Struggles & Partitions
Five times in two centuries the Punjab was broken: annexed in 1849, fired on in 1919, divided in 1947, divided again in 1966, and attacked by its own state in 1984. Each time its people rose: farmers and soldiers, poets and students, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. These are the chapters of that struggle.
After two wars, the East India Company annexed the Kingdom of Lahore on 29 March 1849. The ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh was deposed and sent…
The Namdhari Sikhs of Baba Ram Singh boycotted British courts, schools, post offices and cloth half a century before Gandhi. In January 1872 the…
When the British cut the rights of the canal-colony settlers and raised water rates, the farmers of Lyallpur and the bar rose to the song 'Guard your…
Punjabi farmers and mill-workers on the Pacific coast of America, Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, founded the Ghadar party to free India by armed revolt.…
The Punjab gave the Indian Army more soldiers than any other province. In the First World War Punjabis fought at Ypres, Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and…
On Vaisakhi day 1919, General Dyer's troops fired without warning into a crowd of thousands in a walled garden in Amritsar: Hindus, Muslims and…
The Akali movement freed the Sikh shrines from corrupt hereditary mahants in a campaign of mass non-violence: the Nankana massacre of 1921, the Keys…
When Lala Lajpat Rai died after a police beating in Lahore in 1928, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru answered. Their trial made them heroes across…
The Radcliffe line, announced two days after independence, cut the Punjab between Lahore and Amritsar. Some ten million people fled across it…
In the princely states of the Malwa, villages were held by biswedars who took a share of every harvest from the tenants, the muzaras. In 1928 the…
After a long agitation for a Punjabi-speaking state, Indian Punjab was divided again on 1 November 1966: Haryana and the hill districts were cut…
Sikhs call 1984 the Third Ghallughara, the third great holocaust. The first two were in the eighteenth century: the Chhota Ghallughara of 1746, when…
When India passed three farm laws that threatened guaranteed crop prices, the farmers of Punjab marched on Delhi and camped at its borders for a…
Pakistan's Punjab began in ruins: millions of refugees from the east, millions fled to India, Lahore half burned. Within a generation it had become…
The Punjabi Suba of 1966 left a small state, a little over 50,000 square kilometres, with a Sikh majority, a shared capital at Chandigarh and its…