The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood - Vidhia.com

6 THE SIKHS: SEARCH FOR STATEHOOD
the newly drawn imperial security map, among the newly classified
“martial races”, Punjabis became favourite recruits. By the First World
War, Sikhs constituted a third of the armed forces and Punjab provided
three-fifths of army recruits. Second, Punjab’s peasantry, the Muslims
and Sikhs, also benefited through the development of Canal Colonies; a
network of canals spread through the unpopulated lands in western
Punjab (Ali 1988). The British administrators developed a special
concern for Punjab’s rural peasants, a client—patron relationship whose
interests were jealously protected through the Land Alienation Act of
1900, shielding them from the powerful urban moneylenders, mostly
Hindus. Whatever the reality of imperial “divide and rule” policy in the
subcontinent, in Punjab it amounted to little more than a conscious
policy in favour of the rural classes.
Intra-elite competition and community boundaries
The European-style education and “print revolution” effected profound
changes. It introduced issues of language and scripts, social identity
issues for social groups and castes, and for the newly educated Punjabi
elite, a discovery of its past, translating its cultural ethos into the
modern idioms. As each community established schools and colleges,
the common language Punjabi was abandoned. Sanskrit and Hindi were
adopted as the medium of instruction by Hindus, Muslims adopted
Urdu, and Punjabi became the exclusive language of Sikhs. 5 Another
challenge came from Christian missionaries, who converted some
Punjabi lower classes. This set up a competing spirit of religious
revivalism among the urban elite, producing sharp ethnic boundaries,
and the embittered atmosphere often led to communal conflict and
violence. The comparatively rich urban Hindus were infused with the
aggressively proselytizing social movement of the Arya Samaj preached
by Dayanand, a Hindu reformist from Gujarat. Although Sikhs joined
hands with Hindus in launching this reformist movement, differences
arose on Aryas’ shudhi methods aimed at reconverting lower classes to
Hinduism. Arya Hindus dubbed Sikhism as a mere “sect” and its gurus
“pretenders”. Through various Singh Sabhas, the first of which was
established in 1873, the Sikh reformists took up the challenge. From
1887–8 onwards there was a war of pamphlets, when Muslims and
Sikhs tried to rebut Aryas’ charges. To Aryas’ assertion, “Sikhs are
Hindus,” Sikh reformers retorted, “Sikhs are not Hindus,” the title of a
famous tract by Kahn Singh in 1899 (Jones 1976). The new print media
at Lahore and Amritsar sharpened group consciousness, creating ethnic