|
[Presented on the
Ghadar Cent. Conference Stockton California 22 Sept 2012]
A large volume of literature has been produced on the Ghadar Movement
since independence. It is well-known that the Punjabis represented an
over-whelming majority of the Ghadarites, and an over-whelming proportion
of the Ghadarites were Sikhs. Therefore the ideological moorings of the
Sikh leaders of the Ghadar Movement become important issue. Indeed,
scholars have taken different views on this subject. We may take notice of
a few to illustrate the point.
In his Ghadar Party Lehar (1955), Jagjit Singh underlined that the Singh
Sabha movement served as a kind a renaissance among the peasants of the
Central Punjab. For the first time under colonial rule, the tradition of
sacrifice and martyrdom in Sikh history was made popular among the Sikh
masses. It had created a social consciousness among the peasants who
emigrated to North America and other countries and participated in the
Ghadar movement. Though there was hardly any political consciousness among
the Sikh peasantry in the early twentieth century, there was an awareness
of new ideas with regard to social reform. This background had a great
potentiality for inducing them to adopt a revolutionary path. 1
Harish K. Puri completed his doctoral thesis on the Ghadar Movement in the
1970s. It was published as the Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and
Strategy 1983.
In his introduction, he talks of ‘the relevance or irrelevance of religion
in political violence’ as an important issue, and in his discussion of the
‘background’ he notices that the Singh Sabha Movement had its followers in
Canada. They were described in an intelligence report. As a section of
‘clannish Sikhs’; their ‘jealously and bigotry’ kept alive the ill-feeling
between the clean shaven and the other Sikhs. Teja Singh was referred to
as ‘something of a religious fanatic’, though he was concerned with
‘making life easier for the peasant’ as well as with religious conversion.
2 This appears to suggest that the Singh Sabha ideology had no bearing on
the Ghadar.
Indeed, an article published by Harish K. Puri in 1983 makes it clear that
in his well considered view the Singh Sabha and the Ghadar movements were
two ‘divergent patterns of psychological orientations and structures of
belief, values and attitudes towards political objects’. The initiators of
the Singh Sabha Movement were ‘landed aristocrats, mahants, pujaris and
priests’. Among them were also the Sehajdharis. The mahants and pujaris
‘condemned the Ghadarites as patit Sikhs and enemies of the panth‘.
General Dyer was ‘honoured’ and ‘initiated as a Sikh’ at the initiative of
the Chief Khalsa Diwan. The Nirankaris and the Namdharis had aimed at
restoring ‘the pristine purity of Khalsa norms’, with particular emphasis
on ‘the observance of the five Ks’ so that the Sikhs did not get
‘assimilated among the Hindus’. Under the leadership of Baba Ram Singh,
the Namdhari movement became ‘more radical and militant’. The Singh Sabha
Movement was ‘an alternative’ to the Namdhari movement.3 What Harish Puri
had in mind was the militancy of the Namdharis and the loyalty of the
Singh Sabhas. It may also be added that the Nirankaris did not assign any
importance to the Khalsa initiation and the 5Ks.
According to Harish Puri, the British wanted to strengthen ‘the loyalty of
the Sikh soldier’. They believed strongly that religious orthodoxy of the
Sikh soldier in the army was ‘crucial for his loyalty to the empire’.
Therefore they decided to enlist ‘only Keshadharis into regiments’.
Simultaneously, the control of Gurdwaras through government appointed
sarbrahs was sought to be strengthened through priests and mahants fo
promoting ‘the desired hegemonic influence’. In this set of conditions,
the Singh Sabha Movement was launched. Among its leaders were educated
urban Sikhs and trading classes. Their conflict with the Arya Samaj
strengthened the urge to assert that the Sikhs were a distinct community.
‘In the process, it developed among the community, largely in the urban
areas, a distinct political orientation based on separate community
interests.’ The other two communities in the province were seen as
‘threats to the Sikh community’. 4
The Ghadar movement, on the other hand, developed ‘just the contrary
structure of political orientations’. The Ghadarite interpretation of the
community’s heritage was ‘very different from, almost contrary’ to the one
argued by the Singh Sabhas and the Chief Khalsa Diwan and ‘what some near
to that articulated by the Kakas’. The Ghadarites sought inspiration from
the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh for armed struggle in a righteous cause
and from the brave Sikh crusaders like Banda Singh Bahadur, Dip Singh,
Mahtab Singh, Hari Singh, and Phula Singh. For the Ghadarites the Guru’s
‘Singh’ was distinguished not by ‘a ritualistic adherence to external
forms, as the Singh Sabha advocated’, but by ‘the bravery and
self-sacrificing spirit to fight the enemy’. The Ghadar poets referred to
the Khalsa or the Panth as a force created for the defence of the country
and for ending oppression of ‘Bharat Mata’. ‘The Panth therefore
was to be judged by its service in the cause of the country’s freedom’.
The stress f the Ghadarites was on ‘the primacy of politics and rejection
of preoccupation with matters of religion.’ At best, religion could be
accepted as ‘a private affair’. ‘Casteism’ was completely rejected by the
Ghadarites and in their social relations they never cared much for keeping
long hair and beards or eating jhatka or halal. ‘This orientation
naturally aroused the wrath of the orthodox against the Ghadarites’. In
Haish Puri’s view, the Gurdwara Reform Movement was a structure of
orientations “somewhere midway between the two’, the Singh Sabha and the
Ghadar movements. 5
We have outlined Harish K. Puri’s well considered view of the irrelevance
of the Singh Sabha movement for the Ghadar partly because he has modified
his view only slightly by now, buy largely because, his view does not
appear to find support from the available evidence on the Singh Sabha
Movement.
