Book Review: Robber Noblemen, A study of the political system of the Sikh Jats [Part I]
A survey on the culture of rural Punjab and its Sikh Jat inhabitants from the 1960s
Joyce Pettigrew is probably best known for her seminal work The Sikhs of the Punjab, and for how through detailed investigation, she was able to give a strong English-language, academic voice to a turbulent segment of Punjabi and Sikh history. However, this was her first book; published in 1975 and covering fieldwork conducted from 1965-1967, it is perhaps less well-known because it also covers a period of history that is less glamorous (both to Sikhs and others).
However, in typical Pettigrew-style; the title of this work is bold, immediately catches one’s attention, and [as any in the field should do] gets our mind racing as to whether there are deeper anthropological reasonings to parse out of day-to-day phenomena we take as granted.
I would broadly start this review by noting the book has two large parts:
1) A deep dive through history, anecdotes, field research, and cultural anthropological methods through what “Sikh Jat” culture generally is, and was at the time of the writing.
2) An extensive case study applying this framework of ‘Sikh Jat’ culture to the political career of Punjab Chief Minister Partap Singh Kairon, coming to a head with his vicious rivalry with Gian Singh Rarewala in Eastern Malwa.
Broadly speaking, Pettigrew uses [1] to establish a framework and assumptions on which basis events relayed in [2] are anthropologically analyzed. From the title of the book, I largely expected only [1]; I was happily surprised to find out that while this was covered to my satisfaction, most of the book is actually about [2] and thus serves as a narrator of history of that decade of Punjab/Sikh history.
Accordingly to the large scope of the book, my review will be split accordingly - this article will only deal with [1].
Also, some great news is that although the book had gone out of print at the time of my reading it, it has recently gone back to print and can be purchased through Routledge (also available on Amazon + Kindle).
Punjab - A Land of Extremes
Pettigrew starts her book with a broad overview of what constitutes Punjabi Sikh Jat culture for the terms of her research. Much of this is standard fare common across most books; a historical overview of the Punjab plains, and how its geographical location and topography for made it a land that saw constant invasion and war alongside prosperity and how this shaped Punjabi culture.
This introduction, though perhaps standard in terms of content presented, is in tone anything but the happy, go-lucky caricatured image that pop-culture sometimes portrays of Punjab. For example, she almost immediately talks about how, in Punjab,
”Extremity is not a feature pertaining to the climate alone1. It operates with reference to people and their loyalties. One must be faithful to a friend no matter what this involves one in….One must treat one’s enemies unmercifully, and flagrantly demonstrate that one is doing so. People are either enemies whom one hates or friends whom one loves. Feelings are direct and uncomplicated, a decisiveness which is reflected in the political formation of the ‘paarti’ or faction…”
This example of extremism is continued at length for general cultural traits - bright clothes, extremely rich foods, strong hospitality, and binge-drinking - but it goes to show the incisiveness with which Pettigrew can translate concepts that are perhaps only found in offhand boliyan or casual conversations held over cha into carefully crafted academic prose.
One thing an astute reader of this review (or the book) may note is that some of the broad characteristics may not be exclusive to Sikh Jats or Punjab, or for that matter India/broader South Asia; it’s worth noting that Pettigrew takes plenty of care to be aware of this in her analysis and cites broader anthropological literature while making some of the broader claims (aka, this is probably the last concern to have about this book in general). I’d also note here that another strength of Pettigrew’s writing isn’t just how her prose flows as writing, but how much specific evidence and examples are cited throughout the book.
All in all, the backdrop of Punjab albeit with potential for darker undertones, and the introduction of the “paarti” (party) is an apt teaser for what will really form the main themes of the entirety of the book.
A History of the [Jat] Sikhs
After giving the setting, in come the characters that populate it - as the title so blatantly suggests, the Jat Sikhs. Pettigrew’s Jat history eschews most of the origin hypotheses on the specific origins of the Jat caste and starts with how the Sikh Gurus introduced a new spiritual and political age in Punjab, in particular with Guru Gobind Singh’s creation of the Khalsa2.
For some readers perhaps excited for a caste-based analysis of Sikh history, this major omission of Jat history for centuries prior to the Sikhs as well as lack of any mention of Jat culture elsewhere may seem peculiar. However, Pettigrew makes explicit note of how her discussion of “caste” in Sikh Punjab is confined to a specific context:
“It will be apparent from the above how the values, concepts of the Sikh rural areas of the Punjab differ from those of Hindu India, at least as these have been depicted in ethnographic writing. There nevertheless has been a bland assumption on the part of certain writers that castes, as political segments, exist within the Punjab as they do in other parts of India.”
In other words, the anthropological discourse Pettigrew is engaged in is neither one of how Punjabi Jat Sikhs are performing in accordance to the ideals of Sikhi, nor how they are nestled within ‘the caste system’ and its broader origins; rather, it is about the social realities of them as a group that defines Sikh-dominated rural Punjab3.
