Beneath the village pipal tree literally dozens of conflicting identities awaited the visitor, some so subtle as to be scarcely discernible, others starkly distinct. Counterposing just Muslims and Hindus – a practice long favoured by the British and now championed by Jinnah, endorsed by the Cabinet Mission Plan and fitfully contested by Congress – woefully oversimplified the situation.
For one thing, it ignored the Sikhs. Though statistically irrelevant in the rest of India, in the Punjab the followers of the ten Gurus and the Granth Sahib made up around a quarter of the population and were, reported Darling, as evenly distributed about the province’s Muslim and Hindu majority areas ‘as the ingredients of a well-made pilau’. This was the problem. Muslims and Hindus enjoyed majority status in numerous provinces; if sovereignty was to reside in the provinces and groups as per the Cabinet Mission Plan, each was assured of a share of power. But it was not so with the Sikhs. A minority in their Punjab homeland, they were, like the titbits of mutton in the pilau, so nicely spread about the plate as to be minorities even in most of that province’s districts and sub-districts.
The Cabinet Mission had been made aware of this problem. Sikh spokesmen had lobbied for a settlement that would afford them some guarantee of local autonomy and religious freedom, and that would not further fragment them by dividing the pilau – the Punjab – between a Muslim Pakistan and a non-Muslim ‘Hindustan’. (At the time it was assumed that an India without its Muslim majority areas would call itself ‘Hindustan’, the land of the Hindu, rather than lay claim to the term ‘India’.) Partition would, of course, produce precisely this disastrous bisection of the Sikh community. But the Cabinet Mission’s masterplan for a united India was equally objectionable, in that it consigned the Sikhs to demographic inconsequence within a Muslim-dominated Punjab that would itself be attached to the Muslim-dominated north-western ‘group’ of provinces. ‘We have been thrown into a pit,’ moaned a young Sikh to Darling.13
In making almost no provision for the Sikhs, the Plan ignored a community that was arguably the most distinctive and assertive in the whole country. Uncut hair, billowing beards and tightly tied turbans positively trumpeted the identity of all Sikh Sardars; their neat fields and thriving agricultural cooperatives brought a special glow to Darling’s heart; and their disproportionate representation in British India’s regiments, not to mention their familiarity with firearms and their attachment to costume weaponry (dirks and swords), left little doubt that they would defend their interests. These interests were not purely doctrinal. Muslims were sometimes accused of embracing independence as a chance to put the clock back to a pre-British India when the Muslim Mughals ruled most of the subcontinent. Sikhs felt somewhat the same about their province. The Punjab had been British for less than a hundred years. Before the 1840s it had been the heart of an independent Sikh kingdom – or sometimes ‘empire’ – extending from the Khyber Pass to Tibet. As champions of the Punjabi language and as the region’s erstwhile rulers, the Sikhs effectively defined the province. Their ‘empire’s’ political capital of Lahore was still the administrative capital, and their spiritual capital of Amritsar was still its only rival. Sites associated with the triumphs and tribulations of early Sikhism were scattered right across the province, as were Sikh shrines, places of pilgrimage and centres of worship. Whatever the electoral mathematics, the Sardars felt entitled to special consideration. Their dream of an independent ‘Khalistan’, like the Muslims’ dream of ‘Pakistan’, was as yet more a battle-cry than a realistic proposition, but as the Punjab began to shatter along its Hindu–Muslim faultline, the idea of an autonomous Sikh homeland was becoming ever more attractive.
Another casualty of the constitution-makers’ tendency to polarise Hindus and Muslims (and indeed Sikhs) was the rich matrix of customs and values that both communities shared. In the villages of central Punjab even the experienced Darling sometimes had difficulty telling who was a Muslim and who a Hindu. They were hard to distinguish because Muslims (and Sikhs) were often descended from converts whose caste or tribe was still that of their Hindu neighbours. There were thus Hindu Gujars and Muslim Gujars, and Hindu Jats, Muslim Jats and Sikh Jats. It was the same with Rajputs.
