As our carriage went along the geometrically laid out roads and past the curving gravel driveways of the lesser officials of the Raj, my grandmother observed that the smells in this part of the town were different from ours. I once asked her why we could not live like this, in a stately house with green lawns amidst these splendid avenues shaded by trees. She replied that she would feel lonely here. She liked the bustle of the town, and she had got used to the high walls of her courtyard. My grandmother felt sure that she would feel naked in these ‘inside-out’ houses where the verandas and gardens faced the outside. It was not natural to live like this, she added
It was unnatural in another respect as well, and I understood this many years later. Civil Lines certainly had an unmistakeably different atmosphere from the chaotic part of the town where we lived, but it was not English either. Years later I visited England when I was grown up. I searched for our Civil Lines there but I did not find it. Our sun is too strong, our land is too flat, and these buildings were too imposing. Our alien rulers may have tried to create a bit of England, but they had not succeeded. Civil Lines was an imperial, intrusive, and antiseptic imposition and it was alien to both races.
During our journeys about town my grandmother would sometimes tell me a story from the Mahabharata. I would listen in fear and pity to her account of the epic’s great heroes. She had no doubt that the events actually happened. They had taken place before our degraded age. In those days, gods used to mingle with men, and human beings were more inclined to adhere to the highest ethics of dharma. Grandmother had a sense of cosmic time and she believed that the epic was a true account of the deeds of her righteous ancestors in the Punjab, who with the aid of the God, Sri Krishna, defeated unrighteous foes. For her the Mahabharata was not merely an epic—it was a divine work.
*******
I was born a Hindu and had a Hindu upbringing. My grandfather belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect that had come up in the nineteenth century. Our ancestors did not have a living memory of their own political heritage and this must have been difficult. We had lived under Muslim rulers since the 13th century and had regarded political life as something filled with deprivation and fear. After the Muslims, we saw the rise of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, and with its collapse around 1850 came the powerful British with Christian missionaries in tow. Thus, three powerful, professedly egalitarian and proselytizing religions surrounded us--Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. And so I can understand why my ancestors were eager to receive the Gujarati reformer, Dayananda Saraswati, who established the Arya Samaj in the Punjab in the second half of the nineteenth century. He advocated a return to the Vedas, a diminished role for Brahmins and vigorous social reform. He ‘modernized’ our Hinduism.
‘Arya’ in Sanskrit means ‘noble’ among other things. European scholars in the nineteenth century took this ancient word from the Vedic texts to propagate a racial theory of ‘Aryan’ origins of Hindu culture and society based on a common Indo-European language system. We embraced this idea enthusiastically for it related us racially to European Aryans. Arya Samaj had the positive impact of helping to create a nationalist sentiment among the new Punjabi middle classes for freedom and independence from Britain. The invention of an Aryan race in nineteenth century Europe had tragic consequences for Europe, culminating in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Half a century after the Second World War, the word ‘Aryan’ evokes repulsive memories of Nazism and is thoroughly discredited in the West. In India, however, it has been revived, curiously enough, with the rise of Hindu nationalism and the ascent of the Bhartiya Janata Party.
The Arya Samaj started many schools in the Punjab and my father went to one of these, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (D.A.V) School, in Lahore. After completing it, he passed the entrance examination to the coveted Roorkee Engineering College, which had been set up by the British in the mid-nineteenth century to train civil engineers who were to build the growing network of irrigation canals and roads in the Punjab and the United Provinces. By the time my father went to Roorkee in 1931, there was a growing Punjabi middle class. Roorkee was a fine place. It not only gave my father an excellent technical education, it also fostered intellectual curiosity and introduced him to modern ways. He learned to ride, to play tennis and to think for himself. Oddly enough, it also made him deeply curious about the spiritual life.
Two years later, my father came home triumphantly waving a coveted degree. This was in 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression when the Punjab government had stopped hiring irrigation engineers. But he was patient. He bided his time, and eventually he got into the government the following year. During the year of waiting, he embarked on a spiritual quest. He found a mystically-inclined Guru who had an ashram on the banks of the Beas River; through him, he developed a lasting passion for the spiritual life. The Guru was a sant of the Radhasoami sect, descended intellectually from medieval bhakti and sufi traditions that gave him about the possibility of direct union with God through devotion and meditation. His modern mind appealed to my father’s rational, engineer’s temper. So, my father turned away from the Arya Samaj.
