Before Part 6
This is the part where I found the thing I was actually looking for.
I started this research wanting to understand 1984. I did not expect the most useful key to be sitting in the 1920s. But Chapter 8 of this part contains a pattern that, once I saw it, I could not stop seeing — and it changed how I read everything from Part 8 onward.
The puzzle is simple to state. Between 1914 and 1918, roughly sixty per cent of all combat troops raised in India came from Punjab — a province with maybe seven or eight per cent of the population. The same province, in the same decades, produced the Ghadar Party, the Komagata Maru, Jallianwala Bagh, Bhagat Singh, the Babbar Akalis and a five-year mass civil disobedience campaign that the British lost.
Most accounts pick one half and quietly drop the other. Indian nationalist history is embarrassed by the loyalty and tends to skip 1857. Punjabi pride writing is not embarrassed by anything, but it rarely mentions that Ghadar was largely founded by men who had worn the King's uniform.
I did not want to write either of those books. So Chapter 8 tries to answer the question properly: how was Punjab simultaneously the most loyal and the most rebellious province in British India?
The answer is not hypocrisy, and it is not two different sets of people. It is one thing, and it produces a test I will use for the rest of this work.
Two warnings about this part. Chapter 1 says plainly that Punjab did not join the Revolt of 1857 and gives the reasons without softening them; that will annoy some readers and I think it is necessary. And Chapter 7 argues that Bhagat Singh — the most claimed man in Punjabi history — held written positions that most of the people who claim him would reject outright. I have quoted what he wrote rather than what is said about him.
— L.S.The contradiction
In 1849 the British annexed Punjab by force. In 1857 Punjabi troops helped them hold India. By 1918 Punjab was supplying more soldiers to the Empire than any other province by an enormous margin. And in exactly those same years it produced more anti-colonial violence, and more anti-colonial martyrs, than almost anywhere else.
Here are the two lists. Read them as one province, because that is what they are.
| What Punjab gave the Empire | What Punjab did to the Empire |
|---|---|
| Troops that besieged and retook Delhi in 1857 | The Kuka movement — arguably India's first non-cooperation campaign — and 65 men blown from cannons at Malerkotla in 1872 |
| Roughly 54% of the entire British Indian Army by the First World War | The Ghadar Party, 1913 — and 42 executions in the Lahore Conspiracy Case |
| Around 60% of all combat troops raised in India, 1914–18 | The Komagata Maru, 1914 |
| Punjabi soldiers at Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa | Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 — and Udham Singh shooting Michael O'Dwyer in London twenty-one years later |
| Loyal landholding elites cemented by canal-colony land grants | Pagri Sambhal Jatta, 1907 — India's first successful mass farmers' movement, which forced a repeal |
| A revenue base and a granary that fed India | Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, hanged at Lahore in 1931 |
| Reliable hereditary mahants running the gurdwaras | The Akali morchas, 1920–25 — five years of mass non-violent resistance, which the British lost |
The usual response to this table is to say that some Punjabis were collaborators and others were patriots. That is partly true and mostly shallow, because in a great many cases they were the same families, and sometimes the same people. The Ghadar Party was founded substantially by ex-soldiers. The Babbar Akalis included army veterans. Bhagat Singh's family had both revolutionaries and military connections in it.
That sentence is the thesis of this part. Chapter 8 shows the working.
11857
Eight years after the British took Punjab by force, Punjabi soldiers helped them keep India. This is the most uncomfortable fact in Punjabi modern history and I am going to state it plainly before explaining it.
What happened
The Revolt of 1857 began in the Bengal Army and spread across the Gangetic plain. Delhi was taken by the rebels, and Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was proclaimed the sovereign of Hindustan.
Punjab did not join. More than that: Punjab supplied a substantial part of the force that besieged Delhi through the summer of 1857 and stormed it in September. Sikh and Punjabi Muslim troops were central to the operation. The Punjab administration under John Lawrence disarmed the suspect regiments in the province, raised new ones, and sent men and supplies east.
The British themselves said afterwards that Punjab saved India for them. They were probably right.
Why — four reasons, none of them flattering or shameful
1. The mutineers were the army that had beaten Punjab. This is the reason most often left out, and I think it is the biggest. The Bengal Army regiments that rose in 1857 were substantially the same regiments that had fought the Khalsa at Ferozeshah, Sobraon, Chillianwala and Gujrat between 1845 and 1849. Punjab was not being invited to join a national liberation struggle — no such concept existed yet. It was being invited to help the men who had conquered it eight years earlier.
2. The revolt's banner was the restoration of the Mughal empire. Read Part 4 again and ask what that proposition looked like to a Sikh in 1857. The Mughal state had executed the fifth Guru, beheaded the ninth, killed all four sons of the tenth, dismembered Banda Singh Bahadur and placed a price on Sikh heads. Restoring the dynasty in Delhi was not an attractive offer.
3. The administration had been relatively competent. John and Henry Lawrence's board had reduced revenue demands from the crushing levels of the last Sikh years, abolished some abuses, and invested in roads and canals. For a peasant, the eight years since annexation had not been worse than the ten before it.
4. Opportunity. Pay, plunder rights at Delhi, and land. The Punjab Irregular Force and the new levies offered a career.
There is a genre of Indian writing that tries to argue Punjab secretly supported 1857, or that the loyalty was somehow forced. The evidence does not support it. Punjabis fought for the British at Delhi and they did it willingly and effectively.