Putting all this aside, it’s hard to deny Pettigrew’s main argument here:
“The ranks and leadership of the Khalsa, from this period onwards until the nineteenth century, were predominantly Jat.”4
What I found most interesting here is Pettigrew’s analysis of the misl period and its politics. Traditional Sikh histories focused largely on the ideological mission of the disparate misls for the cause of the Khalsa, 19th century European accounts highlighted the “republican” political nature of the misl system, and subsequent histories borrowed from both of these to provide an image of a democratic system where smaller Sikh armies worked together to overcome powerful enemies. Pettigrew takes the inverse of this standard narrative by focusing on what the misls were doing when they were not united — in large part, warfare amongst themselves over treasure and borders. For example, a specific example of a conflict over some borders occurred between the Ramgarhia5 and Kanhaiya misl in 1776 where residents of Batala, unhappy with the Ramgarhia chieftains, gave aid to the invading Kanhaiyas and thus helped change the tide of the battle and secured their newfound loyalty.
I really found this example to be quite fascinating. Information about internecine misl warfare in most Sikh narratives isn’t censored per say - Rattan Singh’s Panth Parkash has several chapters that discuss such battles, and Khushwant Singh’s “A History of the Sikhs” talks at length about them, including a battle where the two Jassa Singh’s literally inflicted wounds on one another. But Pettigrew’s treatment is unique in that it focuses less on the more “heroic” individuals of the era and the “big names”, and more on how average people who lived under these chieftains thought and acted accordingly. Sikh historiography would benefit largely from more exploration of this sort of ground-level-narrative that can perhaps be aquired from investigation into specific pinds (like how Colonel Harisimran Singh did at Pahuwind in his book on Baba Deep Singh), and it certainly makes the period more accessible and less alien to map social aspects of it to contemporary rural Punjab.
In any case, this example is used to illustrate the concept of “factionalism”, a central thesis to the book as “…for the Jats a relatively persistent and typical mode of organization”. That is to say, the social dynamics which led the residents of Batala to prioritize their own local interests and swap overhead polities overnight with misls echoes through history up to the 1960s when the book was written.
Interestingly, along these lines of an “inverse” analysis of the misl era, Pettigrew particularly highlights the life of Ala Singh—a black sheep in Sikh narratives of the era, but a useful example to drive home the idea of Jat-factionalism having historic precedent. Ala Singh’s political opportunism, as seen by his varying shifting alliances with different Mughal/Khalsa/Afghan overlords, had “…no rationale other than seeking of projtection so that he would be secure in his aggrandizements”. That is, Ala Singh lacked any strong ideology other than an immediate drive to secure and consolidate absolute power in his locality — and this, Pettigrew argues, is the exact pattern she observed (ironically, in the same area of Eastern Malwa) among rural politicians in Punjab in the 1960s.
It is hard to argue with Pettigrew here; despite Ala Singh’s controversial decisions ideologically, he was able to strongly maintain his political foothold in his immediate area and thus sprout the first Sikh cultural influences in a region that was historically dominated by Punjabi Muslim polities. The same applies for his scion, who were able to maintain their rule over the same area over centuries despite several waves of political upheaval from the higher levels.
Ethnography of the Sikh Jat Family Dynamic
Whereas the book starts strong with history and some inklings of theory, this section provides what I thought the book was going to be exclusively about; an ethnographic description of a myriad of customs, social norms, and practices common to Jat Sikh families in rural Punjab (again, in the 1960s). The bulk of this section I will leave to those who purchase and/or read the book, but it is fascinating and exceedingly well done; much of what I read I had already known from hearing my grandparents talk about their experiences growing up, and some of the novelties I was able to confirm after asking them about them. Although this doesn’t make Pettigrew’s research and observations exhaustive, it is a credit to the strength of it that it can be corroborated by “local” folk.
These observations aren’t thrown out of the blue, as the overarching basis here too is to further develop the idea of “factionalism”; an example is following a section discussing wedding rites, Pettigrew notes:
“The amount of land in a family’s possession, however, was never constant…To protect landholding, therefore, alliances were formed through marriage..and by joining factions. Political links were sought primarily to give security in the possession of economic resources in the form of land…”
This idea, though seemingly simple, is critical to the ideas developed in the rest of the book (as mentioned earlier, at length discussing the politics of CM Partap Singh Kairon in the area) and as discussed earlier in the history section, where undoubtedly many locals would pick their affiliation at a given time, whether under a misl or a kingdom, based on what was expedient for them to maintain security of their land (or help expand it).
“The Jats bow the knee only to themselves and God”
As I mentioned earlier, the era of Punjab from 1947-1984 is not really “glamorized” much in Sikh, or Indian, histories, and as such is neglected. Everyone knows broadly of the extreme violence of Partition and the factors leading up to it as well as the fallout of Operation Bluestar and the violent legacy it left; but characterizations of the “interregnum”, so to speak, are mostly like that of the earlier Weekly of India cover — optimistic and all-is-well. For many, there is even a pining to return to this status quo of Punjab at its economic, and perceptively, cultural peak.