My maternal grandmother in Lyallpur remained a traditional Hindu when everyone was rushing to join the Arya Samaj. Her dressing room was filled with the images of her many gods, prominent among them Krishna and Rama, and she would say in the same breath that there are millions of gods but only one God. Her eclecticism did not stop there. She would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and Wednesdays, a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between, she made time for Arya Samaj ceremonies when anyone was born, married, or died. My grandfather used to jest that she had taken out lots of insurances—at least someone up there might listen to her. My father’s mysticism, my grandfather’s Arya Samaj and my grandmother’s traditional Hinduism seem to have coexisted in a chaotic sort of way without causing disharmony in my mind. Amidst this religious pluralism, I have grown up with a liberal attitude and temper that is a mixture of scepticism and sympathy for the Hindu way of life.
Our family in Lyallpur had a hypocritical attitude towards money. Officially, we did not accord it a high place, but, in fact, we loved it. Although we professed a low opinion of the bania commercial castes, grandfather was not above money-lending. Belonging to the Arora sub-caste, we thought we had descended from ruling families from mythical times. Aroras and Khatris were the dominant castes of urban Punjab, although Khatris thought they had a higher status. Both of us, however, engaged in commerce and were also functionaries at princely courts. When the British came in the mid- nineteenth century, both were among the first to embrace western learning and the modern professions. Although Brahmins were superior to us in caste hierarchy, they lost their social position because they were slow to learn English and confined themselves to studying Sanskrit and to religious duties.
I remember my grandmother used to admonish our bania grocer for manipulating his weighing scale. It was the same with the family jeweller, but she treated him with more finesse. She would also scold her son for wasting his pocket money on “adulterated” ice cream. Each commercial transaction, it seems, was a challenge in our lives. It was always a case of us—educated, honest, middle- class citizens—versus them—tax dodging, street-smart banias. We may have looked down on banias, but we loved the bazaar. The most famous bazaar in the Punjab was Lahore’s Anarkali, and to shop in it was the fondest wish of every Punjabi. People came from all over the Northwest to taste its fun, gaiety, and laughter. All of Anarkali’s women, they used to say, were beautiful, and all its men handsome. And if something could not be had in Anarkali it was probably not worth having. For this and other reasons, they called it ‘paradise on earth.’
It was unnatural in another respect as well, and I understood this many years later. Civil Lines certainly had an unmistakeably different atmosphere from the chaotic part of the town where we lived, but it was not English either. Years later I visited England when I was grown up. I searched for our Civil Lines there but I did not find it. Our sun is too strong, our land is too flat, and these buildings were too imposing. Our alien rulers may have tried to create a bit of England, but they had not succeeded. Civil Lines was an imperial, intrusive, and antiseptic imposition and it was alien to both races.
During our journeys about town my grandmother would sometimes tell me a story from the Mahabharata. I would listen in fear and pity to her account of the epic’s great heroes. She had no doubt that the events actually happened. They had taken place before our degraded age. In those days, gods used to mingle with men, and human beings were more inclined to adhere to the highest ethics of dharma. Grandmother had a sense of cosmic time and she believed that the epic was a true account of the deeds of her righteous ancestors in the Punjab, who with the aid of the God, Sri Krishna, defeated unrighteous foes. For her the Mahabharata was not merely an epic—it was a divine work.
*******
I was born a Hindu and had a Hindu upbringing. My grandfather belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect that had come up in the nineteenth century. Our ancestors did not have a living memory of their own political heritage and this must have been difficult. We had lived under Muslim rulers since the 13th century and had regarded political life as something filled with deprivation and fear. After the Muslims, we saw the rise of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, and with its collapse around 1850 came the powerful British with Christian missionaries in tow. Thus, three powerful, professedly egalitarian and proselytizing religions surrounded us--Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. And so I can understand why my ancestors were eager to receive the Gujarati reformer, Dayananda Saraswati, who established the Arya Samaj in the Punjab in the second half of the nineteenth century. He advocated a return to the Vedas, a diminished role for Brahmins and vigorous social reform. He ‘modernized’ our Hinduism.