Riding along this morning, I asked a Muslim Inspector [or Zaildar] …, whether Muslims ever have their horoscopes read. ‘Yes,’ he replied, and added, ‘all Bhatti Rajput Muslims have this done by the family Brahmin.’ The Naib-Tehsildar [Deputy Officer], a Hindu, joining in, said: ‘The Zaildar and I are of the same tribe. He is a [Muslim] Bhatti and I am a [Hindu] Bhatia; our origin is the same.’14
Further on, Darling heard tell of some fifty Rajput villages that had converted to Islam in around 1700. Recently they had offered to ‘return to the Hindu fold on the one condition that their Hindu kinsfolk would give them their daughters in marriage’. This was refused and they remained Muslims; ‘but they still interchange civilities at marriage, inviting mullah or Brahmin, as the case may be, to share in the feasting’. Such communal harmony was by no means unusual. Oral testimony has amply confirmed that even in Bengal and Bihar, the scene of the first great killings, Muslims commonly participated in Hindu festivals and Hindus in Muslim festivals. Each might also consult the other’s holy men, share their myths, mimic their greetings and in some cases partake of their food. Conduct might be no more reliable in deciding who was a Hindu or a Muslim than ethnicity.
South of Delhi, Darling’s route lay among the Meos of a region known as Mewat. ‘Clanny and feckless’, he thought, the Meos were once reputed a criminal tribe who lived by highway robbery. Few outsiders entered their often scruffy villages (one of which, Gurgaon, now challenges Delhi with its shopping malls and call centres), and here, for a change, Darling found the tables turned: it was the villagers who were quizzing him about his own caste. (‘No, I am not a Muslim.’ ‘Then are you a Hindu?’) The Meos had a particular interest in the matter because their own identity was problematic. Officially they were regarded as Muslims and, according to Darling, they already favoured the League. But fellow Muslims were not always anxious to acknowledge them as such, nor to intermarry with them. This was because they combined irregular attendance at the mosque and erratic performance of namaz (the Muslim prayers) with a passionate devotion to Lords Krishna and Rama.
Sadly, according to Shail Mayaram, a latterday champion of the Meos, such bi-confessionalism was being eroded from two sides. On the one hand, the tract-distributing Tablighi ‘mission’ was actively promoting Islamic orthodoxy among the Meos; and on the other, zealots of the Mahasabha, the Hindu triumphalist party, were actively promoting anti-Muslim sentiment among the Meos’ Hindu neighbours. Willy-nilly, the Meos were coming to think of themselves as Muslim because that was how others saw them. In an increasingly polarised society there was no place for a cross-communal community. Come Partition, the Meos would pay dearly for their heterodoxy, experiencing death and dispossession at the hands of their Hindu neighbours, then rebuffs and rejection at the hands of their Muslim ‘brethren’.15
Most of the Meos’ neighbours in that part of the Punjab that is now the Indian state of Haryana were Hindu Jats. Relations between the two communities had been cordial until the 1930s. Then population pressures had led to a period of agrarian unrest as the Jats coveted the Meos’ land. There were armed affrays and the troops had to be called in. But religion had not been an issue at the time. It only became so when Congress and the League squared up to one another in the 1940s. And in the country south of Delhi, all the way to Agra and Jaipur in fact, this politicisation of communal sentiment had especially dire consequences. For here agrarian, ethnic and religious tension was exacerbated by what was undoubtedly the greatest anomaly of all in a supposedly ‘united India’ – namely that much of it was far from united in that it was not actually ruled by the British. Indeed it never had been, for this was princely India.
Long before he reached Mewat, Darling’s equestrian odyssey had repeatedly taken him into territories whose administration owed nothing to his former fellows in the Indian Civil Service and everything to the good sense or otherwise of one of India’s innumerable princes. In the Punjab the princely states of Patiala and Nabha, both ruled by Sikh Maharajahs, had yielded a rather frosty welcome, and Bahawalpur state, ruled by a Muslim Nawab, was beset by poor harvests. Villages in the princely states were less likely to have a school than in British-ruled India, noted Darling, and the people were therefore less well informed.
There