In The Sikhs of the Punjab (1990) my view of the relevance of the Singh
Sabha Movement for the Ghadar was different from that of Harish Puri. I
pointed out that some of the Sikh leaders of the Ghadar Movement recalled
later that they had been inspired to live or die heroically by the novels
of Bhai Vir Singh and the Panth Prakash of Giani Gian Singh. They acquired
a genuinely ‘national’ outlook, but their source of inspiration remained
‘almost exclusively Sikh.’ They evoked the memory of Sikh heroes and
martyrs, and referred to the Sikh past as a struggle for liberation. Not
indifference to faith but a secular interpretation of the heritage
distinguished them from the Singh Sabha
reformers of the Punjab. 6
In his Ghadar Movement: A Short History (2011), Harish K. Puri states at
the outset that Lala Har Dyal was the “inspirational genius” of the
Ghadar. However, it was mainly a movement of the Punjabi Sikh patriots of
India. Their political ideas were shaped by their experience in Canada,
USA and other countries of the world. Harish Puri has outlined the
historical, social and political context of the Punjab at the time when
Punjabis started migrating to North America. ‘The leading figures appeared
to have carried with them some of the reformist ideas to the foreign
lands’. They kept the outward symbols of conduct associated with Guru
Gobind Singh, which inspired respect for them among their brethren. ‘But
they did not approve of orthodoxy in such matters’.7 This assessment of
the situation seems to suggest that even the leading figures among the
Sikh emigrants were content with observing the outward symbols of the
Khalsa and they had no ideological moorings relevant for the Ghadar
Movement.
The socio-religious reform movements mentioned by Haris Puri in this
publication are the Brahmo Samaj and its offshoot the Dev Samaj, the Arya
Samaj, and the Singh Sabha Movement. Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna was ‘a
follower of the Namdhari Guru Baba Ram Singh’. However the influence of
the Singh Sabha ideas or attitude is not visible in the case of any Sikh
leader. The leader of the Amritsar Singh Saba were Sanatan Sikhs who
looked upon Sikhism as an offshoot of Hinduism. The leaders of the Lahore
Singh Sabha devoted their energy to the assertion of a distinct identity
of the Sikhs and their boundary demarcation from the Hindus. ‘Sikhism in
danger’ was a major part of their rhetoric. The British military officials
were keen to promote separate identity and religious orthodoxy among the
Sikhs for their own reasons. 8
It must be added, however, that in the Ghadar Movement Harish Puri noticed
in the Sikh Ghadarites ‘a romance of shaheedi (shahadat; martyrdom)
imbibed perhaps from the Sikh tradition’.9 The qualifying ‘perhaps’
indicates that the author is not exactly aware of the Singh Sabha emphasis
on martyrdom as an essential feature of the Sikh tradition. Dedication of
‘tan, man and dhan (body, mind and money)’ comes from the Sikh Scripture.
The legendary bravery of the Sikh warriors in the Sikh wars against the
British was invoked by Kartar Singh Sarabha and Harnam Singh. There are
other such examples, but there is no need to list them. The essential
point is that the empirical evidence used by Harish Puri himself bears
witness to the relevance of Sikh ideology for the Sikh leaders even though
this relevance is denied in his formulation by Harish Puri.
More recently, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna’s Meri Ram Kahani has been
published in a book form. It was originally serialized in 1930-31 in the
Akali Te Pardesi, started by Master Tara Singh in the 1920s. Master Tara
Singh had earned the displeasure of the British done official for helping
the deputation of Canadian Sikhs in 1913. He organized large meetings in
Lyallpur and the Rawalpindi area at which resolutions were passed in
support of the Sikhs in Canada. In any case, Meri Ram Kahani presents
fascinating evidence on the relevance of the Sikh faith and Sikh ideology
for Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna. He was not indifferent to religion. For him,
religion and politics were two ways of serving mankind. His observations
on religion in general, and the Sikh Panth, and his understanding of Baba
Ram Singh’s position, call for serious attention. 10
Finally, there is the issue of ‘methodology’. The quantum and the nature
of evidence, and the question of its interpretation are of obvious
importance. For a meaningful interpretation of evidence on the Ghadar
Movement it is absolutely essential to study the Sikh movements of the
colonial period in some depth, and that too in the light of the
pre-colonial Sikh Movement. Impressions formed on the basis of ‘secondary’
works can be misleading, and remain more or less inadequate.
NOTES
1. Jagjit Singh, Ghadar Party Lehar, New Delhi: Navyug, 2000 (3rd. edn.),
p. 56. 2. Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and
Strategy, Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1993 (2nd. edn.), pp. 5,
57-8.
3. Harish K. Puri, ‘Singh Sabha and Ghadar Movements: Contending Political
Orientations’, in Ghadar Movement to Bhagat Singh: A Collection of Essays,
Chandigarh: Unistar, 2012, pp. 44-7.
4. Ibid., pp. 47-50.
5. Ibid., pp. 50-9.
6. J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (The New Cambridge History of
India, II. 3), Cambridge : Cambridge University press 1990, pp. 153-6.
7. Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: A Short History, New Delhi: The
National Book Trust, India, 2011, pp. xi-xiii, 14.
8. Ibid., pp. 11-13.
9. Ibid., p. xvi.
10. Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, Meri Ram Kahani, ed., Rajwinder Singh Rahi,
Samana: Sangam Publications, 2012.
-0- |