‘Arya’ in Sanskrit means ‘noble’ among other things. European scholars in the nineteenth century took this ancient word from the Vedic texts to propagate a racial theory of ‘Aryan’ origins of Hindu culture and society based on a common Indo-European language system. We embraced this idea enthusiastically for it related us racially to European Aryans. Arya Samaj had the positive impact of helping to create a nationalist sentiment among the new Punjabi middle classes for freedom and independence from Britain. The invention of an Aryan race in nineteenth century Europe had tragic consequences for Europe, culminating in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Half a century after the Second World War, the word ‘Aryan’ evokes repulsive memories of Nazism and is thoroughly discredited in the West. In India, however, it has been revived, curiously enough, with the rise of Hindu nationalism and the ascent of the Bhartiya Janata Party.
The Arya Samaj started many schools in the Punjab and my father went to one of these, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (D.A.V) School, in Lahore. After completing it, he passed the entrance examination to the coveted Roorkee Engineering College, which had been set up by the British in the mid-nineteenth century to train civil engineers who were to build the growing network of irrigation canals and roads in the Punjab and the United Provinces. By the time my father went to Roorkee in 1931, there was a growing Punjabi middle class. Roorkee was a fine place. It not only gave my father an excellent technical education, it also fostered intellectual curiosity and introduced him to modern ways. He learned to ride, to play tennis and to think for himself. Oddly enough, it also made him deeply curious about the spiritual life.
Two years later, my father came home triumphantly waving a coveted degree. This was in 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression when the Punjab government had stopped hiring irrigation engineers. But he was patient. He bided his time, and eventually he got into the government the following year. During the year of waiting, he embarked on a spiritual quest. He found a mystically-inclined Guru who had an ashram on the banks of the Beas River; through him, he developed a lasting passion for the spiritual life. The Guru was a sant of the Radhasoami sect, descended intellectually from medieval bhakti and sufi traditions that gave him about the possibility of direct union with God through devotion and meditation. His modern mind appealed to my father’s rational, engineer’s temper. So, my father turned away from the Arya Samaj.
My maternal grandmother in Lyallpur remained a traditional Hindu when everyone was rushing to join the Arya Samaj. Her dressing room was filled with the images of her many gods, prominent among them Krishna and Rama, and she would say in the same breath that there are millions of gods but only one God. Her eclecticism did not stop there. She would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and Wednesdays, a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between, she made time for Arya Samaj ceremonies when anyone was born, married, or died. My grandfather used to jest that she had taken out lots of insurances—at least someone up there might listen to her. My father’s mysticism, my grandfather’s Arya Samaj and my grandmother’s traditional Hinduism seem to have coexisted in a chaotic sort of way without causing disharmony in my mind. Amidst this religious pluralism, I have grown up with a liberal attitude and temper that is a mixture of scepticism and sympathy for the Hindu way of life.
Our family in Lyallpur had a hypocritical attitude towards money. Officially, we did not accord it a high place, but, in fact, we loved it. Although we professed a low opinion of the bania commercial castes, grandfather was not above money-lending. Belonging to the Arora sub-caste, we thought we had descended from ruling families from mythical times. Aroras and Khatris were the dominant castes of urban Punjab, although Khatris thought they had a higher status. Both of us, however, engaged in commerce and were also functionaries at princely courts. When the British came in the mid- nineteenth century, both were among the first to embrace western learning and the modern professions. Although Brahmins were superior to us in caste hierarchy, they lost their social position because they were slow to learn English and confined themselves to studying Sanskrit and to religious duties.
I remember my grandmother used to admonish our bania grocer for manipulating his weighing scale. It was the same with the family jeweller, but she treated him with more finesse. She would also scold her son for wasting his pocket money on “adulterated” ice cream. Each commercial transaction, it seems, was a challenge in our lives. It was always a case of us—educated, honest, middle- class citizens—versus them—tax dodging, street-smart banias. We may have looked down on banias, but we loved the bazaar. The most famous bazaar in the Punjab was Lahore’s Anarkali, and to shop in it was the fondest wish of every Punjabi. People came from all over the Northwest to taste its fun, gaiety, and laughter. All of Anarkali’s women, they used to say, were beautiful, and all its men handsome. And if something could not be had in Anarkali it was probably not worth having. For this and other reasons, they called it ‘paradise on earth.’
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