Introduction
On March 5, 1892, the city of Amritsar in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent was abuzz. “With great eclat”1 the laying of the foundation stone of the Khalsa College (KCA) was celebrated and most of the important men of the region—both British and Indian—from the Maharaja of Patiala to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab province, were present. The establishment of Khalsa College was an enterprise led by a broad coalition of Sikh notables, aristocrats, social reformers, and educationists and was heavily supported by the British Indian administration.
Punjab had been annexed and thus become part of British India and the globe-spanning British Empire in 1849. In the province, the young religious tradition of the Sikhs, based on the teachings of Guru Nanak Dev (1469–1539) and his successors, saw itself confronted with the larger Hindu and Muslim communities as well as Christian missionaries and colonial administrators. In imperial imagination and practice, the religious minority community quickly assumed a prominent role as supposedly loyal and ‘martial’ subjects. However, by the end of the century only a few Sikhs “had drunk deep in the fountains of Eastern and Western learning,”2 as it was attributed for instance to the Maharaja of Patiala, and observers lamented the backwardness of the Sikh community in education. Accordingly, Sikh representatives expressed their gratitude towards the government for helping to set up Khalsa College: “[T]he light of western education and civilization ha[d] not reached [the Sikhs] in their remote and ignorant villages”3 and the college was thus supposed to be “the promising nursery of the loyal and enlightened Citizens of the future.”4
Neither Indian, Punjabi, nor Sikh society were static. The opportunities and contingencies of a transforming nineteenth and early twentieth century led to manifold expressions of the colonial encounter that quickly transcended such early assertions of loyalty and simplistic devotion towards ‘Western’ and ‘British’ civilisation. Education was a crucial tool and place for the negotiation of colonial modernity in a world marked by an increasing integration on the regional, national, and global levels and the transgressing of the constraining limitations of earlier parochial frameworks.
Forty years after its establishment, Khalsa College published in its college magazine, the Durbar, an article written by then-principal Sardar Bishen Singh. The article was a call for transforming Khalsa College into a university, stylised as a retrospect on the institution’s origin. The institution’s founders, Bishen Singh noted, wanted it “to be at once the Oxford, Edinburgh and Sandhurst of the Sikhs.”5 The reference to these particular university locations was not random: The University of Oxford stood for tradition and scholarly excellence, the British Army’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst near London famously trained military officers and future leaders, and the University of Edinburgh was celebrated for its crucial role in the Scottish Enlightenment and its consequent pioneering role in the fields of natural and practical sciences. Not only academically but also culturally the principal of Khalsa College saw his institution as an integrative place, claiming that
In a public lecture on “Democracy in Sikhism” given in May 1932, Waryam Singh, history professor at Khalsa College, painted a similar picture. In his lecture, Waryam read the ideals of modern democracy into the organisation of the early Sikh community and attributed to Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) a “democratic spirit,” which the ruler of the famous Kingdom of Lahore had purportedly “imbibed because he was a Sikh.”7 According to the KCA professor, Sikhism was the “result of evolution” and the “outcome of the mingling of several different types of cultures – the Aryan, the Greek, the Sythean [sic] and the Scemetic [sic] in this province of [Punjab].”8thanks to the Founder of Sikhism, we are prejudiced in favour of no particular type, and our will be perhaps the only University in India fostering with care the Muslim as well the Hindu types of culture and moulding them together with the best from the West in order to evolve a new synthesis which alone can satisfy the needs of the fast-evolving nation.6
Several key ideas like the nation, democracy, evolution, culture, and synthesis are of seminal importance in these statements. They coincided in the early 1930s with practical schemes of the educational institution: for example, it initiated agricultural education plans that followed a paradigm of integrated rural development as discussed globally, and professionalised and made more scientific its approach to physical culture and its grasp on the student’s health. These universalist, evolutionist, and scientistic notions display a distinctively ‘modern’ outlook that situated the late-colonial Khalsa College in a complex, intertwined world marching towards modernity.
As the grand stories of the global “birth of the modern world” in nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us, this epochal process was accompanied by (and in many ways contingent on) the age of imperialism. This period and the imperial encounter entailed a profound transformation of both colonised and colonising societies. Often, the “formation of modernity under conditions of imperialism”9 has been interpreted through an understanding of modernity (or ‘modernisation’) as either a state enterprise or a nationalist agenda. Inherent in such narratives are the notions of ‘modernity’ as a ‘Western’ imposition and, conversely, the creation of ‘alternative’ modernities as acts of resistance. At Khalsa College, the modernist dynamic generated diverse actions and interpretations. Not everyone attributed the progressive attitude to the college that it was propagating for itself in statements like Bishen or Waryam Singh’s. Despite its emphasis on the allegedly democratic spirit of Sikhism in its lectures and essays, Sikh critics of the institution regularly condemned the college’s management as undemocratic and oligarchical. Indeed, they urged that the KCA “should move with the times and not be ultra-conservative.”10 The ideal of a frictionless and harmonious cultural synthesis was contested too. For long, this optimistic outlook was contrasted by concerns of the British Indian government that complained that the institution would harbour more divisive than unifying, anti-British feelings, despite the institution’s initial close relation to the colonial administration. Further, as both Bishen Singh’s 1930 appeal for a ‘Sikh University’ and the introduction of a Sikh History Research Department in the same year imply, Khalsa College was in the main a Sikh institution. As such it pursued many particularistic interests and manifested the “coexisting tale of increasing disintegration and disunity along ethnic and religious lines”11 that accompanied modernity’s route of integration and unification. At the Amritsari college, a complex interplay between very local and very global conditions, exchanges, and networks shaped its interpretation of the ‘universalist’, ‘scientific’, and ‘modern’ Sikh. It perpetuated the formulation of a third type of South Asian vernacular and localised modernity that in manifold ways transcended the framework of an antagonism between imperialist and nationalist forces.
Religion, Education, and Knowledge Transmission in Colonial South Asia
Education was one of the main theatres of modernity’s negotiation. Religion, similarly, played a pivotal role in how people constructed their subjective ‘modern’ identity. Consequently, religious communities and associations functioned as the main drivers behind an educational institutionalisation that led to a mushrooming of schools, colleges, and universities. The establishment of Khalsa College in the 1880s and 1890s was promoted mainly by advocates of what today is known as the Singh Sabha Movement. In Punjab a loose network of socio-religious Sikh associations had been established in the 1870s and 1880s. These associations, called Singh Sabhas and later Khalsa Diwans, were heavily influenced by the emergence of the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj as well as other organisations such as the Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam.12 The nineteenth century in British India witnessed the establishment of many “socio-religious reform movements.”13 Members of the elite as well as from the newly emerging middle classes of Indian society, often anglicised, came together in this period to re-evaluate their own traditions and carve out plans to reform and advance their respective communities. Although members of the middle classes played a huge part in the Singh Sabhas’ dealings, many representatives from the traditional Sikh aristocracy were also involved in these associations, leading to various internal conflicts.14 These associations and their later successors were crucial to the slow and complex societal establishment of a reformulated ‘orthodox’ Sikh identity, often called “Tatt Khālsā ” or “Neo-Sikhism,” which strongly advocated a form of Sikhism clearly delimited from Hindu traditions and which became the single leading interpretation of Sikhism by the 1920s.15
As scholar Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair has put it,
Both a symptom of and factor in this ...There is [...] a general consensus about the late nineteenth century as a crucial period in the modernizing/globalizing process, though which the lives and practices of the lower classes in the metropole and of entire populations in the Indian colonies were transformed.16