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Region, religion, and locality: revisiting Punjab politics and the Unionist Party, 1923–1947
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2023
Abstract
This article revisits a series of articles published in the early 1980s on Punjab politics in the pre-partition decade that grew out of my thesis ‘The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab’ which was supervised by Francis Robinson. It initially locates the publications in the existing literature, before assessing the extent to which subsequent research has enriched academic understanding. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the conceptualisation of the Unionist Party's power-sharing as a form of consociationalism.
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References
1 Talbot, Ian, ‘The 1946 Punjab Elections’, Modern Asian Studies 14.1 (February 1980), pp. 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Talbot, Ian, ‘The growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab, 1937–1946’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 20.1 (March 1982), pp. 5–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Talbot, Ian, ‘Deserted collaborators: the political background to the rise and fall of the Punjab Unionist Party, 1923–1947’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11.1 (October 1982), pp. 73–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For the Brass-Robinson debate, see Brass, Paul, ‘Elite groups, symbol manipulation and ethnic identity among the Muslims of South Asia’, in Political Identity in South Asia, (eds) Taylor, David and Yapp, Malcolm (London, 1979), pp. 35–77Google Scholar; Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim separatism’, in Political Identity, (eds) Taylor and Yapp, pp. 78–112.
3 Tribune (Ambala), 16 January 1926, cited in Datta, Nonica, Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (New Delhi, 1999), p. 120Google Scholar.
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5 They included such measures as the Second Amendment to the Alienation of Land Act which closed the loophole created by the benami transaction, the Restitution of Mortgaged Lands Act, and the Registration of Moneylenders Act.
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9 The work by Asoka Mehta and Achyut Patwardhan, The Communal Triangle in India (Allahabad, 1941) is the classic exposition of the divide-and-rule theory.
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12 John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal (eds), Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 1973).
13 Brass, ‘Elite groups’; Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim separatism’.
14 See also Sarah F. D. Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947 (Cambridge, 1992); Erland Jansson, India, Pakistan or Pakhtunistan? The Nationalist Movements in the North-West Frontier Province, 1937–47 (Uppsala, 1981); Shila Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal, 1937–47 (New Delhi, 1976).
15 Waheed Ahmad (ed.), Diary and Notes of Fazl-i-Husain (Lahore, 1977); Ikram Ali Malik (ed.), A Book Of Readings on the History of Punjab 1799–1947 (Lahore, 1970); M. Rafique Afzal, Barkat Ali: His Life and Writings (Lahore, 1969); Abdul Malik (ed.), Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din: Selected Speeches and Statements (Lahore, 1971); Firoz Khan Noon, From Memory (Lahore, 1966); S. Qaim Hussain Jafri (ed.), Quaid-e-Azam's Correspondence with Punjab Muslim Leaders (Lahore, 1977).
16 Imran Ali, Punjab Politics in the Decade before Partition (Lahore, 1975).
17 In ‘Deserted collaborators’, I assessed the Jinnah-Sikander Pact which was concluded at the October 1937 Lucknow Session of the All-India Muslim League as follows: ‘The Unionist leader agreed to advise all Muslim members of his party to join the Muslim League. This was not, however, to affect the continuation of the existing Coalition Ministry in the Punjab which would retain its Unionist Party name. The reason why Sikander agreed to the Pact and what it precisely meant still remains controversial…Even its co-drafters, Sikander and Malik Barkat Ali completely contradicted each other's interpretations of its political effects within the Punjab.’ Talbot, ‘Deserted collaborators’, pp. 80–81.
18 Azim Husain, Fazl-i-Husain, A Political Biography (Bombay, 1946).
19 Craig Baxter, ‘The People's Party vs the Punjab feudalists’, in Contemporary Problems of Pakistan, (eds) J. Henry Corson et al. (Leiden, 1979), pp. 6–29.
20 There was a limited study by P. H. M. van den Dungen, The Punjab Tradition: Influence and Authority in Nineteenth Century India (London, 1972).
21 N. G. Barrier, The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill (Durham, NC, 1966).
22 Talbot, ‘Deserted collaborators’, pp. 75–76.
23 See Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, 2011); Teja Singh, The Gurdwara Reform Movement and the Sikh Awakening, 3rd edn (Amritsar, 2000).
24 Kailash Chander Gulati, The Akalis, Past and Present (New Delhi, 1974).
25 Mohinder Singh, The Akali Movement (Delhi, 1978).
26 Surjit Singh Narang, ‘Chief Khalsa Diwan: a study of socio-religious organisation’, Journal of Sikh Studies 8 (1981), pp. 101–117.
