Akal Takht’s call for partition prayers grounded in identity of undivided Punjab
The prayer call is a reckoning with an inextricable part of Greater Punjab’s dark past. The Akal Takht’s move rises above high politics and takes a deep dive, at the same time, into the region’s personal narrative and identity.
Born and raised in New Delhi, I speak Punjabi which doesn’t sound like the Punjabi of Punjab barely a three-hour drive from the Singhu border.
BOUND BY LINGUISTIC IDENTITY
With all its varieties, Punjabi, as a language, transcends boundaries. The Punjabi you hear in Ludhiana, Bathinda, Moga, Sangrur, Barnala, Malerkotla, Ferozepur, Ropar Ambala, Hisar, Sirsa, Kurukshetra and Sri Ganganagar across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan is a flavour of the Malwa region nestled between Sutlej and Ghaggar rivers.
In Pakistan, the Malwai Punjabi can be heard in parts of Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar and Mandi Bahauddin.
The Majhi Punjabi, derived from the belt lying between Ravi and Beas rivers of Indian Punjab, is spoken in Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Tarn Taran on our side and in Lahore, Sialkot, Gujranwala and Sheikhupur beyond the Attari-Wagah post.
The Doabi Punjabi is central to Hoshiarpur, Nawanshahr, Jalandhar and Kapurthala in Indian Punjab and in areas of Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh and Chiniot in Pakistan’s.
Then there are Hindko, Chachi, Multani/Saraiki, Powadhi, Pothowari and Shahpuri forms.
The Punjabi which I speak, and so do hundreds of thousands of various other fellow Hindu and Sikh Punjabis whose parents/grandparents were uprooted from Western Punjab during the partition, doesn’t have a listed name yet.
But our ears are no stranger to any accent floating in the vast pool of Punjabi dialects and sub-dialects.
Fun videos in Multani/Saraiki and Pothowari on WhatsApp and Punjabi clips and dramas produced in Western Punjab on YouTube instantly resuscitate those melodious words and phrases in our memories which the partition generation carried with it into Eastern Punjab and from there to Delhi, southern Haryana, Kanpur, Mumbai and several other cities and towns.
Despite their distinct religious identities, which weighed heavily in the polarised political climate of the India of 1947, that breed of Hindu and Sikh Punjabis didn’t really let its common linguistic identity succumb at the Radcliffe Line, which split Greater Punjab apart in 1947.
Ranked 13th among the world’s languages with an estimated 100 million speakers, Punjabi is emblematic of a cultural collective that harks back to ancient Punjab.
PRESERVERING PRE-PARTITION LEGACY
And that’s the force which encouraged civil society to preserve the history of the partition in the second decade of the 21st century. Else, the high politics of the subcontinent has subconsciously trained us to move on and not to remember Punjab and Bengal as places of mass destruction and exodus.
Imagine 12 million people becoming refugees overnight and an estimated one million dying, most of them in maddening violence as the Hindus and Sikhs on the one side and the Muslims on the other turned against each other. Yet, there have been no tribunals to fix accountability, no reconciliation measures.
Who gained? Who lost? Was a partition the price that undivided India had to pay in exchange for freedom? Were a million-plus killings, innumerable abductions, sexual violations, and loot avoidable? But civil society took the first step.
In October 2016, the first partition Museum opened at Amritsar in Punjab, the epicentre of the 1947 catastrophe. An Oral History Project in Pakistan and Bolti Khidki are other initiatives.
AKAL TAKHT’S EXTRAORDINARY PRAYER CALL
And now the Akal Takht, the highest seat of Sikh temporal authority, has taken it forward at the religious level. Its Jathedar, Giani Harpreet Singh, has announced a service in memory of those who died in the partition bloodshed.
Ahead of Independence Day in India and Pakistan, he issued an emotive video appeal to the Hindu and Sikh communities worldwide to devote ten minutes of their time to prayers individually or in temples and gurdwaras — between August 10 and August 16 for the 1947 dead.
At the Akal Takht, a special service is scheduled for 9 am on August 16.
Giani Harpreet Singh’s call signifies a reckoning in the upper echelons of a faith which lost its tangible heritage to the division of the subcontinent.
In the partition, the majority of the Sikh community left behind Guru Nanak’s birthplace at Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of the fourth Guru, Guru Ramdas, and the martyrdom site of the fifth, Guru Arjan, in Lahore, the Kartarpur Sahib at Narowal, Gurdwara Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal, the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and numerous other historical monuments and cities.
The prayer call is a reckoning with an inextricable part of Greater Punjab’s dark past. The Akal Takht’s move rises above high politics and takes a deep dive, at the same time, into the region’s personal narrative and identity.
His appeal was grounded in the roots. His tone was poignant.
If the internet helped us to keep alive the moribund dialects our elders spoke after they died off, the Akal Takht in Amritsar has joined in the revival-reconciliation interplay of what was once an undivided Punjab.