What I would add is this: the framework in which this counts as "betraying India" did not exist in 1857. There was no India in the political sense to betray. There were kingdoms, provinces, communities and an expanding Company. Judging 1857 Punjabis by the standards of 1947 nationalism is exactly the kind of anachronism I flagged in Part 1's scorecard.
The interesting question is not whether Punjab was disloyal to a nation that did not yet exist. It is what the British learned from 1857 — because that lesson is Chapter 2, and it shaped everything for the next ninety years.
The lesson the British took
The Bengal Army was broken up and reconstituted. Recruitment was shifted decisively toward the north-west, toward the communities that had not mutinied.
Within thirty years this ad hoc reaction had been dressed up as a scientific theory.
2The martial races
A political classification of who had and had not mutinied in 1857 was rebranded as biology, taught for seventy years, and believed by the people it described. Its effects are still visible in two countries.
What the theory claimed
The "martial races" doctrine was codified after 1857 and is particularly associated with Lord Frederick Roberts, Commander-in-Chief in India from 1885 to 1893.
It held that certain communities were inherently warlike by race and climate — Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Dogras, Gurkhas, Rajputs, Jats — while others were inherently unwarlike and unsuitable for military service, notably Bengalis and most southern Indians.
Recruitment was reorganised around this. Regiments were raised on a "class" basis. Recruiting officers worked defined districts. Entire careers, pension systems and land-grant schemes were built on the classification.
Why it was nonsense
Take the claim seriously for one paragraph and it falls apart.
- The Marathas, classified as unmartial, had built an empire that dominated eighteenth-century India and had to be broken by the British in three wars.
- The Bengal Army — recruited from the very populations later declared unmartial — is the army that conquered India for the East India Company. Plassey, Buxar, the Maratha wars, the Anglo-Sikh wars.
- The Madras Army won Assaye, which Wellington called the hardest battle he ever fought.
So what actually changed between 1800 and 1880?
Not biology. The Bengal Army mutinied in 1857 and the Punjabis did not. The "martial races" are, with striking precision, the communities that stayed loyal in 1857, and the "non-martial races" are the ones that rose.
Why it worked anyway — including on Punjabis
It gave the British a reliable recruiting base that was politically safe, geographically concentrated and cheap to administer. It divided Indians against each other along an axis that flattered some and insulted others, making a united nationalist army almost unthinkable.
And here is the part that matters most for this book: the people so classified believed it.
Being told by the dominant global empire that you belong to a superior fighting race is intoxicating, and it was internalised deeply enough that it is still repeated in Punjab today as though it were a compliment about ancestry rather than a colonial personnel policy. Part 1's scorecard already showed that Punjab's oldest civilisation was strikingly unwarlike; Part 2 and Part 3 showed the warrior culture being built by geography and invasion. The martial-races story replaced that real, earned history with a fake racial one — and the fake one was more flattering, so it stuck.
The numbers
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Punjabi share of the entire British Indian Army by the First World War | ~54% |
| Share of all combat troops raised in India, August 1914 – November 1918, from Punjab | ~60% |
| Total Indian soldiers in the First World War | ~1.4 million |
| Of whom Punjabi | Over half |
| Punjab's share of British India's population | Roughly 7–8% |
| Indian dead in the First World War | ~64,000 |
| Indian wounded | ~167,000 |
They fought at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres in the freezing mud of the Western Front, at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and in East Africa. A great many of them had never seen the sea before they were put on a ship.
The economics, which is the part usually missed
Army service was not only about honour, and treating it as purely cultural misses how the system actually held together. For a Punjabi peasant's son it was the best available career, and it paid in four currencies:
- Cash, in an agrarian economy that was chronically short of it.
- A pension — an extraordinary thing to have in rural India in 1900.
- Land, through grants in the canal colonies to serving and retired soldiers. This is Chapter 3, and it is the hinge that locked the whole system together.
- Status, in the village and with the administration.
Recruitment was heaviest in specific districts — Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Hoshiarpur — and in those districts, remittances from soldiers became a significant part of the local economy.
In Pakistan: the heaviest-recruited districts of all — Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Attock, Campbellpur — were Punjabi Muslim, and in 1947 those soldiers went to Pakistan. This is the direct origin of the Punjabi domination of the Pakistan Army, which is in turn a large part of why Pakistan has spent so much of its existence under military rule. A British recruiting policy from the 1880s is one of the structural causes of Pakistani politics today.
In India: Sikhs remained heavily over-represented in the Indian Army after 1947 — for decades at many times their share of the population. Hold on to that, because in Part 10 it becomes one of the most serious facts in the entire book: in June 1984, after Operation Blue Star, Sikh soldiers mutinied in several units. The recruitment policy of 1880 and the crisis of 1984 are connected by a straight line.
3The canal colonies
The British built the largest irrigation network in the world across western Punjab. It made Punjab rich, it made Punjab loyal, and it created three of the problems that dominate the rest of this book.
What was built
Part 1 established the governing fact: Punjab is semi-arid, with magnificent soil and not enough rain. Prosperity has always depended on moving water sideways.
From the 1880s the British did this on a scale never previously attempted anywhere. The Upper Bari Doab canal came earlier, but the transformative projects were the great colony schemes: the Chenab Colony from 1887, then the Jhelum Colony, the Lower Bari Doab Colony and others.
