‘But you say the IAS was a good service. Weren’t there good things?’
‘There were good things. I was in the drought-prone area programme. We tried to provide relief to people in drought-prone areas. We provided wells, sources of irrigation. That was a good thing. Though there again I ran into trouble. With the zilla parishad, the district council. That’s an elected body, and the chairman wanted all the minor irrigation works to be entrusted to his relative. And that relative was sub-contracting it out to others, and he made money on that. The chairman had a big clout in the administration. But I didn’t help him. He wanted to humiliate me. He called me to a meeting of the zilla parishad. But that time the democratic process worked – very unusual. The other elected members supported me, and rebuked the zilla parishad chairman for harassing an honest officer.’
Even that didn’t reconcile Gurtej to the administrative service. But wasn’t politics the art of the possible? And couldn’t that be said with greater force of the civil service? Wasn’t there – going only by what he had said – an intention of improvement and service to the people?
Gurtej didn’t see it like that. He had gone into the service with the highest expectations; they allowed of no worldliness or compromise. He said, ‘I am not somebody’s minion. I am serving the law, the country’s constitution. Why should I play to the whims of some corrupt man? As an officer, if you can’t act impartially, there is no meaning in remaining in service. Even for self-respect it is essential that you should feel you are doing what is right.’
Though he was far away in the South, his association with Kapur Singh continued. In 1974 he formally took his vows as a Sikh, going through the ritual which the 10th Guru had laid down. He took amrit, drank the consecrated nectar, a mixture of sugar and water stirred with a double-edged sword. Not every Sikh went through this ceremony and made his formal vows.
Gurtej said, ‘I had doubts until then whether this sort of ceremony was necessary. Sikhism is committed to ideas; ritualism has no place. I had been following all the tenets of the religion, but had not formally taken this amrit. Sardar Kapur Singh said that it was a formal ceremony that must be gone through, to declare that you are openly committed.’
The actual ceremony was carried out in the Punjab, where he had gone on two months’ leave. And it was carried out at the town of Anandpur, where the 10th Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, had performed the first baptism of Sikhs in 1699.
Gurtej said, ‘The amrit was stirred with the sword of Ali.’
This was quite bewildering. Did he mean the Ali of the Muslim Shias, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed?
He did. He said, The caliph.’
How had this sword survived more than 1000 years? How had it come into the possession of Guru Gobind Singh?
‘It was presented to him by the Mogul Emperor Bahadur Shah.’
So again, in this version of the Sikh faith that Gurtej propounded, there was an Islamic twist, a non-Hindu, non-Indian aspect, a separateness of the faith from the land of its origins.
‘During this period in Andhra Pradesh I continued my studies in Sikhism. I wrote an article in 1975 about the martyrdom of the ninth Guru. He was beheaded in Delhi by the Emperor Aurangzebe, in Chandni Chowk. Then I wrote some articles for the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism.’
He was encouraged in his studies and writing by his wife, ‘a double graduate’. Together they visited important Sikh temples in the South. ‘Every year we went to the gurdwara established in the memory of the 10th Guru near the spot where he had been cremated.’ The 10th Guru had died in 1708, killed, it is said, by one of his own Muslim followers. The Guru had travelled down to the South – the episode has its ambiguities – to help the Emperor Aurangzebe’s successor in a dynastic war.
In 1977, when he was thirty, and after six years in the South, Gurtej went back to the Punjab. His father was ill, with Parkinson’s disease; he was soon to die. It was still the time of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, and there was an agitation against it by the Sikh political party. The agitation was going on from the Golden Temple.
‘It kept on nagging people that they were not free. It’s all right to make two ends meet and have an animal existence, but there’s more to life. We have in India two absolutely opposed ideas about government and politics. The Hindu idea is that government must have every right to do as it pleases. This is how the violations of the constitution are tolerated by everybody. The Hindu idea is that whatever the government does is the law. It is more susceptible to dictatorship. The Sikh idea is that God is the only true sovereign, and that governments have a mandate to govern on the condition that they do justice. I was very happy that my people were resisting this subversion of the laws and constitution during the Emergency.’
