ਜੇ. ਐੱਸ. ਗਰੇਵਾਲਜੇ. ਐੱਸ. ਗਰੇਵਾਲ

A canal colony childhood in Lyallpur

Jagtar Singh Grewal was born in 1927 at Chak No. 46 JB, a Sikh canal colony village in Lyallpur district in western Punjab, now in Pakistan. He was the youngest of five children. His family were settlers from Ludhiana district, and the village around him was a layered world that stayed with him for life: Sikh landowners, a few Muslim families, visiting dhadi singers and kavishars who narrated the old Punjabi tales, and a devout father who knew the Guru Granth Sahib by heart and expounded it to neighbours gathered in the family mango grove.

The boy absorbed all of it. He learned Gurmukhi at the village gurdwara, read the kissas of Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal against his father's wishes, and found he had a photographic memory for one subject above all others: history. He matriculated at Lyallpur in a high first division, studied Persian and Urdu, and went on to Government College, Lyallpur and then Forman Christian College, Lahore, where he had won a place to read physics and mathematics, and where he played football as hard as he studied.

Partition cut that education in half. After the March 1947 riots closed the colleges in Lahore, he returned to his village, helped organise its defence as tension rose, and finally flew to India at his father's urging, travelling on from Delhi to Ludhiana on a train roof. Everything the family owned was left behind, and his father told him plainly that he could expect nothing more from them. The historian's long road began again from nothing.

From audit trainee to historian

Near Ludhiana, at Government College, he took master's degrees in English and then in geography, cycled twelve kilometres to classes, and learned to debate and speak in public to cure his shyness in English. He qualified in the written papers of the competitive examinations again and again, was placed on the list for the police service without being called, and was selected instead for the Audit and Accounts Service. Training at Nagpur bored and restless, spending his leave among the monuments of Sanchi, Ajanta and Ellora, he understood that accounts would never hold him.

He resigned a secure government career to study history, took his M.A. in history in 1956 as a private candidate while teaching at Ferozepur, and read his way through Toynbee and Spengler before sailing for England. At Durham and then at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London he turned to a question nobody had asked in quite that way: not what happened in medieval India, but how British historians had written about it. His London PhD of 1963, on British historical writing on medieval India, was the first thesis on historiography by an Indian scholar, and it became his first landmark book, Muslim Rule in India: The Assessments of British Historians (1970).

What is J. S. Grewal known for?

J. S. Grewal is known for rebuilding the study of Punjab and Sikh history on primary sources, and above all for Guru Nanak in History (1969), the book that placed Guru Nanak inside the political, social and religious world of his own time. He joined the faculty of Panjab University in 1964, and the university published the book for the quincentenary of Guru Nanak's birth in 1969. Instead of retelling tradition alone, Grewal analysed the milieu Guru Nanak lived in and his responses to it, a method that changed how the first Guru could be studied. The work earned him his D.Litt. in 1971.

The books kept coming for sixty years. In the By-Lanes of History (1975) rebuilt a medieval Punjabi town, Batala, out of 150 Persian legal documents from its qazi's court. Invited by Cambridge University Press, he wrote The Sikhs of the Punjab (1990) for the New Cambridge History of India, still the standard single-volume history of the Sikhs. Around them stand Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Polity, Economy and Society, Social and Cultural History of the Punjab, Sikh Ideology, Polity and Social Order, Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition, Historical Writings on the Sikhs (1784 to 2011), a six-year labour on Master Tara Singh in Indian History (2017), and, at ninety-two, Guru Gobind Singh (1666 to 1708): Master of the White Hawk (2019). In all he authored forty single-authored volumes, eight joint volumes and seventeen edited volumes, besides more than a hundred research papers.

The institution builder

Grewal built the rooms in which Punjab's history would be studied, as well as writing it. At Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar he was a founding member of the Department of History, became the university's first Dean of Academic Affairs, and rose to be its Vice-Chancellor. In 1984 he was elected General President of the Indian History Congress, the profession's own verdict on its leading figures. After retiring from the university in 1987 he directed the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla, and later chaired its governing body.

Age did not retire him. The Indian Council of Historical Research made him a National Fellow. Punjabi University, Patiala made him a Life Fellow in 2004 and then its Professor of Eminence from 2010 to 2016, years he spent on the Master Tara Singh biography. He headed the Institute of Punjab Studies in Chandigarh, sat on the Religious Advisory Council of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and was still working at the end of July 2022, weeks before his death, returning once more to the subject of Guru Nanak. He used to say he would stop writing the day he ceased to learn.

Honours and later life

In 2005 the President of India awarded him the Padma Shri for his intellectual and academic contributions, and the same year brought the Khuda Bakhsh Award for his studies of Sufism. The Asiatic Society in Kolkata gave him its Hemchandra Roychaudhuri Birth Centenary Gold Medal in 2007 for his conspicuously important contribution to Indian history, the Asiatic Society of Bihar and the Khuda Bakhsh Library conferred the title Itihas Ratna in 2012, and in 2016 Panjab University gave him its first Gian Ratna Award.

J. S. Grewal died in Chandigarh on 11 August 2022, aged 95. The history department of the university where he had begun teaching fifty-eight years earlier gathered to mourn a world-renowned historian, and scholars who had argued with him for decades wrote of his rigour, his meticulousness and his sense of social responsibility.

Why his work still matters

Before Grewal's generation, Sikh history was too often written either as devotion or as an annex of somebody else's empire. He and the scholars who followed his method made it a field of its own, argued from Persian documents, Punjabi literature, inscriptions and the Guru Granth Sahib itself, with the social order always in view: who held land, who served, who was shut out of the gurdwara hall. A boy from a canal colony who learned his first history from balladeers and his father's expositions ended by teaching two Punjabs, and the world beyond them, how their past should be read.