Water was diverted from the Chenab and Jhelum through perennial canals into the dry bar country between the rivers — land that had supported only pastoralists. Millions of acres of semi-desert became irrigated wheat and cotton farmland. New towns were laid out on grids: Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), Sargodha, Montgomery (now Sahiwal).
Settlers were recruited from the crowded central districts — Jalandhar, Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana, Gurdaspur — with promises of free land and amenities. Ex-servicemen received grants as a reward for service.
Punjab became the granary of India and a major wheat exporter.
The four consequences
1. It bought loyalty, effectively. A family that had been landless or land-poor in Jalandhar and now farmed twenty-five irrigated acres near Lyallpur had a concrete reason to want the Raj to continue. Combine that with land grants tied to army service and you have a self-reinforcing system: serve, get land, want the system that gave you the land to survive.
2. It built the water infrastructure that Part 8 is entirely about. The headworks at Madhopur on the Ravi and Ferozepur on the Sutlej, the link canals, the whole engineered system of distributing Punjab's rivers — all of it dates from this period. In 1947 that integrated system was cut in half by an international border, and every water dispute since, including the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 and the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal, is an argument about how to run a machine that was designed as one unit and then sawn in two.
3. It moved millions of Hindus and Sikhs into what would become Pakistan. This is the consequence nobody anticipated and it is enormous. The canal colonies were in western Punjab. The settlers were disproportionately Sikh and Hindu farmers from the east. By the 1940s there were large, prosperous, deeply rooted Sikh and Hindu farming populations in Lyallpur, Montgomery, Sheikhupura and Sargodha — districts that went to Pakistan in 1947.
This is a major reason the partition of Punjab was so catastrophically violent. Those families had the most to lose and the furthest to travel. Part 7 will return to this.
4. It hardened Punjab's communities into legal categories. Which brings us to the Land Alienation Act.
The Punjab Land Alienation Act, 1900
The stated problem was real: peasants were losing land to moneylenders through debt. The Act restricted the sale and mortgage of agricultural land to members of designated "agricultural tribes."
It genuinely protected peasants from dispossession. It also did something with long consequences.
Because the designated agricultural tribes were largely Muslim and Sikh cultivating groups, and the moneylending and trading classes were largely urban Hindu, the Act effectively wrote a rural-versus-urban and, in practice, a communal division into law. It created a legally privileged category with an interest in defending itself, and an excluded category with a grievance.
Punjab's twentieth-century politics — the Unionist Party's cross-communal alliance of landholders, and the eventual communal polarisation that overwhelmed it — runs through this Act.
1907: Pagri Sambhal Jatta
And then the British overreached, and got the first real lesson in what happens when the bargain is broken.
Three measures hit the colonists: the Punjab Land Colonisation Act 1906, which restricted inheritance rights in the Chenab Colony and imposed petty regulations with fines; and the Doab Bari Act 1907, along with a sharp increase in water rates. Colonists who believed they were becoming landowners found themselves reduced closer to tenants at the government's pleasure.
Sardar Ajit Singh, with Lala Lajpat Rai and others, organised a mass agitation across the colony districts. The poet Banke Dayal wrote a song for it whose refrain became the name of the movement:
"Pagri sambhal, jatta, pagri sambhal oye."
Take care of your turban, farmer — take care of your honour.
The agitation was large, sustained and effective. Ajit Singh and Lajpat Rai were deported. And the government repealed the measures.
India's first successful mass farmers' movement happened in Punjab in 1907, and it forced a colonial government to withdraw agricultural legislation.
The line from that to the farmers' agitation of 2020–21 — which was also led from Punjab, also concerned three laws, and also ended in repeal — is not a coincidence of theme. It is a continuous political tradition with an unbroken memory, and "Pagri Sambhal Jatta" was sung at both. I will come back to this in Part 13.
One more thing: Ajit Singh was Bhagat Singh's uncle. Chapter 7 is not a separate story from this one.
4Kukas, Ghadar and the Komagata Maru
Three rebellions, forty years apart, all Punjabi, all defeated. The third one failed so completely that its real significance is the template it left behind — and that template reappears, almost unchanged, in Part 11.
The Kukas, or Namdharis
From the 1860s, Baba Ram Singh led a Sikh reform movement in Punjab known as the Namdharis or Kukas. Alongside religious reform — against idol worship, caste, female infanticide, and the dowry — he preached a comprehensive programme of non-cooperation: boycott British courts, schools, railways, the postal service and foreign cloth.
That is a full non-cooperation programme, in Punjab, roughly fifty years before Gandhi's.
In 1872, after a Kuka group attacked butchers at Malerkotla over cow slaughter, the Deputy Commissioner of Ludhiana, L. Cowan, had sixty-five Kukas blown from the mouths of cannons without any trial, and more were executed the following day. Cowan was dismissed for exceeding his authority, but not prosecuted. Ram Singh was deported to Rangoon and died in exile.
The Singh Sabha and the making of modern Sikh identity
Also from 1873, the Singh Sabha movement worked on religious reform, education and publishing. It founded Khalsa College at Amritsar in 1892 and produced an enormous body of print in Punjabi.