Gurtej didn’t go back to Andhra Pradesh. ‘In 1979 I joined the Punjab government – an IAS transfer, on deputation – and worked until 1980. It was a good experience. The chief minister was known to me. He was not a crookish man. We worked on a big process of decentralizing certain powers. It was good for democracy.’
He also began at this time to be politically active. ‘Bhindranwale was in the air.’ This was the fundamentalist or revivalist preacher who was to become the ‘monster’ of Sikh politics. ‘Since 13 April 1978’ – the 13th of April is a date that recurs in Sikh affairs: it is the date of the harvest festival, and is chosen as the date of great events: the first Sikhs were baptized on this date by the 10th Guru – ‘since 13 April 1978 he had shot into prominence. He was a young man who had recently become the leader of a seminary.’ The immediate cause of Bhindranwale’s fame was a dispute with a Sikh sect called the Nirankaris. ‘The Nirankaris are as old as independence. They were a reform movement started in Sikhism in the late 19th century. And then one Buta Singh took over that movement, and he was supported by the government to create a schism in the Sikh body.’ It wasn’t clear from this account whether the government that encouraged the Nirankaris was the British Indian government, or the government of independent India. ‘In a demonstration aginst the Nirankaris on the 13th of April 1978, 13 of Bhindranwale’s followers were shot.’
In this atmosphere of excitement, Gurtej took up political work. He began to help Sant Longowal in the Punjab water problem. Longowal was another religious leader; he was to be murdered in 1985, the year after Bhindranwale and many others were killed in the army action at the Golden Temple.
Gurtej, explaining his association with Sant Longowal, said, ‘The Sikh idea is the service of mankind. And here was a representative of my people asking me to be with him in this agitation. Everybody must serve his people first, and through them serve humanity.’
He resigned from the IAS in 1982. ‘My deputation was over, and there was trouble over a paper I read about the Sikh problem. I thought that people didn’t want me in the service. I think that the administration was objecting to my religious activities.’
He had told me the day before that at the boarding school in Dehra Dun, far from the atmosphere of home, he had read ballads about the suffering of ‘my people’; and that Kapur Singh had later talked to him about the persecution of the Sikhs. It didn’t seem to me a sufficient explanation of the way he had developed. It occurred to me now to ask him again about his childhood.
How had his family heard of this boarding school in Dehra Dun? Was he sent off alone, or were there other boys from the village with him?
‘Three of us were sent. A brother and a cousin and I. Somebody in my grandfather’s village was already studying there. The school was run by the Irish Brothers, the order of St Patrick.’
‘How often did you go back home?’
‘We just came home for the holidays. It has taught me a lesson. I will never send my children to a boarding school.’
‘When did you go?’
‘1951. From 1951 to 1961.’
‘But in 1951 you were just four.’
‘Every day I used to sit up in bed and pray that the term should come to an immediate end. We wer
e allowed to go home once in six months, for a month or so.’
An exile from four to fourteen: so the memories he had spoken of the day before, of the camel rides with his grandfather, so gentlemanly with his clean clothes and white turban and watch and horse carriage, and the making of the snakebite serum at the start of the rainy season – all those memories would have been like memories of a lost paradisal life, something far removed from the India to which he would have been awakening over the 10 years in Dehra Dun.
It also occurred to me – but this was two or three months later – that it might have been at that Irish Catholic school, with the example of the Irish brothers for 10 whole years, a school term running for six solid months, and this was in the 1950s, still close to colonial times, in the decade before the discovery by the hippies and others of a spiritual and romantic India, it occurred to me that in his solitude over those 10 years some idea of the greater seriousness or modernity of revealed religion, and some wish to touch his own faith with this non-Indian magic, might have come to Gurtej.
