How have local histories shaped, and been shaped by, the processes of globalisation?
By Alexander Casse, Third Year History student
Reason for publication:
This paper addresses the effects of the 1947 Partition of India on the Sikh communities of Punjab. While much work has been done to map out the events of the partition in relation to the the majority Muslim and Hindu camps, there has been a significant disparity of analysis in respect to Sikh narratives. It is my conviction that this essay provides a detailed and enlightening overview of the effects of a messy partition on cosmopolitan spaces that Sikhs once inhabited and its subsequent effects on not only Sikh ways of life but also their agency in the nascent sovereign state of India. It is relatively short yet manages to incorporate some of the most prominent aspects of the Sikh movements for agency, their struggles against marginalisation and the dismantlement of their local histories. It is a concise essay with significant depth, that engages thoroughly with the historiography and challenges some of the preconceptions of Sikh paradigms post-partition.
Preface:
For the purposes of this essay globalisation is defined as the process of increasing political, social, and economic interaction of a nation-state beyond its borders with the global community, and in the case of the Partition of India, their first foray as nation-states into the global sphere. As such, the mere process of becoming a nation-state is by correlation also a process of globalisation as it is the prerequisite for independent global interaction. Decolonisation will also be grouped under globalisation for this very reason and will be used as the primary process of globalisation that has affected the course of local histories in this essay’s chosen case study of Punjabi Sikhs. Before this investigation begins in earnest, it is vital to challenge the preconceptions of globalisation as an entirely positive force. This essay will endeavour to argue that some groups may be left in the dust in the pursuit of lofty globalising ambitions such as nationhood. It seeks to analyse the problematic position of newly stratified and formalised religious and social divisions on the populations of globalising regions as well as determining how minority groups can be underrepresented.
The 1947 Partition of India has been a cornerstone of the narrative of globalisation, as it effectively created an immediate mesocosm of processes that would later become associated with the term. The exit of Pakistan and India from a colonial sphere signified the first step as nations towards interaction with the broader world and thus the initiation of globalisation. However, this egress from empire was disruptive and violent in nature and created some of the clearest divergence of local histories in the world, providing historians with a concise case study, as to how a globalising process such as decolonisation affected local histories and in the same vein how they have affected the wider world. For this reason, the case study of Punjabi Sikhs will be the primary lens through which this question will be answered. The case study will be analysed with respect to how their local histories would be affected by the Partition of India, and secondly how Sikh local histories had agency over how the globalising process of decolonisation progressed. This will be approached through two arguments: firstly, that the process of decolonisation had severely displaced local social, migratory, religious, and political histories, yet in some cases also reinforced them. Finally, that although the concessions afforded to Sikhs by the Mountbatten delegation left much to be desired in securing religious security and autonomy, Sikh efforts in the partition were still vital in shaping the process of globalisation to their interests.
First, it is essential to understand the forces prompting nationhood and thus globalisation through the Partition of India, as to not take decolonisation as a self-evident process. The era of decolonisation would find its provenance in a weakened British hegemony that was now thoroughly at the mercy of U.S. whims. As Eric Hobsbawm argued, the “force and legitimacy of old colonialism had been severely undermined” following the terminus of WWII, due to economic and political issues in the United Kingdom. Britain’s economy had taken a severe beating during the war and now found itself indebted to the United States to avoid bankruptcy. In addition to this, they had also swapped from being a creditor to India, to being a debtor. Thus, they found it continually harder to justify British presence there to the British population, who were aware that British retainment of the Raj would be economically detrimental. Additionally, it became far harder to sway the increasingly unsettled locals who had been living under British rule for nearly a century and had more recently been indignant to the continued demands by the British for Indian participation in the Second World War.
Although the reasons as to why this globalising force picked up significant steam are not the focus of this essay, I felt compelled to contextualise the partition, as the chaotic nature is very much derived by how unsustainable Britain’s continued presence was in the region, which resulted in an expedited, but mishandled partition.
In this vein a retired civil servant of the British Raj by the name of Malcolm Darling had predicted in 1946: “what a hash politics threaten to make of this tract [of Punjab], where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are as mixed up as the ingredients of a well-made pilau”, and by 1947 this had been realised. The Partition of India resulted in a riptide that catapulted heterogeneous religious communities into disarray, with century-old bonds torn apart by the artificial borders imposed upon them by the Mountbatten committee. The cohesive nature of commonality within the Punjabi community is further exemplified by Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s request to Viceroy Mountbatten in April of 1947, to not meddle with the unity of Punjab which he asserted had “national characteristics in common history, common ways of life”. This commonality that as Jinnah knew it, had been thoroughly dismantled by the terminus of the partition process.