Its effect was to produce a modern, self-conscious, standardised Sikh identity, with clearer boundaries than the fluid practice of the nineteenth century — including Kahn Singh Nabha's 1898 tract Ham Hindu Nahin ("We Are Not Hindus").
I flag this without judgement because it matters later. The sharpening of Sikh distinctness in this period is a real historical development, driven partly by census categories and colonial administrative logic, and it is directly upstream of the identity politics of Part 8.
Ghadar, 1913
Punjabis had been emigrating to North America since the 1900s — to the lumber mills of British Columbia and the farms of California. Many were ex-soldiers. They had been raised on the idea that they were the Empire's most loyal subjects, members of a martial race.
In Canada and the United States they were met with exclusion laws, racial abuse and organised campaigns to keep them out.
That gap — between the promise and the reception — is what produced the Ghadar Party, founded in 1913 on the American west coast. Ghadar means mutiny or revolt.
- Sohan Singh Bhakna — founding president, a Punjabi farmer and mill worker.
- Lala Har Dayal — the intellectual and organiser, a Delhi-born scholar.
- Pandit Kanshi Ram — treasurer.
They launched a newspaper, Ghadar, in November 1913, first in Urdu and then in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Pashto, English, German and French. It was mailed around the world to Indian communities and, critically, to Indian soldiers.
The Komagata Maru, 1914
In 1914, a Punjabi businessman named Gurdit Singh chartered a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, and sailed for Vancouver with 376 passengers, most of them Sikhs. The voyage was a deliberate legal challenge to Canada's "continuous journey" regulation, which was designed to exclude Indians while appearing not to name them.
The ship was held in Vancouver harbour for two months. Passengers were denied landing, and supplies of food and water were restricted. Ghadar organisers came to the ship, lectured the passengers and distributed literature. The vessel was eventually forced to return.
On arrival at Budge Budge near Calcutta in September 1914, police attempted to arrest the passengers and move them under guard to Punjab. Shooting broke out. Around nineteen or twenty people were killed.
The men who had sailed expecting to test a law came home to be shot at on a riverbank. A large number of them joined Ghadar.
The rising of 1915, and the executions
Ghadar's plan was ambitious to the point of fantasy: return thousands of emigrants to Punjab, trigger a mass mutiny in the Indian Army while it was distracted by the war in Europe, and seize the province.
Thousands did return. The plan was betrayed from inside — the name usually given is Kirpal Singh, an informer — and the authorities moved first.
The Lahore Conspiracy Case trials followed. Of 291 convicted: 42 were executed, 114 received life sentences and transportation, and 93 got lesser terms.
Militarily it was a total failure. It did not free a single village.
What it created was a template, and the template is the reason this chapter is in the book:
- Money raised from a Punjabi diaspora in North America.
- A newspaper published abroad, in multiple languages, mailed into Punjab.
- An ideology written overseas by people who had left, aimed at people who had stayed.
- Armed action inside Punjab, funded and directed from outside it.
- And a movement whose members abroad were far more radical than the population at home.
Read that list again when you get to Part 11. The Khalistan movement's organisational structure — diaspora funding, diaspora media, overseas leadership, action inside Punjab — is not an invention of the 1980s. It is the Ghadar template.
The difference, which I will argue in Part 11, is what the population inside Punjab thought about it. In 1914 the gap between diaspora radicalism and home-province opinion is precisely why the 1915 rising collapsed. That gap is a permanent feature of this organisational model, and it is worth noticing that it was fatal the first time too.
51919
Punjab had just given more men to the war than any other province in India. What it got in return, within months of the Armistice, was detention without trial, then a massacre, then an order to crawl.
The Rowlatt Act
The Defence of India Act had given the government emergency powers for the duration of the war. In March 1919 the Rowlatt Act extended the substance of those powers into peacetime: detention without trial, trials without juries, no right of appeal.
Indians had expected constitutional advance as a reward for wartime service. Punjab in particular had earned a claim on that expectation. What arrived instead was the machinery of emergency made permanent.
Gandhi called his first all-India satyagraha against it.
Amritsar, April 1919
The Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O'Dwyer, was a hardliner who regarded political agitation as sedition to be crushed.
On 10 April, two popular local leaders in Amritsar were arrested and deported: Dr Satyapal, a Hindu, and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, a Muslim. That detail matters — the agitation in Amritsar was conspicuously cross-communal, which was exactly what alarmed the administration.
A crowd marching to petition for their release was fired on. Rioting followed. Five Europeans were killed and an English missionary, Miss Marcella Sherwood, was assaulted.
Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived and took charge.
13 April 1919
It was Vaisakhi. Amritsar was full of villagers who had come in for the festival and the horse fair, many of whom had no idea a public meeting had been banned that morning.
Several thousand people were in the Jallianwala Bagh — a walled enclosure, roughly six acres, surrounded by buildings, with a few narrow exits and one main entrance.
Dyer arrived with about fifty riflemen. He positioned them at the main entrance — blocking it — and gave no warning to disperse.
He ordered fire. The firing continued for roughly ten minutes, around 1,650 rounds, and stopped when ammunition was running low. He directed fire toward the exits, where people were densest as they tried to escape. Some jumped into a well in the compound and drowned.
Official British count: 379 killed, around 1,200 wounded. Some official reports give 291.
The Indian National Congress inquiry (with Madan Mohan Malviya prominent among its members) concluded the dead numbered over 500.
