Guru Nanak exalts Jats of Punjab
* Eminent
historian and author. This is excerpted from his essay in Honour of Dr. Ganda
Singh - delivered as Presidential address at the Punjabi History Congress, at
Patiala in 1971.
It has always seemed to
me a question worth asking - why, when other movements similar to Guru
Nanak’s, movements so similar that the verses of their preachers were included
in the Guru Granth Sahib, failed to take strong roots among the
peasantry, in their own regions, Sikhism should so greatly have succeeded in
this?
It is quite clear that what
Guru Nanak and his successors preached was a universal faith, and not a narrow
or sectional doctrine. But, like all great religions, Sikhism made progress
differently in different areas and different classes. It is always incredibly
difficult to analyze the teachings of religion in historical terms, to work out
what aspects of it made particular appeal to what strata, and what aspects were
stressed by whom. Individuals naturally tend to interpret every universal
message in terms they can themselves understand; and thus a distinction is
bound to arise in the case of every religion between the substance of the
message and its actual comprehension, however lively and sincere might be the
attempts that are made to attain an absolutely loyal comprehension of the
original doctrine.
Can it, therefore, have
happened that the Jatts received Sikhism at a time when, by historical
circumstances, they were in need of it the most, and so saw it as a message of
particular import to themselves?
We have seen that the Jatts,
as an originally pastoral community, had been condemned to a humiliating
position; they had then expanded and transformed themselves into large
agricultural communities. It is almost certain that, in spite of this
transformation, the older caste stigma persisted. The other castes do not still
allow the Jatts the status of Kshatriyas to which they lay claim, and the
traditional view, recoded by Skinner at Hansi in 1825, was that they arose out
of the wedlock between a Kshatriya and a Vaishya woman.1
The Dabistan-i-Mazahib,
about the middle of the seventeenth century, described them, as we have seen,
as the lowest caste among the Vaishyas, though this was still an advance over
the Shudra classification of Alberuni in the eleventh century. It is,
therefore, quite likely that the Jatts who, in the sixteenth century, were not
only entirely peasants but, in so many localities of the Punjab, also zamindars
would assert themselves against a social status which no longer corresponded to
their economic position.
For such cases Indian society has usually had the mechanism which
modern sociologists tend to term Sanskritization. In most such cases, the top
strata of the lower caste would ‘Sanskritize’ and merge into the higher castes
in due course of time. Why this could not easily happen with the Jatts –
although the process is not entirely lacking there is perhaps mainly because
they had inherited from their earlier stage an egalitarian or semi-egalitarian
social structure, to which both Hiuen Tsang and the Chachnama bear
testimony.
In such circumstances,
Sikhism, which rejected in theory the entire system of caste and whose Gurus in
practice raised Jatts to the highest position without hesitation, could not but
fail to win over and command the loyalty of large sections from amongst the
Jatts. To them Sikh Scripture’s stirring words, written in the name of Dhanna
Jat, might have had a significance beyond the purely spiritual one that the
Guru had in mind:
“Having heard all this, I, a Jat, applied
myself to devotion:
I have met
the Lord in person; such is the great fortune of Dhanna.”
But I would go further; I do
not think it is adequate to see in the Jatt espousal of Sikhism a mere
alternative to Sanskritization. The Jatts were peasants, and the one
outstanding problem of the peasants in the seventeenth century was that they
had to bear a very heavy burden of land revenue and a great degree of
oppression of the ruling classes of the Mughal Empire. I have elsewhere argued
that this situation was bound to provoke peasant revolts.2
On this I have not anything new to add, but it does seem to me that the
militant development of the Sikh community during the seventeenth century can
have one major explanation in the resort to armed violence by the Jatt
peasantry, when the economic pressure became increasingly intolerable. This
further cemented the historical association between the Jatt peasantry and
Sikhism, though the association itself certainly antedates the agrarian crisis
of the Mughal Empire.
q
Reference
1. James Skinner,
Tashrihul Aqwam, Br. Mus. MS Add. 27,
255 f.
2. Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963, pp. 318-51.