But that idea, about revealed religion, didn’t come to me until much later; I couldn’t put it to Gurtej. At the time I was too taken with the idea of the four-year-old child sent away from home.
How had he managed? Did he think he had gained anything from the separation and the loneliness?
He said, ‘I think if I hadn’t gone to the boarding school I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the basic nature of things, and I would never have tried to analyse why certain things function as they do.’
I asked him to talk about the changes that had come about in the village he knew.
There has been a revolution. Attitudes have changed – towards the joint family system, to begin with. Agrarian relationships have changed. My paternal grandfather at one time had about 3000 acres of land. Every year he would buy some.’
An idea came to him. He broke off what he was saying and added, as if in parenthesis, ‘And yet my father wasn’t an educated man. He stayed at school until the fourth standard. My grandfather’ – the gentlemanly figure of Gurtej’s childhood – ‘didn’t believe in education. When I was doing my M.A. I heard my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, say to my father one day, “Why don’t you take this boy out of school?” He still thought I was going to the secondary school. And my father, not wishing to show disrespect, said, “What can I do? He doesn’t listen.” ’ And, for the first time since we had met, Gurtej laughed.
‘My grandfather was greatly disturbed to see me reading. He said I was reading all the time. I was the first in the family not to be a farmer, and perhaps the first in the family to be a graduate. In my village there are now 16 people who have their M.A. When I was born there was only one person – and he had done his B.A. and was a teacher. The people are greatly concerned now about what is happening. There is this craze for education. People are paying through the nose to send their children to better institutions.’
He returned to the subject of his grandfather’s 3000 acres. ‘There’s no one with so much land now. There has been fragmentation of holdings. Intensive cultivation, with high-yielding varieties. It’s a revolution. I used to go sometimes to see my grandfather in the field, carry his lunch and sometimes buttermilk – he was very fond of buttermilk. The agricultural practices which I saw then are totally extinct today. The cutting of the crops was in April. In most of the land then we had only one crop a year. April was a very hot month. And my grandfather would take about 40 people as labourers, give them sickles, and they would go out to the fields at about four in the morning, to avoid the heat. They would be cutting until 11 o’clock – a whole big row of people sitting in the field and going at it with gusto, holding the stalks in the left hand and cutting with the right, and then moving on, in a competitive spirit.’
After Gurtej the theoretician, the man with ideas about religion and history, this was like another man.
‘It was a sort of celebration, this harvesting. The cutters would rest in the afternoon, and go back again in the evening, from 4.30 to 6.30, seven. Now it is impossible to see this sight in any village. Nobody gets up at four in the morning to go to the fields. I think the adoption of machinery has changed the attitude and life. It has given people the education required to handle such complicated machinery, and to that extent they have become more modern. This again is one of the causes of the Punjab problem, which the Hindus in other areas don’t understand.’
I said that what he was saying about machinery was true of other parts of India as well, in villages and cities. It was an aspect of the Indian industrial revolution.
He appeared to agree, but went on, ‘Agricultural man comes in touch with several aspects of administration very early in life. Because of water, he understands the hierarchy of officials. Because of seeds, he gets to know the universities. He understands the functioning of government much better than people in towns do.’
He went back to the subject of change. ‘We used to have sharecroppers. That’s gone. The dependence on labour is no more to the same extent. During the harvest the common scene in the evening used to be the sickles being sharpened. The poor carpenter would be at it the whole night, because the sickles were required again in the morning. Today I have several people in my village who make and repair the new agricultural implements. In small towns in the Punjab you now have a long row of repair shops on both sides of the road.’
He thought of something else that had changed. ‘Nobody in the village is paid in kind any more. And there is the position of the harijans, the scheduled castes. That has changed. One day, when I was a child, I had water from a well in the village. I didn’t know it was the harijan well. My uncle didn’t allow me to enter the house. I had to sit there in the entrance, and the village granthi – the reader of the Sikh scriptures – was called, and he gave me some water, to purify my misdeed. Today the same uncle has harijans working in his kitchen. They cook for him.