One of the most explicit and emblematic examples of the partition dismantling religious and communal diversities is that of Sikh communities in Pakistani Punjab. The creation of a Muslim state in Pakistan had evoked a sense of absolute entitlement to their new homeland, thus seeing violence against Sikh minorities in the Punjab region rising and Sikh exodus’ becoming more common, as their homes were seized or destroyed. This completely altered the local history of Sikhism in the region, with Sikh populations vanishing from Pakistani Punjabi districts in favour of joining the officially secular Indian state across the border, where they would find a less fervent population. It is clear then that communal connections had been torn apart by the process of partition, with the growing rift between Sikhs and Muslims being succinctly summarised by the previously mentioned Malcolm Darling who despite his lofty delusions of grandeur and unplaceable attitude towards the Empire, travelled Punjab and interviewed Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. His interviews, although anecdotal illustrate the effects that a messy decolonisation had set in motion; distrust, opportunism and polarisation. Sikh populations in the area stated that before movements for nationalism, Muslims and Sikhs had lived side by side without fear, yet now “they eye each other critically and keep apart”. However, one may argue that since Darling’s interactions with Punjabi locals were anecdotal, his findings are not representative, but considering that a near 0% of Sikhs stayed in the Pakistani side of Punjab, it is entirely safe to say that the differences between the two groups had now become near irreconcilable, and Darling’s anecdotal findings are buttressed by census evidence. Thus, the process of decolonisation and the resultant creation of two new nation-states usurped the cosmopolitan, heterogeneous status quo of Punjab, and set Sikhs and Muslims against each other. However, it is crucial to contextualise this violence as not only the product of newly found nationalist energy but also as the result of negligence on the part of the United Kingdom. They removed peacekeeping forces and “shift[ed] the responsibility for peacekeeping to nascent governments”, creating a power vacuum and an essential free for all, where Sikhs; those with no nation to protect them, were ravaged. Ultimately, this conflict shaped a local history of socio-migratory divisions, with Sikhs becoming more averse to interaction with Muslim populations and unable to return to Pakistani Punjab.
The displacement of Punjabi Sikhs also meant that they were forced from their heartlands, sequestering many of their major holy sites such as Kartarpur and Nankana Sahib in the hostile state of Pakistan. No longer were Sikh people able to freely make pilgrimage between their holy sites. The heavily militarised border of Pakistan and the considerable animosity between the two new states meant that the minority community of the Sikhs were mostly left to the wayside with little consideration. Sikh’s who wished to undertake pilgrimages would have a difficult time doing so, as the new states of Pakistan and India would come to clash on many occasions over the next decades, and freedom of movement is still severely restricted. This globalisation imposed local history of a divided Sikh heartland, has only recently begun to be addressed, with a visa-free corridor being established to Kartapur on November 9th, 2018. The sheer delay on any concessions toward the Sikh minority indicates the reinforcement of historical Sikh marginalisation in Punjab.
The Partition of India was not, like many things, absolute in its ends. As well as creating divergent paths for Sikh local histories, it has also reinforced older, specifically political ones. Being a clear minority in India, Sikh interests and identities have often been conflated with Hindu ones, as is very clearly outlined in Sikh text Hum Hindu Nahin (We Are Not Hindus), which describes the ignorance of British occupiers in distinguishing the two for the sake of convenience. It would appear that by the process of the 1947 partition, Sikhs were yet again denied further differentiation from the predominant Muslim and Hindu camps. According to correspondences between the Sikh representative in the Partition, Baldev Singh and the Mountbatten delegation, Sikhs were originally intent on the creation of an independent state in Punjab, or at the very least the affordance of significant autonomy; however, ultimately they were denied this privilege. This reinforced a local history of marginalisation through colonial decree. Subsequently, to offset the lack of concessions, the Mountbatten delegation decided that “resourcefulness should not fail in the case of Sikhs and their problems must also be resolved to their satisfaction”. Such assurances meant that they received such concessions as “Guarantee[s] that the traditional strength of Sikhs shall be maintained in the Armed Forces of Hindustan both in Officers and rank” reinforcing the Khalsa tradition of Sikh military service that had been established in the army of the British Raj. However, this perennial local history of ‘much-vaunted militancy’ would be atomised by the incredible violence of the partition, castrating the lofted pride of Sikh militancy through a salvo of Muslim attacks in Punjab.
Thus, decolonisation cemented the local history of denial of autonomous rule for Sikhs in Punjab, but only to an extent. As V.P Menon, the Political Reforms Commissioner to Viceroy Mountbatten illustrates that Sikhs did acquire forms of communal representation, but not necessarily self-government. These assertions by Menon are supported by official “Safeguard” decrees that he helped institute with the Mountbatten committee which included piecemeal provisions such as constitutional protections, minimum representation in “both Houses of Federal Legislature” and at least one minister in the Federal Cabinet. However, these political concessions were simply insufficient for the Sikh population, who were seen as the ‘orphans’ of the new status quo, as the division of the heartland were too severe to overcome. According to Pashuara Singh, this ultimately led to a local history of “ambivalence” to Indian politics and the nation as a whole and begs the analysis of Sikh agency in the partition; to what extent did they guide the process of globalisation to their own mould?
