Saving PunjabDate: Monday, 12 October, 2009
As we negotiated Amritsar traffic, Gurmeet's iPhone rarely stopped ringing. She now heads the Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative (CRCI), a multidisciplinary conservation consultancy with projects all over the country, but it is preserving the relics of Sikh history that means the most to her. We rounded a traffic circle marked by a battered Patton tank captured from Pakistan by a Sikh regiment and pulled up at a little guard post. Two watchmen peered curiously into the car window, recognized Gurmeet and waved us through. We were about to enter Gobindgarh, a 43-acre, 18th-century Sikh fortress with four mountainous bastions and a broad moat choked with trees. Ranjit Singh stored some of his vast treasure within its walls. The British Army occupied it. So did the army of free India, which in 2006 turned it over to the state of Punjab. It is not yet open to the general public, but in the middle of the old parade ground craftsmen are mixing traditional lime mortar in a circular pit. Under the CRCI's direction they are shoring up the mammoth brick tower in which Ranjit Singh lived when visiting the holy city. Gurmeet has stopped by to make sure the color of the lime is right. But she has bigger plans, as well. There are rumors that an American-based hotelier plans to turn the fort into a luxury hotel for overseas Punjabis interested in revisiting the shrines of their faith without more than minimal contact with the real India. If he succeeds, she fears ordinary citizens will be kept out of this precious relic of their history.
'"Freezing buildings in time may not work here the way it does in the West," Gurmeet says. "There are too many pressures for change. But turning everything into tourist hotels won't work either. Our historic buildings need to mean something to the people who live around them. We need to involve them in our work, to make them understand its importance." To achieve those ends she hopes to undertake an overall management plan that would both provide for world-class preservation and supply visitors with the interpretive materials they need to understand monuments like this. (Since our visit, Gurmeet has been given the go-ahead by the Punjab government.)
That understanding has largely been missing in Punjab. In recent years, for example, Sikh congregations have been "improving" historic structures by bulldozing them and then constructing ever-more-lavish substitutes on the sites. "Somewhere along the line the original, unpretentious Sikh architecture has begun to be perceived as something to be ashamed of," Gurmeet says. "Our gurus were simple, down-to-earth men of the soil, and their buildings reflect the simplicity and harmony Sikhism is all about."
Wagah marks the western end of the Indian portion of the Grand Trunk Road. It is the sole crossing point between the two Punjabs; Lahore, the capital of Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom and of pre-Partition united Punjab, is just 18 miles up the road. The formal flag-lowering ceremony that takes place at Wagah at dusk every evening of the year must be one of the oddest regularly scheduled events on earth. On the evening we visited, hundreds of eager onlookers streamed into specially built grandstands in the coppery light. On the Indian side, a big amiable crowd jostled one another for the best seats, men, women and children sitting together. In the roadbed, several busloads of teenage girls in brightly colored salwar kameez danced to recorded bhangra music. On the Pakistani side, a giant portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father whom Pakistanis call their Quaid-i-Azam, or "Great Leader," looked down upon stadium seats in which men and women sat carefully segregated: men and boys on the left side of the road; girls and women (a handful in full-length burqas) on the right. Instead of dancing schoolgirls, three gray-bearded mullahs in green and white raced back and forth, waving huge Pakistani flags to whip up enthusiasm.
The ceremony itself proved both impressive and ludicrous. As the spectators cheered and chanted "Long Live India" or "Long Live Pakistan," squads of uniformed Punjabis from both sides of the border, picked for their height and fierce good looks and wearing turbans with starched coxcombs that made them look still taller, quick-marched toward one another till they stood only a foot or two apart. Then, they stamped and whirled, puffed out their chests and flared their nostrils in perfect military unison, each apparently seeking to out-testosterone his opposite number before hauling down their flags. I asked the major in charge of the Indian contingent how seriously his men took their nightly confrontation with their neighbors. He laughed. "We've been doing this for more than 20 years," he said. "We know each other's names. It's all for the audience."
It was the muted reaction of that audience that fascinated me. The region around Wagah had witnessed some of the worst Partition bloodletting. Since then, India and Pakistan have gone to war three times. A few weeks before my visit, fanatics trained in Pakistan had butchered more than 160 people in Mumbai. The people who had turned out to watch the ceremony this evening had grown hoarse shouting patriotic slogans. And yet when the flags were finally folded away and the big gates clanged shut, spectators on both sides drifted as close to the dividing line as the respective armies would allow, peering silently across the no man's land into the faces of counterparts who looked so much like themselves.
Most of the monuments we'd seen testified to Punjab's bloody past: battlefield markers; crumbling village walls built to bar marauders; gurdwaras that honor Sikhs martyred in battle against the Moguls; and Jallianwalla Bagh, the Amritsar park now filled with flowers and shouting schoolchildren, where, in 1919, a British commander ordered his men to fire upon unarmed civilians-killing at least 379 and galvanizing the independence movement.
But there are also sites that still evoke the mutual respect that characterized life for many Punjabis before the tragedy of Partition. Gurmeet led us to one of the most unlikely of them, the Guru ki Maseet, or "Guru's Mosque," in the old walled town of Sri Hargobindpur, west of Amritsar. Here, on a bluff overlooking the Beas River, a member of the Nihang Sikh order, justly celebrated for the ferocity with which it defended the faith against its enemies in the old days, stands lonely guard over a Muslim house of worship. His name is Baba Balwant Singh and he has been on duty here for more than a quarter of a century. The shrine he protects is a modest three-domed brick structure, barely 20 feet deep, with arched entryways so low that anyone much over five feet tall must duck to enter. But it has a truly extraordinary history.