Other Indian estimates at the time ran to 1,000 or more.
The count is unrecoverable for a specific reason: a curfew was imposed immediately after the firing, the wounded could not be reached, and families removed bodies during the night without registration. No systematic count was ever attempted by the authorities.
I give the range. What matters more than the exact figure is the next section, and on that there is no dispute at all.
Dyer's own testimony
The Hunter Commission was appointed in October 1919 — four British members and three Indian. Dyer gave evidence on 19 November 1919.
What he said, under questioning, is the most important documentary fact in this chapter, and it is remarkably little quoted:
- He stated that he had made up his mind before arriving that if he found a crowd assembled, he would fire on it.
- He said he continued firing after the crowd began to disperse, and that his object was not to disperse the meeting but to "produce a moral effect" throughout Punjab — that is, to punish and to terrify.
- He said that had he been able to get his armoured cars with machine guns through the narrow entrance, he would have used them.
- He made no arrangements for the wounded, telling the Commission it was not his job.
The crawling order, and after
In the street where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted, Dyer issued an order that any Indian passing through must crawl on their hands and knees. Public floggings were carried out. Martial law across Punjab brought summary trials, aerial machine-gunning of a crowd at Gujranwala, and mass humiliations.
Dyer was removed from command. He was not prosecuted. The House of Lords passed a motion sympathetic to him, and a public subscription in Britain, promoted by the Morning Post, raised over £26,000 for him — a fortune at the time.
Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest, in a letter that remains one of the great documents of the period.
And on 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, Udham Singh — who had been at Jallianwala Bagh as a young man — shot and killed Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who had backed Dyer. He made no attempt to escape. At his trial he gave his name as "Ram Mohammad Singh Azad" — a deliberate composite of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, plus the word for free. He was hanged in July 1940.
Before 1919, the mainstream of Indian political demand was for reform within the Empire — dominion status, expanded councils, a fairer deal. After 1919 it was for the Empire to end.
That shift happened because of what was done in Punjab, and because of the response to it in Britain: no prosecution, a supportive vote in the Lords, and a public collection for the general. The message received in India was not that a rogue officer had exceeded his orders. It was that the system approved.
6The Akali morchas
Between 1920 and 1925, thousands of Sikhs walked unarmed into police lines to be beaten, in wave after wave, for five years, and won. It is one of the largest sustained non-violent campaigns in Indian history and outside Punjab almost nobody has heard of it. It also created the institution that has shaped Sikh politics ever since.
The problem
Historic gurdwaras — including the Golden Temple and Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak — were controlled by hereditary custodians called mahants. The arrangement dated from the eighteenth century, when open Sikh practice was dangerous and shrines were kept going by people the state tolerated.
By 1900 many mahants treated the shrines and their considerable landed endowments as personal property. Some had reintroduced idol worship and caste restrictions. And they were reliably pro-British, which meant the administration protected them.
So the campaign to reform the gurdwaras was, unavoidably, a campaign against the government.
The organisations
The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) was formed in November 1920 to manage the shrines.
The Shiromani Akali Dal was founded in December 1920 as the volunteer corps and political arm.
Nankana Sahib, February 1921
A jatha of around 150 Sikhs went to take control of the gurdwara at Nankana Sahib. The mahant, Narayan Das, had hired armed men and prepared.
Over a hundred Sikhs were killed. Some were shot; some were burned. The jatha, under instruction, did not fight back.
The Keys Affair, 1921–22
The government seized the keys to the Golden Temple's treasury. A campaign of arrests and protests followed, and in January 1922 the government surrendered — the keys were returned to the SGPC.
Gandhi sent a telegram: "First decisive battle for India's freedom won."
Guru ka Bagh, 1922
This is the one that should be famous.
At Guru ka Bagh near Amritsar, a dispute over land attached to the gurdwara led to a sustained morcha. Day after day, jathas of Akalis walked toward the site. Police met them with lathis and beat them to the ground. The Akalis, under a vow of non-violence, did not raise a hand or run. The next day another jatha came.
This continued for months, with over five thousand arrested.
C. F. Andrews, the English clergyman and friend of Gandhi, went to watch. His published account of what he saw — men standing motionless while being clubbed, then being carried away, and the next rank stepping forward — caused a serious political embarrassment in Britain. He described it in explicitly religious terms, as something he had not thought possible outside the New Testament.
Jaito, 1923–25
The British deposed the Maharaja of Nabha, a state sympathetic to the Akalis. Protests centred on the gurdwara at Jaito, where an akhand path — a continuous recitation of the scripture — was interrupted by the authorities.
Jathas of 500 marched to Jaito repeatedly over two years. On 21 February 1924 troops fired on a jatha, killing a number of marchers. Jawaharlal Nehru travelled to Jaito to observe, was arrested and briefly imprisoned — an experience he wrote about afterwards with real admiration.
The result
The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925. Control of historic gurdwaras in Punjab passed to an elected SGPC.
The campaign had run five years, seen thousands arrested and hundreds killed, and it had won its stated objective in full.
The SGPC controls the historic gurdwaras of Punjab, including the Golden Temple. That means it controls:
- Enormous property and revenue, including offerings, land and educational institutions.
- The appointment of the head granthi and, in practice, considerable influence over the Jathedar of the Akal Takht — the office that Part 4 showed carries the temporal authority of the Panth.
