A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab: The colonial experience

A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab

Ruchi Ram Sahni, 1863-1948

Neera Burra (Editor)

Oxford University Press

354 pages; Rs 1,195

Ruchi Ram Sahni belonged to the first generation of “English-knowing Punjabis”, a generation that was widely seen as the “hope” of the country.
 

He wrote these memoirs in the 1940s, when he was in the winter of his life. His primary motivation was to explain to his descendants their familial origins. But, what he has to say is of interest to anyone wishing to get a feel of grassroots life at a time when India was experiencing a remarkable social and intellectual transformation.

This book covers the period up to 1914, spanning Sahni’s 30-year-long career as a teacher of chemistry at Government College, Lahore, and his short stint as a researcher in radioactivity in Germany. At the end, there some notes relating to matters with which he was briefly associated after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. 

Emerging from a modest early life in Dera Ismail Khan, Sahni pursued many interests in his chequered life that included: Education, popularisation of science, social reform, land acquisition, economics and ecology of power stations, agriculture extension, reform of the penal system for juvenile offenders, and women’s franchise.  

In his account as a college student in Lahore, Sahni provides details of the strengths and shortcomings of different teachers since, he says, “they exercise the greatest influence in the unfolding of the whole personality” of those in their charge. He describes his love of reading and discussions with other students on the writings of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Their college debates were on a par with similar verbal jousts in British universities.

Confrontations and crises always had some lessons for him: A particularly ugly dispute with a British academic colleague convinced him of the supremacy of “Fact” as the “beacon of light” and the source of courage in adversity. He viewed with scepticism the attempts of theosophists to promote thought-reading and clairvoyance, and once exposed Madame Blavatsky at a public meeting for failing to identify with her “inner sight” the diverse items he had put into a matchbox.

Sahni has devoted a separate chapter to the issue of maintaining “self-respect”; he describes this as one of the “hardest tasks” for a middle-class Indian, amidst the prevailing “imperialist jingoism”. He observes that the British espoused freedom, but actually “robbed nations of whatever of that commodity their victims had long possessed”. He then notes shrewdly that the imperial powers sought to impose their civilisation and culture on those they ruled, but in practice “hated those who had the ambition to adopt their ways”. 

Sahni dilates on the racist attitude of most British officials and academics towards Indians, and shows that racism was an inherent aspect of the Raj. He describes his encounters with racist attitudes to illustrate how he handled these challenging situations, his general attitude being to hold on to his principled position, but put his view across with restraint and courtesy.

As Mahatma Gandhi experienced in South Africa, Sahni too was insulted by British co-passengers in railway bogies, when he was struck by one and threatened with an umbrella by the man’s wife; he told the lady that for every strike from her, he would give her husband two blows.

The deepest insult Sahni experienced was when he was denied the headship of his department and a much younger British colleague was preferred over him. This led him to resign from the college and proceed to Germany and then Britain to study the new field of radioactivity.

Since Sahni was in government service during the period covered by the book, his political activism was limited. However, the short chapter on the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre shows he was respected by top Congress leaders and played an important role in “coaching” Indian members on the Hunter Enquiry Committee. He makes some astute observations: He sees Shaukat Ali’s words on Hindu-Muslim brotherhood as “hollow and hypocritical”, and notes a “distance” between the morally rigid Gandhi and the other more pragmatic Congress leaders.

The book is the personal accomplishment of Sahni’s great-grand daughter, Neera Burra, who starting with some vague recollections of her ancestor from senior relatives, made collecting material relating to him an obsession. The result is history at its best as it reflects the personal experiences, the views and values, and finally the wisdom of one man who flourished over a century ago, who was a shrewd observer of human achievement and foible, modest and restrained in judgement, but always honest, sensitive and principled.

When Sahni was a member of the Punjab Legislative Council, he was unhappy with members not attending sessions or “walking out” for what he believed were “frivolous reasons”, seeing this as a betrayal of the constituency that had elected them. While participating in political issues, Sahni speaks of “enlightened, independent and restrained discussions” among the “more responsible political circles” at that time. 
 

Hopefully, these attributes will characterise our contemporary political discourse again.

The reviewer is a former diplomat