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May 11, 2003
Review: Never forget the past
“...NO STUDY can be more entrancing than the exploration of our Punjab history, and that our province affords a fine arena for historical dispute and a rich mine of historical research”. This was the raison d‘etre for the establishment of the Punjab Historical Society in 1909 by concerned British administrators-cum-scholars and highly educated Indians, both Hindus and Muslims. They were a motley group of historians, archaeologists, teachers, government servants and landed gentry.
The Journal of the Punjab Historical Society (JPHS) was the elite biannual publication of the Society. It had a short life of a decade (1911-20). However, it was revived in the 1930s by the Punjab University Historical Society. (The Chairman, Department of History, Punjab University, did not respond to my query in respect of the revised edition).
Now some matter from this defunct journal has been brought to life as a part of the reprint series of the Lahore-based Sang-e-Meel Publications. The reprint of rare and out-of-print classics has now become a viable proposition and this publisher has made a useful contribution in that respect. But reprinting defunct scholarly journals has a limited scope and readership. A collection of articles selected from the Journal of the Panjab Historical Society was previously published in three volumes. The present one-volume collection under review has the misleading cover title Notes on Punjab and Mughal India, though the sub-title inside explains that the work is a reproduction of material already published.
A lot of editorial effort has gone into the selection and arrangement of the 47 articles taken from the eight volumes of the Journal. The first 15 articles relate to important monuments of Lahore and the history of Punjab, particularly during the Sikh times. Another 15 articles throw light on earlier history of Punjab and the remaining 17 are on Mughal India and a few studies on the historiography of the Indian subcontinent. These original papers were literally ‘peer-reviewed’ as they were first read before the learned members of the Society in its bi-annual meetings held alternately in Lahore and Simla. This house organ was very much a referred journal setting an early example of standard periodical publication complete with illustrations, documents, footnotes, references, etc.
Each article reproduced here is a piece of thorough research and factual information. Thus included in the volume is a paper by Rai Bahadur Pundit Sheo Narain, an advocate of Lahore, on “The Kohinoor of 1851”. This was the earliest Urdu newspaper from Lahore and was started in 1850.
Munshi Naval Kishore, whose famed Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow rendered yeoman service to oriental literature in India, was the first editor of Kohinoor. Working in “primitive condition”, he produced the Kohinoor in 1851 consisting of eight pages of 12 x 8 inches. It had “....certainly no trace whatever of indecent advertisement of medicine or of objectionable literature..., no religious controversies or party politics”. The “paper had a long spell of journalistic respectability”.
There were 18 Urdu contemporaries published from different cities in India before 1857, which included the Urdu daily Darya-i-Noor from Lahore, the tri-weekly English newspaper Punjabee which was launched in 1856 and soon ceased publication but its Urdu version continued from 1857 to 1890. Lahore was the premier publishing city in India and a centre of literary and journalistic activities. Rudyard Kipling’s Civil & Military Gazette is a testimony to this phenomenon.
Another paper of geopolitical interest is the one which was read by A.M. Stow, Settlement Commissioner, Srinagar on Sept 16, 1912 at Simla on “The Roads of the Punjab — Delhi to Multan”. The author highlights the need of communication in empire-building particularly during the earlier Muslim invasions and conquests. He explains how the main history of Punjab during the rule of the early Muhammadan kings of Delhi centred round the road from Delhi to Multan, which had received “exclusive” attention at the hands of the early historians.
The author pointed out that the road from Delhi to Lahore, “afterwards the main road to Empire [British]” was hardly referred to. His paper was “an attempt to apply the observations which force themselves upon a district officer in the course of his duties to the description given in the original authorities,” and it was “worthwhile to consider the reasons why the history of the early Mussalman kings was thus confined to the Multan-Delhi route....”
What emerges from the other papers is that as early as 1915 it was realized by the administrators that history had a relationship with sociology and it was important for the historian to study social phenomena. The author further elaborates, “As a special social science, history is no doubt primarily concerned with the correct and authentic chronicling of past occurrences, but it has also the secondary function to perform in so far as it has to discover the true import of those occurrences by finding out their correlation with other facts in contemporary human experience, in order to define and bring into prominence the social process and thus lead to a letter and more fruitful knowledge of social reality”.
Today when history and geography are being dropped out in our school/college syllabi the above papers highlight their importance in our national lives. These subjects were taught during the British rule and the study of these fruitful branches of human knowledge had prompted the Indians to struggle for their independence.
Another paper by Ramsay Muir underscores the study of local history, which was “the main object of this Society to encourage”. He added, “It is no exaggeration to say that much of the most fruitful work in recent historical research has been based upon the study of local history”. He also pleaded for laying the foundation of sound teaching of history and outlined a possible development of historical studies in India.
The publishers have done well to revive this genre of underutilized source material of journal articles and help integrate it in research in many a field. But the present reprint is at best a patch-work. The material should have been better organized giving reference to the volume, number and pages of the Journal where a particular paper had appeared. A cumulative index of the entire set would also have been useful.
With these caveats, I commend this tour de force particularly at a moment when our interest in the past is declining. Hopefully, a similar enterprise to retrieve relevant material from the decaying files of Journals of Asiatic Society of Bengal and Bombay, respectively would be worth the candle. For it has been correctly said, “Never forget the past, you may need it again” (Malcolm Bradbury).
Notes on Punjab and Mughal India: (Selections from Journal of the Punjab Historical Society)
Edited by Zulfiqar Ahmed
Sang-e-Meel Publications, 20 Shahrah-i-Pakistan, Lahore Tel: 042-7220100
Email: smp@sang-e-meel.com
ISBN 969-35-1297-9
832pp. Rs1,500
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