- Immense moral standing and an electoral machine, since SGPC elections are contested by political parties.
Whoever controls the SGPC controls the physical and moral centre of Sikh religious life. In practice the Akali Dal has held it for most of the last century.
Now recall the structural point from Part 4, Chapter 7: after 1708 there is no living Guru, and no office with binding authority to say "this person does not speak for the Panth." The SGPC and the Akal Takht are the closest thing that exists — and both are, in practice, subject to whoever holds political power in Punjab.
Keep this in hand. In Part 9 the contest over these institutions is not a side issue. It is the main event.
7Bhagat Singh
He is claimed by Hindu nationalists, Sikh nationalists, Khalistanis, Communists and Congress. Most of them are quoting a man whose actual written positions they would reject. So let us use what he wrote.
Where he came from
Born in 1907 at Banga, in Lyallpur district — which is to say, in the canal colonies of Chapter 3, now in Pakistan.
He was born into the politics of this part. His uncle was Sardar Ajit Singh, who had led Pagri Sambhal Jatta in the very year of his birth and was deported for it. His father Kishan Singh was also imprisoned for political activity. He was twelve at the time of Jallianwala Bagh and, by family accounts, went to see the site.
He joined the Hindustan Republican Association and was central to renaming it the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928. The inserted word was not decoration.
What he did
October 1928. Lala Lajpat Rai — the same Lajpat Rai who had led the 1907 farmers' agitation — was beaten in a police lathi charge while protesting the Simon Commission at Lahore, and died weeks later.
December 1928. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Chandrashekhar Azad shot dead J. P. Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police. They had intended to kill Superintendent James Scott, who had ordered the lathi charge. It was a case of mistaken identity, and a man who was not their target died.
I am including that because hagiography usually leaves it out, and it matters to how one assesses him.
8 April 1929. Bhagat Singh and B. K. Dutt threw two low-explosive bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, deliberately aimed at empty benches. Nobody was killed. They threw leaflets, shouted slogans — and then waited to be arrested.
The stated purpose, taken from the French anarchist Vaillant, was in the leaflet: "it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear."
The point was never the bomb. The point was the trial. He wanted a courtroom and a national newspaper audience, and he got both.
The hunger strike. In jail he led a strike demanding that political prisoners be treated as such rather than as common criminals. It lasted 116 days. Jatindranath Das died on the sixty-third day of his strike. The coverage made Bhagat Singh a national figure on a scale the bomb never could have.
23 March 1931. Hanged at Lahore Central Jail with Rajguru and Sukhdev. He was twenty-three.
What he actually believed
Now the part that matters most, and the reason this chapter exists.
He was an atheist, and he wrote a pamphlet about it. Why I Am an Atheist was written in Lahore Central Jail in 1930, in response to being told that his refusal to pray was arrogance. It is a serious piece of argument, and it is unambiguous. He rejected belief in God, rejected the consolation of an afterlife, and said explicitly that he would face the rope without it.
He was a socialist and specific about it. His conception of freedom was not the replacement of British administrators with Indian ones. He wrote that if power simply passed to Indian hands while the economic structure remained, the peasant and the worker would have gained nothing. His slogan was Inquilab Zindabad — long live the revolution — and by revolution he meant something economic, not merely national.
He wrote against communalism explicitly. His 1928 essay on communal riots and their remedy attacks religious leaders and communal politicians by name and argues that religion in politics is one of the principal obstacles to Indian freedom. He was writing this in Punjab, in the decade when Punjab's communal polarisation was accelerating, and he saw exactly where it was going.
Bhagat Singh is invoked today by Hindu nationalist organisations, by Sikh nationalist and Khalistani groups, by Communist parties and by Congress. Some of these claims are simply false on the record: he was an atheist who denounced religious politics, and a socialist who thought a change of rulers without a change of economics was worthless.
The technique used on him is always the same: take the courage and discard the content. Keep the twenty-three-year-old who walked to the gallows. Delete Why I Am an Atheist. Keep Inquilab Zindabad. Delete what he meant by it.
That is precisely the technique Part 4 identified as the danger in the shaheedi tradition — inheriting the willingness to die while discarding the tests that determine whether the cause is worth it. And it is exactly what Part 9 will examine being done to a much larger body of Sikh tradition in the 1980s.
If you want a single portable test for the rest of this work: when someone invokes a martyr, check whether they have read what the martyr wrote.
8The broken-bargain test
Here is the answer to the question this part opened with, and the tool I will carry into Parts 8, 9 and 13.
The wrong answers first
"Some Punjabis were loyal, others were rebels." True in a trivial sense and useless as an explanation, because it does not survive the biographies. Ghadar was founded substantially by ex-soldiers of the British Indian Army. The Babbar Akalis included veterans. Bhagat Singh came from a family that contained both a deported revolutionary and army connections. The categories overlap far too much for this to be the answer.
"They were hypocrites." No. There is no evidence of bad faith on either side of the ledger. Punjabi soldiers fought exceptionally well for the Empire, and Punjabi rebels died exceptionally well against it, often within the same extended family.
The actual answer, in three parts
1. The relationship was a transaction, and both parties understood it as one.
Punjab supplied soldiers, revenue and grain. The Empire supplied pay, pensions, land in the canal colonies, status, and protection of the landholding order.
