The Human Geography of SIKH Dominions
- the land and the people, Part I of III
In this essay, I’m going to conduct an overview survey of the human geography of the lands controlled or politically dominated by Sikhs in the 18th and 19th centuries. The the main motivation for this essay is some discussions recently on Twitter regarding the nature of various forms of kingdoms and empires in Northern India, especially in modern times.
I had proposed that the Mughal and Afghan empires were, essentially, foreign in the Indian civilisational domain. To which some had raised an argument that Sikhs themselves were conquerors in lands which became part of the Sikh dominions. My intention here is to provide more context to this debate. Keeping this in mind, in this first part of a three part essay, I am presenting a survey of the human geography of Sikh controlled lands, that is an overview of different groups that lived in various places that gradually came under Sikh control. As you will see, the picture is that Sikhs were one among a heterogenous people who occupied what can only be called a very Indian civilisational realm – which was very distinct from a Persio-Arabate Central Asian or even an Afghan one, from which the Mughals and the Afghans originated, (that is, unless Afghans accede to the absurd idea of Akhand Bharat and agree that they are Indian too. I will have more to say on this in the conclusion of this series.)
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The core Sikh dominions extended from the Himalayas in the north, the Rajputana desert in the south, the Indus in the west and the Yamuna in the southeast. Within this core, the region extending from Lahore to the Sutlej, making up the Majha-Malwa tract, were the oldest of Sikh lands, with Sikh influence gradually extending outwards, in this outer core. Outside of this Sikh ‘heartland’ Sikh control extended for different periods of time, down till Multan, up till the Hindu Kush, northeastward across Kashmir, and into Ladakh, cutting through the province of Delhi up till the city walls, and into some city quarters, with occasional southeastward forays down the Ganga-Yamuna doab, till the borders of Awadh, chiefly to extract tribute, and eastward into the principalities of the Sivalik hills. These hill principalities, in no particular order, are : Bilas, Suket, Mandi, Kullu, Siba, Guler, Kangra, Nurpur, Chamba, Badarwah, Rampur, Mankot, Ramkot, Basohli, Jammu, Rajauri, Chenini, Jasrauta, Manawar.
In the 19th to the 20th century, beginning with Banda Singh Bahadur’s era, at one time or another, these Rajput hill principalities were either tributaries or in vassalage to various Sikh Sardars, Misls or Kingdoms. Some of these regions were integrated into the colonial era Punjab province. These regions were often called the ‘Punjab Hills’, and have some Punjabi influence, naturally. But they form a distinct geo-cultural domain from Punjab proper, while being an integral part of the north Indian domain, especially in terms of art and culture.
After the hill principalities, the next region where Sikhs began to extend influence was. what we might call the greater trans-Indus region. Broadly speaking, these territories were the valleys of Peshawar and Kohat, the foothill-lowlands of Bannu, along the floodplains of the Indus, touching on the northern frontiers of Sind, marked by the town of Panjnad – where the five waters of the greater Punjab floodplains finally commingle as one, to flow into the Arabian Sea, through Sind, as the Indus. Again, Sikhs refrained from extending their influence further south of this ‘notional’ frontier.
Contrary to perception (these days), these trans-indus territories gradually controlled by Sikhs were not solely Pathan lands. Again (something which people might find surprising these days), this region had some of the highest population of farmers in the greater region, who along with pastoralists made up the bulk of the population. Most of the region between these plains and the Majha-Malwa belt had very few farmers – which is not surprising when we read that many lands here had to be ‘broken’ by Sikhs (or, at the behest of Sikh Sardars) to make them arable. (Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s ancestors ‘broke’ the land around Gujranwala to make it suitable for more than sustenance farming: see the 19th century Gazetteers of Gujranwala for more.)
To emphasise the heterogenous population of the region in this wider belt, consider – in Derajat (Dera Ghazi Khan), for example, the largest proportion of people belonged to Jat clans, followed by Baloch, Hindus and some Muslim artisanal groups; in the southern Punjab lands – Multan, Dipalpur and Jhang – again, 40% of the population belonged to various small farming groups, among them Jats, and various pastoralists, while Hindu traders (and some ‘foreign’ Muslim traders) were the most economically dominant. Further south, the banking centre of Shikharpur was dominated economically by various Hindu Banias – these merchants had their banking networks extending till Ukraine, throughout the Caucuses and even into Central Asia, and Chinese Turkestan, with their agents in various oasis towns. One could authorise a hundi in Shikarpur and have it encash almost anywhere in Eurasia in branches of these Bania-Banker diaspora establishments. (Not pushing on to control Shikarpur was a huge blunder by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. A story for another time.)