27 K. W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab (Berkeley, 1976).
28 K. W. Jones, ‘Ham Hindu Nahin: Arya-Sikh relations, 1877–1905’, Journal of Asian Studies 32.3 (May 1973), pp. 457–475.
29 H. L. Agnihotri and Shiva N. Malik, A Profile in Courage: A Biography of Ch. Chhotu Ram (New Delhi, 1978); Prem Chowdhry, Punjab Politics: The Role of Sir Chhotu Ram (New Delhi, 1984); Madan Gopal, Sir Chhotu Ram: A Political Biography (Delhi, 1977); D. Kumar, ‘The Brahmo Samaj’, Punjab Past and Present 7 (1973), pp. 200–205.
30 N. G. Barrier, ‘The Punjab government and communal politics, 1870–1908’, Journal of Asian Studies 27.3 (May 1968); Craig Baxter, ‘Union or partition: some aspects of politics in the Punjab 1936–1945’, in Pakistan: The Long View, (eds) Lawrence Ziring, Ralph Braibanti and W. Howard Wriggins (Durham, 1977), pp. 40–70; Gerald A. Heeger, ‘The growth of the Congress movement in the Punjab 1920–1949’, Journal of Asian Studies 32.1 (1972), pp. 39–51; Stephen Oren, ‘The Sikhs, Congress and the Unionists in the Punjab, 1937–1945’, Modern Asian Studies 8.3 (1974), pp. 397–418.
31 For further details, see Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism: From A Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora (Cambridge, 2022), pp. 89–90.
32 Ibid., pp. 82–110.
33 Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab elections’, pp. 67–68.
34 Ibid., pp. 68–69, 75–76.
35 Ibid., pp. 69, 82–86, 88.
36 Waheed Ahmad, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The Punjab Story, 1940–47: The Muslim League and the Unionists towards Partition and Pakistan (Islamabad, 2009).
37 David Gilmartin's important study was published in 1979. D. Gilmartin, ‘Religious leadership and the Pakistan movement in the Punjab’, Modern Asian Studies 13.3 (1979), pp. 485–517. In this he highlighted the role of the Chishti revivalist pirs of Taunsa, Golra, Sial, and Jalalpur. In Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab elections’, pp. 85–87, I also pointed to the importance of Qadiri pirs, the Gilani pirs of Multan, and the role of older, established Chishti shrines such as that of Sharfu'd-Din Bu Ali Qalandar at Panipat.
38 Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab elections’, pp. 72–74.
39 Ibid., p. 74.
40 Talbot, ‘Deserted collaborators’, pp. 82–85.
41 I examined the Muslim rivalries in the Unionist Party following Sikander's untimely death in December 1942 in terms of the rivalries between the Noon-Tiwana and Khattar factions. See Talbot, ‘Deserted collaborators’, p. 86.
42 Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab elections’, p. 71.
43 Ibid., p. 68.
44 Talbot, ‘Deserted collaborators’, p. 88.
45 Ibid., p. 86.
46 David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley, 1988).
47 Ibid., pp. 20–23
48 Ibid., pp. 200–202.
49 Ibid., p. 201.
50 Ibid., p. 189.
51 Ibid., p. 191.
52 Ibid., p. 226.
53 Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (London, 1998).
54 Syed Nur Ahmad, From Martial Law to Martial Law: Politics in the Punjab, 1919–1958 (Boulder and London, 1985).
55 Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, 2015).
56 G. F. Ansari to Jinnah, 25 April 1943, QEAP File 1101/105 R, National Archives of Pakistan.
57 Datta, Forming an Identity, pp. 2, 10, 75–79, 86–112.
58 P. Chowdhry, ‘Social support base and electoral politics: the Congress in colonial Southeast Punjab’, Modern Asian Studies 25.4 (October 1991), p. 826. On the Muslim League's propaganda around shortages, see Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab elections’, pp. 74–75.
59 Chowdhry, ‘Social support base’, p. 824.
60 Chhanda Chatterji, The Sikh Minority and the Partition of the Punjab 1920–1947 (Abingdon, 2018).
61 Singh and Shani, Sikh Nationalism, chapters 1, 3 and 4.
62 Ibid., pp. 106–107.
63 See Akhtar Hussain Sandhu, ‘Sikh failure in the partition of the Punjab in 1947’, Journal of Punjab Studies 19.2 (2012), pp. 215–232.