That is a bargain, not devotion. Nobody in Punjab in 1900 loved Queen Victoria. They served because service was, quite rationally, the best available deal for a peasant family in a dry province. Loyalty that is purchased is loyalty that can be withdrawn when the payments stop.
2. Every major Punjabi rebellion in this period tracks a specific breach of that specific bargain.
This is the part I found genuinely useful, and once you line them up it is very hard to unsee:
| Rebellion | The bargain | How it was broken |
|---|---|---|
| Pagri Sambhal Jatta, 1907 | Settle the colonies, farm the land, and the land becomes yours. | The 1906 and 1907 Acts restricted inheritance and ownership, reducing colonists toward tenancy. Broken on the land. |
| Ghadar, 1913–15 | You are loyal subjects of the Empire and a respected martial race. | In Canada and the United States those same subjects were met with exclusion laws and racial abuse. Broken abroad. |
| 1919 | Give your sons to the war and you will get political advance. | 1.4 million Indian soldiers, over half from Punjab, 64,000 dead — and the reward was the Rowlatt Act, then Dyer, then the crawling order. Broken at home. |
| The Akali morchas, 1920–25 | The Raj does not interfere with religion. | The administration actively backed corrupt hereditary mahants against the community's own institutions, and seized the keys to the Golden Temple. Broken in the gurdwara. |
Four rebellions. Four identifiable breaches. In every case the sequence is the same: a deal existed, the stronger party broke it, and Punjab responded — sometimes with rifles, sometimes by walking into lathis, sometimes by mailing newspapers from San Francisco.
3. And the same underlying capability produces both behaviours.
Look at what the loyal and the rebellious versions actually required of a person.
Holding a trench line at Neuve Chapelle under artillery requires the willingness to accept a very high probability of death for a collective commitment. So does walking forward at Guru ka Bagh to be clubbed to the ground without raising your hands. So does throwing a bomb and then standing still to be arrested. So does waiting twenty-one years and crossing an ocean to shoot Michael O'Dwyer.
It is one capability. Part 4 identified where it came from and how it was made. This chapter shows it being pointed in opposite directions by whether or not the bargain was being kept.
Why this is the most useful chapter in the book so far
Two reasons.
First, it dissolves a paradox that recurs. In Part 10 I will have to describe Punjabi policemen hunting Punjabi militants, often from neighbouring villages, both sides invoking the same tradition. People treat that as a uniquely tragic aberration. It is not an aberration. It is Ambhi and Porus in 326 BCE, it is 1857, it is this chapter. Punjab has never faced anything as one body, and the reason is that Punjabis have always been individually available to whichever side was, at that moment, keeping its side of a deal.
Second, it gives me a test I can actually apply.
When Punjab rebels, look for the broken bargain. Identify what was promised, by whom, and what was delivered.
In Part 8 I will apply this directly to 1947–1980 and ask a specific question: what was promised to Punjab at independence and in 1966 — on language, on territory, on Chandigarh, on river water, on constitutional status — and what was actually delivered?
That is not a rhetorical question and I do not yet know how far the answer will go. But it is the right question, and this chapter is where I found it.
A warning attached to the test, so that I cannot use it lazily later: a broken bargain explains why a grievance is real. It does not by itself justify any particular response to it. The Akalis and the Ghadarites faced comparable breaches and chose opposite methods, with very different results. Part 9 will need both halves of that.
9Scorecard: what Part 6 proves
BOTH TRUE — AND NOT A CONTRADICTION Around 60% of India's combat troops in the First World War, and Ghadar, Jallianwala, Bhagat Singh and a five-year mass civil disobedience campaign, from the same province and often the same families.
The explanation is Chapter 8: the relationship was transactional, and Punjab rebelled precisely when specific terms were broken. Whoever tells you only one half of this table is either uninformed or selling something.
ANACHRONISTIC — BUT THE FACTS ARE THE FACTS Punjab did not join and actively helped the British retake Delhi. I am not going to soften that.
The reasons were specific: the mutineers were the same Bengal Army regiments that had conquered Punjab eight years earlier; the revolt's banner was the restoration of the Mughal dynasty that had executed two Gurus and four children; the new administration had cut revenue demands; and there was pay and land on offer.
"Betrayal of India" requires an India to betray, and in 1857 that political entity did not exist. Judging it by 1947 standards is the same error I flagged in Part 1.
FALSE The Marathas built an empire. The Bengal Army conquered India for the Company. The Madras Army won Assaye. All were later classified as unmartial.
The actual variable was 1857: the "martial races" are, with striking accuracy, the communities that did not mutiny. It was a security classification presented as biology.
Its most damaging effect was internal. Punjabis believed it, and a flattering colonial fiction displaced the real history — that the warrior culture was built by geography and fifteen centuries of invasion, which is in Parts 1 to 3 and is far more impressive than a racial myth.
DISPUTED — AND THE DISPUTE IS NOT THE POINT Official British count 379 (some reports 291), with around 1,200 wounded. The Congress inquiry concluded over 500. Other contemporary estimates ran to 1,000 or more. A curfew imposed immediately afterwards made any accurate count impossible, and none was attempted.
