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A Scholar
seeks help through WSN
Prof Himadri Banerjee,
who holds the Guru Nanak Chair in Indian History at Jadavpur
University's Department of History, has been working on Sikhs and
Sikhism in eastern India for years now, and is also on the advisory
board of The Sikh Review, an important community journal published
from Calcutta.
His book, The Other
Sikhs: A View from Eastern India, is widely regarded as a
path-breaking work on the Sikhs and their history and heritage in
Assamese, Oriya and Bengali traditions. He has studied the
information and records, published over a century between the First
Sikh War (1845) and the Partition of India (1947), available in
local languages, and has shown how the regional flavour lends its
own colour to the traditions of the Sikhs.
Prof Banerjee is now
amidst a major venture, preparing a bibliographic essay outlining
the cultural experiences and contribution of the Sikhs residing in
different provinces of India outside Punjab. This is his call for
primary sources of information. Readers may respond at the email
address given at the end of his appeal. -- Editor
Prof Himadri Banerjee’s plea: I am preparing a bibliographic essay
outlining the cultural experiences, social contributions and
economic participation of the Sikhs residing in different provinces
of India outside Punjab. According to one estimate, one out of every
five Sikhs live in the region and add to the success story of the
Sikhs as migrants. They are long here and project an interesting
dimension to the local non-Sikh milieu. Many of them were the
descendants of those who had to migrate from Pakistan, Burma and
other countries many decades ago and struggled hard to attain
success in their new places of settlement. They are successful
industrialists, enterprising businessmen, intelligent technicians,
wise financial investors, wise managers in movement of vehicles and
committed soul to the administration of the gurdwaras, hundreds of
which have sprang up in different parts of India. But they have
experiences of sufferings and hardships. The last one occurred
during the days of the Punjab Tragedy but they did not leave their
new home outside Punjab. Everywhere they represent themselves as
successful migrants struggling hard in their daily life against
innumerable odds. They have also built up an apex body at the
provincial level (Pratinidhi Board) and brought out publications in
regional languages communicating the message of the Gurus to the
local folk who live around them.
One
may conveniently divide these Sikhs into four major occupational
groups. The Sikh agriculturists are in Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Jammu. They have brought hundreds of acres
of waste lands under plough and set up an example of enterprising
agriculturist in these areas since their settlement in the
post-partition years. The second group consists of the
industrialists, businessmen, traders who are mostly seen in the
different urban centers of India like Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata.
Like the former, these men came to settle here as a result of the
partition of Punjab. Another segment is represented by a sizeable
number of technical wizards long associated with different areas of
industrial development. They are often described as 'mobile men' who
had played a pioneering role in laying railway lines in different
parts of India under the colonial rule. Finally, there are a very
small group of scheduled castes who are still undertaking the ardous
job of sweeping the streets of a few urban centers of India.
There has so far been very little serious work on these Sikhs. The
role and contributions of these Sikhs are still an unchartered area
of the post-colonial India. On the contrary, the Diaspora Sikhs of
the West who constitute only five percent of the total Sikh
population have long received the serious attention of scholars from
the West. Do we not feel like knowing of the rich contributions of
these Sikhs? It would surely offer us an interesting opportunity of
outlining the nature of migration of the Sikhs within India which
had started long before their migration to the West. It may add to
our knowledge regarding Sikhs and Sikhism's long standing pan-Indian
link since the days of the Gurus. Finally, when the Sikhs are
planning to have an all-India Gurdwara Act, their understanding of
the social composition of the numerous Sikh settlements scattered
beyond Punjab would definitely make that move more meaningful and
reasonable.
I
am writing to those Sikhs living outside Punjab with the great hope
that they may kindly respond and send whatever printed information
(including gurdwara brochures, souvenirs, newspaper clippings etc.)
they have at the individual/community level.
My
email is
hbanerje@cal3.vsnl.net.in and my telephone numbers are
(R) 033/2556-1616; (0)033-2414-6962; (M) 9433061616.
21 November 2007
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