The partition placed the Sikh minorities at low priority status, with many Sikh historians such P. Singh arguing that they were overshadowed by the dominant camps of Hindus and Muslims. The sentiments that they had been severely marginalised during the partition were reinforced by the voluminous Transfer of Power documents that were produced by the parties involved in the process of decolonisation, with the majority of the documents featuring Indian National Congress and the Muslim League representatives. This narrative, of course, is not wholly incorrect, Sikh minorities had been considered a part of the Hindu sphere of religion for the purposes of partition and were thus, as Hum Hindu Nahim illustrated near 50 years prior, fused at the hip to an Indian paradigm with no hope of independence.
However, this narrative also implies that Sikh agency in the partition was negligible and their local histories had no effect on the process of decolonisation, this is not the case, and traditional historiography does not properly reflect the impact the Sikhs did have on the partition. Had it not been for Sikh boycotts and ardent protest, the process of globalisation would have been even more detrimental to Sikh interests in the region as these. Without the work of key actors like Baldev Singh, Sikh representation in the new Interim Government would have been diminutive and divided along with a truncated Punjab; they had fought to keep the division of Punjab as limited as possible. They had also worked tirelessly against a manifesto known as the Cripps Plan in 1942, which contained a clause that would permit Muslim majority provinces to secede from India entirely, this would essentially leave the 4 million Punjabi Sikhs at the mercy of a majority Muslim nation. Historically, repression of Sikhs by Muslim rulers has not been uncommon, with Mughal rulers having enacted sect repression in the past. From this Sikhs derived a deep sense of anxiety, exemplified by a Member of the Punjab Legislative assembly, Giani Kartar Singh stating that “We have already had some experience of Muslim rule in Punjab and we feel that in the future when British control is withdrawn we will be in very serious danger.” This would come back to haunt them in May of 1946 when a Cabinet Mission from Great Britain proposed that Punjab be afforded to Pakistan in the partition. Sikh leaders stated that this course of action would be “injurious to their interests” and boycotted the assembly, this along with refusals of alliance with the Muslim League meant that proposal came to a standstill. It would be a truism to say, however, that their minority status would have put them in an almost impossible position if the Indian National Congress had decided to support the proposal. Despite this, since the Hindu majority was averse, Sikhs knew they had agency over the Muslim camp and were able to mould the partition to their interests.
In conclusion, the globalising force of the Partition of India nullified local histories of cosmopolitan communities, sequestered Sikhs from Muslim intermingling; resulting in contempt, and stripped them of some of their most important holy sites. However, the partition also cemented previous local histories such as the denial of autonomous rule, marginalisation, and conflation with Hindu identities, and Sikh Khalsa traditions of militarism. Despite this, Sikhs also affected their influence onto the processes of globalisation by being heavily involved in the partition, levying their admittedly paltry nominal influence very admirably, and having a significant say in the political landscape of Punjab and the nature of statehood post-partition.
Bibliography
Secondary Sources
Bayly, C. A., “The Pre-History of ‘; Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1985, doi:10.1017/S0026749X00012300.
Hill, K., et al. “The Demographic Impact of Partition in the Punjab in 1947.” Population Studies, vol. 62, no. 2, 2008, JSTOR.
Hobsbawm, E. J., Age of Extremes: 1914-1991. Folio Society, 2005.
Jalal, Ayesha., Struggle for Pakistan: a Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. Belknap Harvard, 2017.
Khan, Yasmin., The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan: New Edition. Yale University Press, 2017.
Louis, William Roger, and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Decolonization” in William Roger Louis (ed), Ends of British Imperialism. Routledge, 1994.
Mansergh, Nicholas, and Esmond Walter Rawson. Lumby. The Transfer of Power 1942-7. Vol. 7, 8, 11, H.M.S.O., 1970.
Menon, V. P. The Transfer of Power in India. Orient BlackSwan, 2017.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Pant, Harsh V. “A Bloody Mess.” The Review of Politics, vol. 70, no. 4, 2008, JSTOR.
Shaw, Jeffrey M., and Timothy J. Demy. War and Religion an Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict. ABC-Clio, 2017.
Singh, Bhai Kahan., and Jarnail Singh. Sikhs, We Are Not Hindus. J. Singh, 1984.
Tan, Tai Yong., and Gyanesh Kudaisya. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. Routledge, 2005.
Cover image credit: Mario on Flickr