What is not disputed is Dyer's own sworn testimony to the Hunter Commission: that he had decided to fire before he arrived, that he continued firing to "produce a moral effect" across Punjab rather than to disperse the crowd, that he would have used machine guns had they fitted through the gate, and that arranging care for the wounded was not his concern.
When you have the perpetrator's confession to his own government's inquiry, the casualty range matters less than people think.
FALSE ON THE RECORD He wrote Why I Am an Atheist in Lahore Central Jail in 1930. He was a self-described socialist who argued that transferring power to Indian hands without economic transformation would leave the peasant and worker exactly where they were. He wrote against communal politics by name.
He is the most appropriated figure in Punjabi history, and the method is always the same: keep the courage, delete the content. That method is the subject of Part 9.
FALSE It was among the largest and most sustained non-violent civil disobedience campaigns of the early 1920s anywhere in India — five years, thousands arrested, hundreds killed, and it achieved its objective in full with the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. Gandhi called the Keys Affair the first decisive battle for India's freedom. Nehru was arrested at Jaito.
It also created the SGPC and the Akali Dal — the two institutions that have dominated Sikh religious and political life ever since, and whose control becomes the central contest of Part 9.
NO — IT IS THE GHADAR TEMPLATE Money raised from Punjabis in North America; a newspaper published abroad and mailed into Punjab; an ideology written overseas by emigrants and aimed at people who stayed; armed action inside Punjab funded and directed from outside. That is Ghadar in 1913.
Worth noting for Part 11: the model failed in 1915 for a reason that is structural rather than accidental. The diaspora was far more radical than the population at home, and when the rising came, Punjab did not rise with it.
Timeline of Part 6
What happens in Part 7
Part 7, The Cut, is about 1947, and it is the point at which this work stops being history and starts being about wounds that are still open.
It answers the question in the title of this whole project's first ask: why was Punjab divided? The answer runs directly through Part 3, Chapter 5 — the nine-hundred-year formation of a Muslim-majority west and a Hindu-Sikh-majority east — and through Chapter 3 of this part, which put millions of Sikh and Hindu farmers in the canal colonies that ended up in Pakistan.
It covers the Radcliffe Line, drawn in six weeks by a lawyer who had never been to India; the Sikh political position and the impossible arithmetic Master Tara Singh faced; the earliest Khalistan-shaped proposals, including the 1940s pamphlets that first used the word; and the violence — with casualty and migration figures given as ranges, because the estimates run from 200,000 to two million dead and I am not going to pick one.
And it covers what Punjab specifically lost that no other Indian region lost: Lahore, Nankana Sahib, the tomb of Ranjit Singh, the canal colonies, half the river system, and the graves of everyone who had lived on the wrong side of a line drawn in six weeks.
Sources & further reading — Part 6
Primary sources
- Report of the Hunter Committee (Disorders Inquiry Committee), 1920 — including the full transcript of Dyer's evidence of 19 November 1919. This is the essential document for Chapter 5 and it should be read rather than quoted second-hand.
- Report of the Congress Punjab Inquiry Committee, 1920 — the Indian counter-inquiry, with Gandhi and Madan Mohan Malviya involved.
- Bhagat Singh, Why I Am an Atheist (1930); To Young Political Workers (1931); his 1928 essay on communal riots; the Assembly leaflet of 8 April 1929. Collected in The Jail Notebook and Other Writings (ed. Chaman Lal).
- Ghadar newspaper, from November 1913 — substantial holdings digitised by the South Asian American Digital Archive and by Punjab universities.
- C. F. Andrews, contemporary published accounts of the Guru ka Bagh morcha, 1922.
- Rabindranath Tagore, letter renouncing his knighthood, 31 May 1919.
- Records of the Lahore Conspiracy Case trials, 1915 and 1929–31.
Modern scholarship
- Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885–1947 — the standard work on the canal colonies and their political economy. Indispensable for Chapter 3.
- Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 — the best single account of how military recruitment shaped the province.
- Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture.
- David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj and Indian Voices of the Great War — the latter is a collection of censored letters written by Indian soldiers from the Western Front, and is worth reading on its own account.
- Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre — the most thorough modern account, excellent on the casualty dispute and on Dyer's testimony.
- Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar — a biography of Dyer.
- Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism; Harish Puri, Ghadar Movement.
- Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru.
- Mohinder Singh, The Akali Movement; Rajiv A. Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith — on the morchas and the creation of the SGPC.
- Chaman Lal (ed.), Bhagat Singh Reader; Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India — the latter is particularly good on how the HSRA used publicity.
- Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries — on the Singh Sabha and the hardening of Sikh identity.
Reference sources used for figures
- 1914–1918-Online (International Encyclopedia of the First World War), articles on "Martial Races, Theory of," "Military Planning and Wartime Recruitment (India)" and "Non-European Soldiers" — for recruitment shares and casualty totals.
- Royal Geographical Society factsheet, "Punjabis in the Army"; Cambridge Modern Asian Studies, "Race and Recruitment in the Indian Army: 1880–1918."
- Britannica, "Jallianwala Bagh Massacre"; Wikipedia, Hunter Commission, Lahore Conspiracy Case trial, Punjab Land Alienation Act 1900, Pagri Sambhal Jatta.
- The Sikh Encyclopedia and allaboutsikhs.com on the Akali movement; Drishti IAS and Vajiram & Ravi summaries cross-checked against Imran Ali and Mohinder Singh.