64 Singh and Shani, Sikh Nationalism, p. 88.
65 Tan Tai-Yong, The Garrison State. The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi and London, 2005); Rajit K. Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi, 2003); Clive Dewey, ‘Rural roots of Pakistani militarism’, in The Political Inheritance of Pakistan, (ed.) D. A. Low (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 255–284.
66 Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton, 1988).
67 Mridula Mukherjee, Colonizing Agriculture: The Myth of Punjabi Exceptionalism (New Delhi, 2005). Two of the key colonial-era ameliorist texts are Hugh Kennedy Trevaskis, The Land of the Five Rivers: An Economic History of the Punjab from the Earliest Times to the Year of Grace 1890 (London, 1928) and H. Calvert, The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab (Lahore, 1936).
68 Raghuvendra Tanwar, Politics of Sharing Power (New Delhi, 1999), p. 53.
69 It is impossible to cite here all the rich literature in this field. The best introductions to the growing scholarship on Sikh and Punjab studies remain: Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds), Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice (New Delhi, 2012); Arvind-Pal Mandair, Christopher Shackle and Gurharpal Singh (eds), Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity (Abingdon, 2001).
70 Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir, Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice (New Delhi, 2012).
71 Richard Carnac Temple, The Legends of the Punjab, 3 volumes (Bombay, 1884–1886); Aubrey O'Brien, ‘The Mohammadan saints of the Western Punjab’, The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 41 (1911), pp. 509–520.
72 Navtej Purewal, ‘Sikh/Muslim Bhai-Bhai? Towards a social history of the Rababi tradition of Kirtan’, Sikh Formations 7.3 (2009), pp. 365–382.
73 Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Cambridge, 2011).
74 Ibid., p. 260.
75 Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley, 2010).
76 Her thesis was published as Samina Yasmeen, Communal Politics in Punjab: 1925–1947 (Riga, 2011).
77 Kishwar Sultana, ‘South Asian Muslim politics and Sikander-Jinnah pact of 1937’, Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 19.1 (Spring 2011), pp. 99–115.
78 Muhammad Iqbal Chawla and Nyia Mubarik, ‘Theorizing the plural society: Sir Fazl-i-Husain role in Indian Punjab’, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 67.4 (October 2019), pp. 23–39; Zameer Hussain Khan, ‘Fazl-i-Husain and the Muslims of British Punjab’, Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 40.1 (2019), pp. 1–12.
79 Tahir Kamran, ‘The unfolding crisis in Punjab, March–August 1947: key turning points and British responses’, Journal of Punjab Studies 14.2 (2007), pp. 187–210.
80 Jenkins to Wavell, 3 March 1947, MB1/D259, University of Southampton, cited in ibid., p. 191.
81 Ibid., p. 197.
82 Yaqoob Bangash, ‘Anglo-Indians and the Punjab partition: identity, politics and the creation of Pakistan’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming).
83 Asima Noureen and Zaigham Sarfraz, ‘Bertrand Glancy and ministry formation in Punjab in 1946’, Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society 28.2 (December 2016), pp. 20–37.
84 Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Richmond, 1996); Khizar Tiwana, (trans.) Tahir Kamran (Lahore, 1996).
85 Maqbool Ahmad Awan, ‘Khizr Hayat Tiwana: the last and sole voice of the Unionist Party in the British Punjab’, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan 55.2 (July–December 2018), pp. 253–269.
86 Akhtar Hussain Sandhu, for example, supports a nationalist reading by emphasising that the use of government machinery by the Unionists could not deflect the popular religious appeal of the Muslim League. See his article with Amna Mahmood, ‘Revisiting the elections 1946 and the Punjab politics’, Pakistan Vision 14.2 (2008), pp. 207–230; Dr S. Qalb-i-Abid, ‘Communal competition for power in the Punjab and the Unionist-Muslim League co-operation, 1924–26’, South Asian Studies 1.6 (January 1989), pp. 12–33; S. Qalb-i-Abid, Muslim Politics in the Punjab, 1921–1947 (Lahore, 1992), pp. 188–204. For an Indian assessment, see K. C. Yadav, ‘The partition of India: a study of the Muslim politics in the Punjab, 1849–1947’, The Punjab: Past and Present XVII–I.33 (April 1983), pp. 105–144.
