History, we all know, is invariably a handmaiden of those who rule. And those who rule always have much to hide because the business of ruling involves excesses, intended and unintended. Human consciousness tempered by ethics finds itself forced not only to explain the normal acts as rational but also rationalise the irrational. Ruling elements fear both the present and the future. They try to justify their actions, which mostly are oppressive in nature, by explaining them to their contemporaries and rationalising them for the generations to come as logical outcome of specific historical situations.

It’s a real bummer for humans whether they are powerful or powerless that they feel compelled to explain their motives and actions as compatible with the dictates of what is generally called conscience however warped it may be. The powerful, by virtue of their position, which produces an impression of them being immortal in some way, tend to fear the big stick of posterity. “How can we be immortal if the posterity rejects us as such,” goes their logic. Paradoxically, it’s purely human qualities, not power which make the mortal humans immortal at a level. In other words, history in the hands of scholarly cronies of the powerful is transformed into an instrument of humanising what actually is inhuman, emanating from the exercise of power. This is what practice of history writing has been and still is about, which is increasingly being challenged and debunked by the emergence of diverse disciplines of people’s history, myths, folklore, oral traditions and subaltern studies (the term subaltern was first used by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) in the Marxist theory and later developed and popularised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) which focus on the unrepresented and less represented segments of society.

The questions of history and historiography gained prominence during the colonial and post-colonial era because the colonialism everywhere created its version of historical account of the colonised with all its thinly disguised biases and undisguised condescension driven by overarching notion of European superiority, which had visible economic underpinnings. The colonial account demeaned the indigenous and degraded the locally rooted historical achievements with a view to instill a sense of inferiority in the subjugated people, paving the way for general acquiescence to the colonial dictates.

As the resistance movement against colonialism picked momentum from the early nineteenth century onward, freedom fighters and revivalists dug the known and murky past of their societies. They retrieved historical and mythical characters, which could be juxtaposed against the overbearing real and symbolic Western personages in order to galvanise the people’s struggle against the occupation that demonised everything indigenous. The endeavour eventually went beyond the colonial era in India, putting under scrutiny the pre-colonial period when empires or kingdoms managed and administered by non-local elites sitting smack in the middle of cocoon of smugness held sway. Being well-directed such an intellectual effort at exploring the past has resulted in a kind of cultural resurgence in many a region of the colonised world. Punjab too has been a part of this broad intellectual and cultural movement where alienation with the past is chronic due to the myriad factors rooted in the differences of faith, race and culture. Rediscovered glory of the past from Harappa onward has infused the people of Punjab with a sense of national pride emanating from their contribution to the advancement of human civilisation. But sometimes the exercise overshoots and becomes lopsided as it has happened in the case of Dulla Bhatti and Emperor Akbar.

Dulla was a sixteenth century folk hero who defied and resisted the Great Mughal’s bureaucracy which levied back-breaking taxes on the peasantry that rose in revolt in a part of Sandal Bar. For centuries, he, no doubt, remained a people’s hero which was alternately remembered and forgotten, not prominently figuring in the collective memory. The peasants’ revolt was led by Dulla who came from one of the leading families of powerful Bhatti clan. In the last half of 20th century, Dulla was dusted off and was presented by poets, playwrights and cultural activists as the quintessential Punjabi hero. He was made larger than life to match the measure of an emperor like Akbar. It created a perception as if he was historically as significant as Akbar, in fact, more so because of his struggle for the rights of the impoverished peasants.

The fact of the matter is that Dulla was a local lord whose rebellion was confined to a small area of Punjab with local repercussions. It’s revealing that no researcher or scholar has been able to find historical material to substantiate some exaggerated claims regarding Dulla. All we come across is spirited claims and inspired assertions. What most of the proponents of Dulla present is fiction, not history, myths, not reality. Most of the writings about him are rife with hagiographic bits. How tenable is the assertion for example that Akbar shifted his capital from Delhi to Lahore to crush Dulla’s rebellion? Now Akbar is not an obscure king in the haze of history. Almost everything about him and his times is recorded by historians and authors, official and non-official. We don’t find any trace of Var (Epic) or Sadd (Ballad) in Dulla’s own town and Sandal Bar that celebrates his heroic feats. When you ask balladeers and minstrels of the Bar, where chronicling the achievements of heroes and actions of heroism is a long standing cultural tradition, the enquiry draws a blank. On Dulla, we have nothing like ‘Nijabat di Var’, or ‘Chathiyan di Var’ or ‘Jang Hind Punjab’, let alone ‘Babar Bani’. If the event was impregnated with such historical implications, why our poets, who had been politically and socially conscious, failed to turn it into stuff of poetry in the most glorious times of our literature, i.e. sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? That poets failed to be sufficiently inspired by the conflict and strut their stuff could give us some clue to decode the puzzle. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2019