Remembering interfaith activism in South Asia
In early 2020, Muslim protesters flooded the Nankana Sahib Sikh gurdwara, a Sikh holy space, in Pakistan. For some Indian observers, this provided evidence of the harassment that non-Muslims faced in modern Pakistan and justified the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in India in 2019. The CAA facilitated the easier migration into India of religious minorities from neighboring countries. However, it excluded Muslim refugees and migrants, including those fleeing India’s ongoing military occupation of Kashmir. Protests against CAA erupted across South Asia and the world, as activists condemned what they believed to be a discriminatory, anti-Muslim policy. Yet 100 years ago today, Sikh activists occupied Nankana Sahib for very different reasons. Hindu and Muslim leaders would pay tribute to this holy place to signal their shared fight against colonial rule. This earlier occupation of Nankana reveals a history of interfaith collaboration, rather than division, in South Asia that the CAA, and other exclusionary definitions of national identity, hope to erase.
The story of Nankana is rooted in the specific anti-colonial context of the First World War and the impact of military culture in the Punjab province more broadly.
On February 20, 1920, India included the modern nation states of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and was governed and occupied under British colonialism. On that day, a group of “130 Sikhs” attempted to inhabit the courtyard of the Nankana Sahib gurdwara but were “brutally massacred, the bodies being afterward burnt with kerosine [sic] oil.”[1] Allegedly, Narain Das, the manager (mahant) at Nankana, hired a private guard of Muslim Pathans—armed by the British Government of India—to defend the property. Yet the issue was certainly not a Muslim-Sikh struggle. According to the Punjab government the Nankana gurdwara was “one of the richest in the Province” but Narain Das was “a notorious ill-liver,” condemned by many fellow Sikhs.[2] Sikh activists tried to occupy the property to wrest it from his control and use the profits from the property for the betterment of the community. However, after the tragedy at Nankana, police arrested Narain Das and sent troops onto the site. The Punjab government condemned the ensuing protest by claiming that it was led by “extreme and fanatic Sikhs.”[3] Indian leaders clearly did not view things this way when Mohandas Gandhi and the pan-Islamic leaders the Ali brothers visited Nankana.[4]
The story of Nankana is rooted in the specific anti-colonial context of the First World War and the impact of military culture in the Punjab province more broadly. By the early twentieth century, Punjabis were overrepresented in British colonial forces. Sikhs famously made up 20% of soldiers in the colonial army despite being less than 1% of the population. Yet Punjabi Muslims were often regarded as the true “backbone” of the Indian Army and were the majority population of the providence. Muslim soldiers –recruited mostly from Punjab and other parts of northern India – made up roughly 30-35% of soldiers. Punjabis – whether Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh – enjoyed a reputation for being strong in body and steadfast in their service to the British, making them ideal soldiers in British minds.[5] Although discriminatory recruiting practices encouraged the selective recruitment of religious minorities like Muslims and Sikhs, service in the Indian Army was always an interfaith enterprise. Anti-colonial movements often built on the interfaith potential of the army.
Perhaps the most prominent vehicle of resistance during the First World War was the Ghadar – or Mutiny – movement which attempted to start a rebellion in the Indian Army. Ghadar leaders targeted Punjabi regiments, South Asian veterans in North America, migrants in Southeast Asia, and prospective recruits. Intelligence officers observed that most Ghadarites were Sikh and over 50% were ex-soldiers. Yet it built on prewar interfaith networks that emerged from shared hardships in Punjab. In 1907, a deadly famine devastated Punjab. Two Sikh sepoys reportedly visited a mosque in Kissa Khani Bazar, Peshawar, urging Muslims to convince the Amir of Afghanistan to send forces against the British. Around the same time a “seditious leaflet” addressed to Indian soldiers appeared in the D.A.V. and Islamia Colleges of Lahore. It called for “Sikhs and Pathans” to rise up because the “motherland” had “hopelessly fallen into the hands of the enemy.”[6] When a group of would-be Punjabi migrants were forcibly returned to India in 1914 after trying to settle in British Canada on the notorious ship Komagata Maru, Ghadar gained many enthusiastic new supporters.
