LEARNING FROM HISTORY
Besides tracking the cultural footprint of Sikhism in Pakistan, this book also underlines the fact that peaceful coexistence enriches lives
Im not a Sikh or even a Punjabi. As a somewhat deracinated middle class Malayali Hindu raised in 1980s Bombay, no traumatic race memories shadowed my childhood. I first heard about the Partition from a Sindhi who had fled Karachi for the refugee camps of Ulhasnagar, and from the grandparents of Punjabi friends who made that fraught journey on trains across the border. The reminiscences were tinged with nostalgia for what had been left behind. And then there was that skein of horror. “We were scared every time the train stopped because, if the Muslims got on, they’d kill all of us,” our Hindi teacher recounted for the umpteenth time during a ‘free period’. There were many Muslim students at the Catholic school I attended. They looked on mutely. We were Indian school children together at a peculiar point in history when Amar, Akbar and Anthony were beginning once more to turn their jaundiced eyes on each other, just after Indira Gandhi and the Delhi massacres but before Babri Masjid and the Bombay bomb blasts. No, we didn’t start the fire but we’ve been caught in that hot-cold conflagration ever since.
I thought of all this as I flipped through Amardeep Singh’s superb The Quest Continues; Lost Heritage – The Sikh Legacy in Pakistan. A follow up to his earlier volume on the same subject, Singh’s work clearly emerges from a place of intense religiosity and ethnic loyalty, from his need to explore the cultural roots of the Sikh community. While the first book was based on the author’s explorations across 36 cities and villages in Pakistan, the second takes in Pakistan Administered Kashmir, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Pakistani Punjab.
The supporting photographs are spectacular and the writing is personal, devoid of unnecessary stylistics and rich in anecdote. Most rewardingly, it places historic events and personalities in context. So a picture of the foundation stone of the Khalsa High School, Rawalpindi, laid by HH Sir Michael Francis O’dwyer, Lieutenant Gov- ernor of the Punjab on the 1st of August, 1913, is accompanied by a paragraph reminding the reader that it was under O’dwyer’s watch that Colonel Reginald Dyer led troops to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar leading to the deaths of 379 unarmed civilians there. With Partition, the entire Sikh population of Rawalpindi left for India and the Khalsa school eventually became the Government Muslim Higher Secondary School.
The author also touches on a range of subjects including how “cultures and languages have now been boxed into religious realms”, the equations between Pashtun Sikhs of the Swat valley and the Nanak-panthi Sikhs, and the syncretic Hindu-sikhism practised in Sindh. This could have been an anodyne romp through important sites in Pakistan. Amardeep Singh does not take the easy way out. But while he doesn’t avert his eyes from scenes of tragedy, like the well of Thoha Khalsa where women committed mass suicide, he urges the reader to view Partition with a degree of distance and to hold fast to the spirit of forgiveness.
Here he is on Muhammad Aslam (88) who was 18 when he witnessed 25 Sikh women jump into the well: “With teary eyes, Muhammad Aslam looked into the well saying, “This is the site where the girls jumped and I helplessly stood in a corner. I still wonder why I did not make an effort to stop them. I was not a part of the mob but was afraid of the miscreants who had turned us against our own brothers and sisters. Years later, the event still haunts me.”
This is an important book not just because it lists places important to Sikhs and because it reminds readers of the tragedy of Partition but because it transcends that to make people of different faiths see that peaceful coexistence enriches lives, that bitterness must be overcome, and that we must learn from history instead of being condemned to endlessly repeat it.