Sunday, February 2, 2003		Books

Punjabi literature
Banda, first to challenge Mughal tyranny in Punjab
Jaspal Singh

SEVENTEENTH century Punjab witnessed the beginning of Sikh persecution at the hands of the ruling Mughal hierarchy when two of their Gurus were executed. This persecution intensified in the beginning of the 18th century. As a result, the 10th Guru had to leave Anandpur Sahib and then Chamkaur and retreat into the wilderness of the Malwa on his way to South India after having lost his mother and children in the turmoil.

In fact, the 18th century is one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the subcontinent. With the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the central Mughal authority went haywire as a consequence of his own policies. At about this time Guru Gobind Singh met Madhodas, a Bairagi, near Nanded on the banks of the Godawari. Madhodas originally belonged to a farming Rajput clan of Jammu. His childhood name was Lachhmandev, which was changed to Madhodas after his induction into the Bairagi cult. As soon as Madhodas had a glimpse of the Guru, he completely submitted himself to his will and the Guru was immediately convinced that he had found the man to lead his beleaguered Sikhs and who may eventually accomplish his mission after him.

The Guru baptised him the chief of his small soldiery. Many historical accounts about his life and times are available but the latest appears in the form of a historical novel, Banda Singh Bahadur (Lokgeet Parkashan, Chandigarh), by Kuldeep Bhatnagar "Kavideep". The novel begins with a glimpse of Banda’s adolescent pranks in his native village and then takes a complex discursive line as the narration crisis deepens. Of course, the persecution of the Sikhs and the cold-blooded murder of the Guru’s minor sons at Sirhind by the Mughal governor Wazir Khan was the immediate cause of Banda’s induction by the Guru, yet there was a larger vision of dismantling the structure of fear and bondage and thus creating a living space for those who did not subscribe to the Mughal ethos. Message had had already spread that Banda Bahadur with the Guru’s blessings and weapons was on his way to Punjab to bring to justice the perpetrators of barbaric atrocities on the Guru’s followers. The Sikhs at that time were not more than a few thousand but they firmly believed that Banda was the deliverer of divine nemesis and they readily rallied around him with all their possession and improvised weapons to make a life-and-death battle against an unjust arrogant power. Most of Banda’s soldiery was from peasant stock and with sheer rage, passion and grit they swooped on the brute rulers of Punjab like a scourge of God and took towns, cities and villages by storm, devastating all the structural symbols of Mughal authority. Sonepat, Kaithal, Samana, Sadhaura, Banur and so on fell one after the other and were sacked by the victors. The entire landed aristocracy in this region was put to the sword.

Banda gave a specific call to the peasantry to rise and promised them the captured lands along with a share in the booty. The imagination of the peasantry was inflamed with the vision of mastery over the land that they tilled under inhuman conditions as serfs. After having subdued the entire region between the Yamuna and Sirhind, Banda was moving towards Sirhind itself, the capital of the province between Lahore and Delhi. It was only here that he was to encounter a trained well-equipped regular Mughal army with well-oiled artillery. The battle of Chappar Chirhi (Chhaparh Jhirhi) is a great military marvel. That an irregular army of peasants without any artillery could completely rout a trained regular army of the Mughal governor Wazir Khan is in itself a miracle.

Sirhind was completely devastated; the lands and booty were distributed among the conquerors. "The prosecutors were prosecuted and the rulers were ruled," as they say. With the fall of Sirhind, Banda held sway over the entire region between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. Since he did not have any viable administrative machinery, he could not devise an effective transfer of power. After Sirhind Banda crossed the Yamuna, sacked Saharanpur and its surrounding towns and villages before turning to the Doaba and Majha regions of Punjab. The powerful Faujdar of Rahon, who dominated the Doaba region, was decimated and in the Majha, except Lahore and Kasur, the area came under his dominance.

The central Mughal authority under Bahadur Shah I now made up its mind to teach Banda a lesson. A huge imperial army sent by Farukh Siyar (Bahadur Shah having died in 1712 in Lahore while chasing Banda), under Abdus Samad Khan and his son Zakarya Khan, after a prolonged treacherous war was able to subdue Banda at Gurdaspur. He was captured along with his 700 comrades and was severely tortured, humiliated and killed in the most barbaric manner ever devised by an injured power. This is how the short stormy life of Banda Bahadur, the first Sikh ruler of Punjab, ended. Kuldeep Bhatnagar skillfully transforms a historical narrative into a fictional one and vice versa. The novel Banda Singh Bahadur, therefore, is history, biography and fiction all rolled into one.