is therefore, that in addition to the historical and religious  factors that go behind the "martial culture" of Punjab, their close mingling with the British in the military sphere, may have led to a sharper perception of the inherent racism of the colonial project, leading therefore to greater discontent, and greater participation in acts of national terrorism or subversion. Their diaspora and greater participation in the army meant that they were also in relatively privileged positions and had the logistics to form revolutionary networks and carry out such subversive plans. I would like to be "corrected" or supplemented by somebody better educated in Punjabi history than me.