The Kashmir province and its surrounding regions were also very heterogenous in terms of human geography – the valley itself was home to Muslims – Sufi, Shia and Sunni – various groups of Hindus, including Kashmiri Pandits, while if one goes into the upper reaches of the Indus, there were numerous Buddhist groups, with some smaller tribal groups following hybrid Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and animistic practices. Ladakh. (which was conquered in 1836 and paid Rs. 30,000 tribute directly to the Lahore Durbar) was officially a Buddhist state.
One final region that we have to talk about is the land extending from the Ghagghar to the Yamuna, and, really, up till Delhi. The river Ghagghar marked an important geographical boundary. While the river itself ‘gets lost’ in the deserts west of Sirsa, we now know – and have a lot of evidence for this – that the Ghagghar, together with the Hakra that flows in Bahawalpur, make up the now mostly dried up channel of the Vedic Saraswati. In Mughal times, from south of the Ghagghar till the floodplains of the Yamuna, were the thinly populated drylands dominated by Jat-Rajput and Gujjar pastoralists. These drylands extending through the Bagar region stretching out into the deserts of Bikaner, are, in a sense, an internal frontier between Punjab and the more settled regions of Rajputana, and central India. Towards the south, these ‘badlands’ were neighboured by the Delhi Subah – and, when in Sikh history we talk about raiding Delhi, we are generally speaking of raids into the Delhi Subah and not the city, and except the few prominent cases, such as by S. Baghel Singh, Sikhs refrained from occupying Delhi city. Sikhs gradually conquered large parts of this internal frontier, but it was also contested by other powerful local players – Jats and, sometimes, the Marathas. Some questions are also asked about why Sikhs did not conquer Delhi city – the chief reason for this was the nature of the city itself, as it did, lying in this band of the internal frontier, but also, as over the years, as an imperial city had become the stage for various competing interests – various quarters of the city were controlled by other local Indian powers, such as Marathas, Rajputs, powerful trading houses, and even Europeans trading in the Indian Ocean. (Sikhs also held various quarters in the city, since the late 17th century.) Annexing the city, might have meant aggravating these other local powers. To give an example, in the mid 1780’s the East India Company once deployed its guns on the walls of Delhi to protect it from a Sikh raid.
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As might have become clear from the previous section, the question of whom any particular land belonged to, in this north Indian civilisational realm, is a complex one and cannot be seen from a purely religious lens, ie the argument some markedly less informed individuals make that Sikhs conquered land that belonged to Muslims (Afghans or Punjabi Muslims) is a facetious one. This is false for Punjab, and for Kashmir too, which taken as the larger province, that it was most of recent history, was also a very heterogenous land which belonged to various people, from various religious backgrounds.
To further understand the nature of competition over these lands, even in west Punjab, where the absurd argument is made that most conquered people were Muslims so Sikhs were outsiders – while there was a heterogenous mix of population, the most dominant groups in most of these regions were uniquely Indian agro-pastoralists – primarily Jats, but also Rajputs – from which background most of the Sikh Sardars also came. While the conversion of a large number of Jats to Sikhism in the Majha-Malwa region did add a layer of complexity, a lot of conflict still remained internecine agro-pastoralist tribalistic warfare, between Jat-Rajputs of various religions, as it has been for centuries in this land.
This was especially evident in the later Sikh Misal period, something I will discuss in more detail tomorrow. Sikh Misals were, on a local scale, essentially tribalistic, but when there was an outside threat, as in the case of Ahmad Shah Abdali, they could quickly organise around the core republican Khalsa Army Infrastructure, and become a Civilisational Resistance Force. Again, this shows how clear the demarcation in magnitude of threat between insiders and outsiders was. The earlier outsider threat had been the Mughals, against whom the Khalsa organised a Civilisational Revolt, the later one, were the Afghans, and then, briefly, the English.
Once the outside threat subsided, the Misals reverted to more localised forms of contests, primarily for land – as is the perennial nature of the Punjabi agro-pastoralist, no matter what religion he, at the moment, professes.
The overlapping political order of the Khalsa with Punjab’s localised internecine contests, is something I will explore in greater detail in the next essay, which will also lead into the third part, on the importance of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Empire.
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