Ghadar activists benefited from the rapid mobility of wartime, circulating in recruiting districts and wartime festivals. Gurdwaras and mosques in Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Bangkok became centers for spreading Ghadar ideas to troops. This even contributed to a Mutiny in Singapore in February 1915.[7] The revolt lasted seven days and resulted in the death of dozens of soldiers and civilians, including the execution of nearly fifty South Asian soldiers. At the time, British officials focused on the “religious” motivations of Muslim troops of the 5th Light Infantry and inefficiencies among commanding officers. However, many soldiers identified Hindu and Sikh soldiers and civilians as leaders and instigators of the rebellion. The Singapore Mutiny, therefore, was a truly interfaith revolt against colonialism.
Ghadar’s early success led to a crackdown on “sedition” in India. British officials employed spies to infiltrate Indian ranks and executed twenty people for participating in the so-called “Lahore Conspiracy.” This rooting-out of anti-colonial activists continued after the war with the passage of the Rowlatt Bills in 1919 and the extension of the anti-sedition Defence of India Act. Gandhi launched a non-cooperation campaign, attracting supporters across political and religious divides. Much of India – and especially Punjab – continued to suffer under inflation, the loss of family members in the war, the influenza pandemic, and political repression. Soldiers redeployed their wartime militarism for anti-colonialism.
Many grew more steadfast after the tragic events of April 13, 1919. Many Sikhs had entered into the holy city of Amritsar, and the famed Golden Temple, to celebrate the festival Baisakhi (Vaisakhi), which commemorated the formation of the Sikh Khalsa (elect) warrior fraternity[8]. Yet the city was tense with recent bans on public gatherings. Facing a large crowd near the Golden Temple, General Reginald Dyer ordered fifty South Asian soldiers to open fire at Jallainwala Bagh, killing 379 and wounding over 1,200.[9] The firing emboldened nationalist and anti-colonial movements, which were already empowered by Gandhi’s activism and pan-Islamic critiques of British power that were expanding into Muslim lands of the former Ottoman Empire. Sikh protesters, meanwhile, flooded into the holy city bearing swords in the hopes reclaiming the keys to the Golden Temple from government-appointed officials. The Government of India recognized their tenuous position and conceded control to the newly formed Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) which claimed the right to manage Sikh holy spaces.[10] This inspired Sikh leaders to possess other gurdwaras managed by Sikhs who collaborated with the colonial state or deviated in their performance of Sikh identity. They organized along military lines and forcibly occupied gurdwaras throughout the 1920s. One of these was Nankana, which would become a symbol of united activism.
Mohandas Gandhi and the Ali brother’s decision to pay tribute after the tragic violence at Nankana continued the trend of prewar and wartime interfaith activism. Leaders agreed that an attack against one community made all communities vulnerable. Challenging the injustices of colonial rule, they realized, required collective action. As economic depression and political disagreements took over much of the anti-colonial conversation in the 1930s and 1940s, interfaith activism, at times, became peripheral rather than integral to the anti-colonial project. Yet division along religious differences was not an inevitable outcome of decolonization in South Asia. There were many histories of unity that challenged rather than facilitated violence between communities. The desire of modern nation-states to categorize people as citizens or “other” bares more similarity to the colonial past than the interfaith activists who challenged it.
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Notes
[1] Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, “Note on the Sikh question in the Punjab, 1919-1922,” (June 1922).
[2] Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, “The Kirpan Question,” 1924.
[3] Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, “Note on the Sikh question in the Punjab, 1919-1922,” (June 1922).
[4] Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, “The Kirpan Question,” 1924; Satya M. Rai, Legislative Politics and Freedom Struggle on [sic] the Panjab 1897-1947 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1984).
[5] See for example Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Santanu Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-18 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Daniel Marston, The Indian Army at the End of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Heather Streets Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
[6] Director of Criminal Intelligence, Weekly Report, (4 January 1908), Home Department, Political, (January 1908), file 111-118 B, NAI.
[7] Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[8] Shrabani Basu, For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2015).
[9] Derek Sayer, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920,” Past & Present 131 (May, 1991): 130-164; Kim Wagner, “‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 233, 1 (2016): 185-225.
[10] Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849-1947 (New Delhi and London: Sage, 2005).
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