However, the reality is that violence didn’t just take suddenly afflict Punjab on these two occasions of sentali and charausi like a sudden thundercloud on an otherwise-sunny day; the social realities of rural Punjab from the 50s to 70s were harsh, brutal, and often excessively violent. Pettigrew makes this explicitly clear:
“The legitimation of killing and violence was historical and cultural. Courage, the willingness to take risks, the absence in the ideology of any concept of defeat and submission and the capacity to impose oneself on others, were major values of the culture…Legitimation of killing and violence, was…fundamentally based on power. Violence had always been the traditional accompaniment of dominance in a village or small local area and in the state. Moreover, the security achieved by dominance was conceived to be, and in fact was, only temporary, and therefore required permanent guarding. This led to further violence. In my fieldwork area killing and violence were facts of existence that had to be lived with. They were not sensational news and were thought about unemotionally.”
Sure, we can concede that ideological violence in Punjab, such as that of sentali and charausi, undoubtedly played out at a larger scale and thus captures the fears and horrors of a broader population (including urbanites and those outside of Punjab) more than some people brutally fighting one another for an extra killa of zameen.6 At the same time, it’s high time many Punjabis grow up from the play-land given to them by colorful Bhangra routines and recognize the brutal social realities that persisted, and at times were even exasperated, even as [East] Punjab saw massive economic growth in its period of optimism.
It’s also worth noting that we should apply the principle of “ethnographic” research broadly — it’s extremely important to contribute to Archive Projects for Partition and 1984 by interviewing elders, but a lot of interesting (and sometimes, quite shocking) stories can be found by just asking them about their lives, and seeing how occurrences they talk about as routine and mundane can be utterly shocking to our modern sensibilities.7
Though the contemporary take on Punjab’s weather is of it having a moderate climate, perhaps because of its reputation as an agricultural powerhouse that is good for rearing crops, the idea of Punjab’s climate being a harsh one as it varies wildly from extremely hot to incredibly cold was first intellectually introduced to me via the works of the eminent MS Randhawa, who also discussed how this shaped the culture of the people there. Nobody knows this better than people who live in villages today who have to handle burning hot summers and freezing winters, as well as some NRIs who may have made the unfortunate mistake of booking tickets to visit in the summer but also forgetting to wear layers to sustain through winter nights.
“Uncut hair was a Jat custom” is cited with a footnote mentioning McLeod who first made the argument and an example of such being the classic story of Mirza-Sahiba; while Mirza, like many Punjabi heroes, is traditionally portrayed with long hair, this is quite different from the uncut hair of Sikhs often portrayed in a top-knot of some sorts. The hairstyle of Mirza is common to many Punjabi Muslims in Pakistan today, who keep it trimmed. Indeed, there’s not even much evidence to suggest that this affinity for long-but-trimmed hair was exclusive to Jats as it was common to different Muslim and Hindu groups across the subcontinent (such as depictions of Pathans or Dogras) and other Jats kept short hair (see the Jats of Bharatpur). Anyway, this is more a diatribe on McLeod - who made the argument in the first place.
Some further quotations from the section that support this are how Pettigrew notes that “caste solidarity rarely operated in practice” and how caste hierarchy does not explicitly exist as the way it does in other parts of India. Indeed, this is why non-Jat rural Sikh figures are used interchangeably within analysis of the “Jat Sikh” framework throughout the book. Pettigrew also doesn’t whitewash realities of caste; she spends an extensive section discussing Mazhbi-Jat economic and social relations in many villages, which did often assume an asymmetric relationship.
Although there were undoubtedly Sikhs of a myriad of caste backgrounds represented in the Dal Khalsa during the misl-era, the argument that Jats were the most predominant numerically and politically is pretty well-supported; examples of contemporary evidence to this note include contemporary Sikh sources noting as much, as well as a couplet from the famed poet Waris Shah referring to the domination of the Sikh misls as Jat rule.
An astute reader will note that while the Kanhaiya misl was indeed founded by Jats, the Ramgarhias were explicitly not - “Ramgarhia” is a community name for many Tarkhan Sikhs. This highlights another key facet of Pettigrew’s book, which is really concerned with political considerations between Sikhs in rural Punjab, of which Jats are a large demographic, rather than any specific caste considerations.
See the 2012 film “Shareeka” for an accurate portrayal of such conflicts and how some even persist to the modern day.
Since reading, I’ve tried to glean more information from my elders along these lines from their time growing up in the 50s-70s and have come up with some quite colorful stories. One such story is about how one of my grand-uncles along with his buddies used to proudly take buses without paying the fare. One day, a particularly strong-willed bus conductor demanded the fare paid; to which things escalated ending up with my uncle slapping the bus conductor. At this point, the bus-conductor physically subdued him, made everyone else get off the bus, and immediately drove off; putting it flatly, he casually kidnapped my uncle for his transgressions and held him hostage at his personal residence. The situation was resolved when some family members immediately left for the bus-conductor’s village with members of their Panchayat to help resolve and diffuse the situation and bring him back.
As I heard this story from a family member, there was a pretty nonchalant attitude to how quickly the situation escalated and it was casually mentioned that had the panchayat and family members not quickly arrived to diffuse the situation, “who knows” what would have become of my uncle.
Bro you should write a book of your own as well.