Punjab has started attracting a good deal of scholarly attention in the recent years. A sizable number of young scholars have focused on the colonial past as well as on the post-colonial present of the region, producing a number of nuanced studies.
The most important effect of this is the process of introspection that has begun, at least among some Punjabis. Several events like extension lectures, seminars and conferences are held in various universities of the Punjab with the two-fold aim -- bringing scholars of the Punjab together and also to explore fresh themes with new perspectives.
One such event was held by the History Department of GC University, Faisalabad with the overarching theme of ‘Punjab: Past & Present’. Rizwan Ullah Kaukab and Abdul Qadir Mushtaq were the chief organisers of this two-day event, actively attended by scores of young scholars. Relatively senior historians and researchers were asked to join in the proceedings with keynote addresses of 15 minute duration.
When I walked into the conference hall, Abrar Zahur, a young historian from Sargodha University, was presenting a paper titled ‘Two Lawrences: Henry and John’. The paper was cogently argued with an emphasis on John Lawrence’s role in conjuring up the Punjab Officers Commission, which to my reckoning had extraordinary relevance for Pakistan’s contemporary situation. One may argue that the prevailing system of bureaucracy has tangible resonance with the principles of governance framed by that corps of officers. However, I put a question to Abrar about the religious inclination of John Lawrence, reputed to be a stark evangelical which, according to Kenneth Jones, compromised the much-trumpeted neutrality of the British officers. That it later helped foment the Christian cause was the implied connotation of the question. Abrar opted to agree with my assertion.
But my friend Prof. Iqbal Chawla, the head of History Department, Punjab University and also Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, chose to differ. This is what I will be dealing with in the following lines.
Apparently, Prof. Chawla was right in maintaining that the latent support lent by the Punjab government to Christian missionaries in their proselytisation proved to be a damp squib. In the Punjab under the British, the rate of conversion to Christianity amongst Punjabis remained abysmally low. Therefore, the efforts of missionaries and the avowed support of the Punjab government to the former proved to be an utter failure.
One cannot dispute this claim looking only at the statistical data. Mostly, conversion was confined only to the lowest strata of the Punjabi populace, which was engaged in menial work. But, if scrutinised a bit closely, one may find casting of a strong socio-moral influence of the rulers (British) on the collective disposition of the people.
It may be underlined here that the moral ethos underpinning modernity was essentially Christian of sorts. Comparative research conducted on a pre-modern pattern of morality and how different was it vis-à-vis modern patterns of morality may bring out astonishing results. If minutely observed, our current paradigm of morality rests on three pillars -- primacy of the ritual, centrality of textuality and a misogynistic attitude towards women. About women, it is important to mention here that with the introduction of modern education, North Indian Muslim reformers came up with an ambivalent response. One response was to allow the males to empower themselves through Western education while making it incumbent upon the females to preserve tradition. Therefore, socially, the male-female dichotomy was perpetuated.
All said and done, these pillars are a colonial bequest to which we adhere as if it were part of our ancient heritage. The complete abnegation of the transgender is one corollary of a British/modern/Christian ethos which we readily embraced and internalised. But that requires a separate piece.
The ‘Print’ was the most important modernist tool which the Muslims adopted heartily. Here, it will be instructive to invoke what veteran historian, Francis Robinson from Royal Holloway, notes. He points out a number of changes that the print brought about in the Muslim World View. Most salient of them were, "The emergence of a protestant or scriptural Islam; the strengthening of the Pan-Islamic layer in the Muslim sense of identity; consolidation of Ulema as the sole interpretation of Islam; the outflanking of the oral, person to person, systems for the transmission of knowledge; the colonising of Muslim minds with Western knowledge; and the opening of the way towards new understandings of Islam such as those of the modernists and the fundamentalists".
A scriptural tradition with an augmented role for the Ulema and the pan-Islamic streak among the Muslims of the modern era are the facts of our national life which we have internalised, considering them to be integral constituents of our pristine collective self. In his conclusion, Robinson does not include the discriminatory attitude towards women which has become institutionalised, and the changes brought to literature and art, done at the behest of the British officials in order to cleanse them of erotic and immoral content.
Thus, literary genres like wasokht, Sarapa-e-Sukhan, Hezel and Rekhti were denounced as obscene and dispensed with. The classical Persian text Bahar-i-Danish was also proscribed as it contained ‘erotic’ (for which read ‘immoral’) content, not at all amenable to Victorian sensibilities, which people like Holroyd, Lietner and Macleod epitomised.
It is interesting that the Muslim reformers and the Ulema unequivocally endorsed this colonial policy. Thus it would be over-simplistic to conclude that the Ulema were against the British rule on all counts. Even if proselytisation by the missionaries could not yield the desired results, their impact on our morality, ethics and the social fabric was decisive. That is what Colonialism does, it changes the state structure and social norms in absolute sense.