Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten

About the book

Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten, first published in 2013 by the Aleph Book Company in New Delhi, is Rajmohan Gandhi's history of undivided Punjab. In 432 pages and 11 chapters it traces the land of the five rivers from the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the Partition of 1947, the most violent phase of Punjab's history.

The publisher calls it the first major account of undivided Punjab, and the claim holds: no earlier book had tried to tell the whole story of the region, from the collapse of Mughal authority through the Sikh empire and British rule to Partition, in a single volume. It is dedicated to three men: Khushwant Singh, Mubasir Hussain and Pyare Lal Nayar.

The book's Punjab is the undivided one: the province that covered much of present-day Pakistan and the Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, seven times larger than the Punjab of today. Its people, Gandhi argues, shared a Punjabiyat that Partition could not erase.

Why did Rajmohan Gandhi write a Punjab history?

The preface gives a personal answer. Gandhi was eleven when Partition happened. His first awareness of Punjab, he writes, came in 1945, when three Punjabi officers of the Indian National Army, a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh, were tried for treason by the British. A visit to Lahore some fifty years later deepened the interest into a book.

The introduction asks the question directly: why a Punjab history? Part of the answer is the gap in the bookshelf. The last full history of the region was Syed Muhammad Latif's History of the Panjab, published in 1889. Ikram Ali's History of the Punjab 1799-1947, published in 1971, did not cover the years from 1707 to 1799. Between the Mughal collapse and the Sikh empire there was a century with no single account.

The other part of the answer is the subject itself. Punjab was the garrison state of India, invaded again and again, and its people learned to absorb invasions and carry on. Gandhi's book is an attempt to write that story from the inside, through the eyes of all its communities rather than one.

What the book covers

The book opens with a chapter on Punjab until Aurangzeb's death, then follows the collapse of authority from 1707 to 1757, the years of Adina Beg Khan, the Afghans and the Sikhs from 1757 to 1799, and the long chapter on Ranjit Singh and his successors from 1799 to 1849. British Punjab, from annexation in 1849 to the freedom struggle, takes up the middle of the book, including the years 1919 to 1922, when Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs campaigned together for freedom.

The story is told through battles and tragedies, but the book keeps returning to ordinary Punjabis: farmers, traders, soldiers and singers whose lives were disrupted by events they did not choose. The final chapter, Divided Punjab and the future of Punjabiyat, asks what survives of the shared culture after 1947, and answers with cautious hope.

Gandhi draws on fresh sources as well as earlier accounts, and he uses them from opposing perspectives, letting Mughal, Sikh, British and nationalist versions of the same events sit side by side. The political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed, who read the manuscript, called it a book that will surely be the standard reference on the history of Punjab.

What makes it different?

The book breaks free of the nationalist and communalist histories written after Partition, in India and in Pakistan, in which each community tells Punjab's story as its own. Gandhi's Punjab belongs to no single community: its heroes include the Sikh maharaja, the Muslim peasant soldier, the Hindu trader and the British administrator, and its villains are rarely whole communities.

That even-handedness is the book's method and its argument at once. The reviewer in The Hindu BusinessLine called it a masterpiece and recommended it as compulsory reading for students of history and civil servants, particularly those serving in Punjab and Haryana. The EducationWorld review called it an evocative, epic account of a vibrant region.

ਲੇਖਕ

Rajmohan Gandhi (born 1935) is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and of C. Rajagopalachari. He worked as a journalist, co-founding the weekly Himmat in 1964, served in the Rajya Sabha from 1990 to 1992, and taught history and political science at the University of Illinois. His earlier books include biographies of Vallabhbhai Patel and of his grandfather, and a comparative study of the 1857 rising and the American Civil War. His life is told in full in his own entry in the Kosh.

Punjab was the book that brought him closest to the region his grandfather's politics had divided. He wrote it, he says, in the hope that it might prod others to pursue their own research into Punjab's history.

Reception and legacy

The book was widely reviewed on publication in 2013. The Hindu BusinessLine praised its sensitive pen and its sweep from Afghanistan to the Red Fort, and EducationWorld praised its evocation of a region that withstood invasions and carried on with sound practical sense. Ishtiaq Ahmed's two-part review, published on ApnaOrg, examined it chapter by chapter.

More than a decade on, it remains the single-volume history of undivided Punjab that readers and students reach for first. It has not replaced the specialist histories, and it does not try to: its job is to give the whole story in one place, and to remind readers on both sides of the border that the Punjab they share is older than the line that divides it.