‘This has taken place in the Punjab, but it is going to be extended to the entire country. The attitudes of the people are going to change everywhere, and they are going to expect more and more of their government. The government is deteriorating fast. It will not be able to come up to the expectations of the people, and therefore I see a deep-rooted chasm in the country. Utter chaos. Our government has become a sort of mafia – the politician, the government servant, and the trader, none of them primary producers. They are going to come into conflict with the producers.’
Gurtej gave me copies of some of the papers he had written on the Punjab and Sikh issue. One of the papers, written for a university seminar at the beginning of 1982, might have been the one that had got him into trouble with the administration. It was called ‘Genesis of the Sikh Problem in India’. It reminded me of Kapur Singh’s writing; it was academic in tone, with long sentences and difficult words, and with quotations from the Sikh scriptures in the footnotes. Its primary theme was the separateness of the Sikh faith and ideology from the Hindu; its further theme was that the Punjab was geographically and culturally more a part of the Middle East than of India. The great enemy of Sikhism and the Sikh empire of Ranjit Singh had been – again – brahminism.
‘With nothing more tangible than unflinching faith in the Guru, the Sikhs built up an Empire on the foundations laid by the Guru. They planted the saffron flag’ – saffron also the colour of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, with material in that colour draped on the wall panels of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, and decorated with crossed swords – ‘in the heartland of the customary invaders, humbled the might of China and reduced the god-king of Tibet. Then they turned to liberating India from the English.’ But they were frustrated. ‘The Brahminically oriented forces within and without the Punjab cooperated in destroying the Sikhs who alone held out a promise of the early redemption of India.’
So, with his pastoral memories of his grandfather’s village, the enchantments of harvest and celebration, there was this other dream of glory, based on Ranjit Singh’s s
hort-lived 19th-century kingdom. It was a partial view. But that was to be expected; people all over India, awakening to history and new knowledge of their place in the scheme of things, refashioned history according to their need.
What was unexpected in Gurtej’s account of his life and beliefs was how much he took for granted. The constitution, the law, the centres of education, the civil service with its high idea of its role as guardian of the people’s rights and improver of their condition, the investment over four decades in industrial and agricultural change – in Gurtej’s account, these things, which distinguished India from many of its neighbours, were just there. There was no acknowledgement that generations of reformers and wise men – refusing to yield to desperate conditions – had created those things that had supported Gurtej in his rise from the village.
With his pastoral memories, his dream of Sikh glory, there was also his idea of religious purity. He applied this idea to the affairs of men, and rejected what he found. Like Papu the Jain stockbroker in Bombay, who lived on the edge of the great slum of Dharavi and was tormented by the idea of social upheaval, Gurtej had a vision of chaos about to come. Papu had turned to good works, in the penitential Jain fashion. Gurtej had turned to millenarian politics. It had happened with other religions when they turned fundamentalist; it threatened to bring the chaos Gurtej feared.
To be baptized was to take nectar, amrit. The Golden Temple was at Amritsar, the pool of nectar. It was said that there had been a pool here known to the first Guru. Sacred sites usually have a history: it was also said that the place was mentioned in a version of the Ramayana, and that 2000 years and more before Guru Nanak, the Buddha had recognized the special atmosphere of the Golden Temple site. The Emperor Akbar, the great Mogul, gave the site to the fourth Guru, and the first temple was begun by the fifth Guru in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada. In the chaos of the 18th century the Temple suffered much from the Muslims. The Sikh king Ranjit Singh rebuilt it in the 19th century. He gave the central temple its gold-leaf dome. This gold leaf, reflected in the artificial lake, has a magical effect. Even after the battle-marks of recent years the Temple feels serene.