87 Malik, ‘Identity formation’, pp. 293–323.
88 See Ian Talbot, Provincial Politics and the Pakistan Movement: The Growth of the Muslim League in North-West and North-East India 1937–1947 (Karachi, 1988).
89 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism, and Partition 1932–1947 (Cambridge, 1994); Haimanti Roy, ‘A partition of contingency? Public discourse in Bengal 1946–1947’, Modern Asian Studies 43.6 (2009), pp. 1355–1384.
90 Partha Chatterjee, ‘The second partition of Bengal’, in P. Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism (Delhi, 1997), p. 38.
91 Sana Aiyar, ‘Fazlul Huq, region and religion in Bengal: the forgotten alternative of 1940–43’, Modern Asian Studies 42.6 (November 2008), pp. 1213–1249.
92 Ian Talbot, ‘Back to the future? The Punjab Unionist model of consociational democracy for contemporary India and Pakistan’, International Journal of Punjab Studies 3.1 (January–June 1996), pp. 65–75.
93 A Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley, 1968); A. Lijphart, ‘Consociational democracy’, World Politics 21 (1969), pp. 207–225; A. Lijphart, Power-Sharing in Southern Africa (Berkeley, 1985).
94 See Parry, B., ‘Political accommodation and consociational democracy’, British Journal of Political Science 5 (1975), pp. 477–505Google Scholar; Halpern, S., ‘The disorderly universe of consociational democracy’, West European Politics 9.2 (1986), pp. 181–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Barry argues that the Swiss ‘success case’ fails to fit the consociational model. The theory has also been attacked as undemocratic because it depends on elite agreements on power-sharing behind closed doors.
95 Talbot, ‘Back to the future?’, p. 69.
96 Talbot, Khizr Tiwana, p. 158.
97 See, for example, the assessment of Khizr by Syed Nur Ahmad, From Martial Law to Martial Law: Politics in the Punjab 1919–1958, (ed.) Craig Baxter from a translation by Mahmud Ali (Boulder, 1985), p. 167.
98 Talbot, Khizr Tiwana, p. 151.
99 Ibid., p. 145.
100 There were 86 Muslim seats in the 175 Muslim seats in the Punjab Legislative Assembly. Seventy-five Muslims were returned from rural constituencies, nine from reserved urban seats, and there were two ‘others’ (women, landholders).
101 Brendan O'Leary sees ‘coercive consociationalism’ as being successful, only if it creates motivation for local elites to avoid violence by making cross-community/segment compromises. O'Leary, Brendan, ‘The limits to coercive consociationalism in northern Ireland’, Political Studies 37 (1989), pp. 562–588CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 Malhotra and Mir, Punjab Reconsidered.
103 Talbot, Khizr Tiwana p. 48.
104 On the existence of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh branches of the same clan in Punjab, see ibid., p. 15.
105 Khizr to Sardar Sadhu Singh Tiwana, 11 March 1937. Letter in the personal archive of Ian Talbot.
106 Sardar Sadhu Singh Tiwana to Umar Hyat Khan Tiwana, 13 June 1938. Letter in the personal archive of Ian Talbot.
107 Sardar Sadhu Singh Tiwana sent a letter of thanks on 5 September 1938.
108 Sardar Sadhu Singh Tiwana to Umar Hyat Khan Tiwana, 1 January 1943. Letter in the personal archive of Ian Talbot.
109 Interview with Justice Kulwant Singh Tiwana, Chandigarh, 10 December 1993.
110 For a discussion of the concept of hybrid regimes in the context of the Pakistan Army's continuing political influence during democratic governments, see Adeney, Katharine, ‘How to understand Pakistan's hybrid regime. The importance of a multi-dimensional continuum’, Democratization 24.1 (2017), pp. 119–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
111 Datta, Forming an Identity, p. 196.
112 Kushal Pal and Jyoti Mishra, ‘BJP's sweeping electoral victory in Haryana’, Economic and Political Weekly 54.32 (10 August 2019), http://epw.in/journal/2019/32/commentary/bjps-sweeping-electoral-victory-haryana.html (accessed 20 April 2023); Ramphal Ohlan, ‘Farm reforms, protests and by-election in Haryana’, Economic and Political Weekly 56.21 (22 May 2021), http://epw.in/journal/2021/21/commentary/farm-reforms-protests-and-election—haryana.html (last accessed 5 January 2022).
113 Singh and Shani, Sikh Nationalism, p. 70.