Where there isn’t a sense of history, myth can begin in that region which is just beyond the memory of our fathers or grandfathers, just beyond living witness. This story of the bricked-up children might have occurred 2000 or 200 or 100 years ago. The events can, in fact, be dated. The 10th Guru gave amrit, baptized the first Sikhs, established the Sikh martial order, in 1699, in the town of Anandpur. Two years later he was besieged in the town by the Mogul forces. The siege lasted for three years. The Guru escaped with two of his sons; but the Guru’s mother and his two other sons were captured. They were taken to Sirhind. In 1710 Sirhind fell to the Sikhs.
Events which can be dated and analysed, and placed at a proper distance from the present, can also at some stage begin to appear far away; can fade. Myths are fresh; they never lose their force. Though at Malerkotla in 1762 the Sikhs were massacred by an invading Afghan army, in Malerkotla in 1947, at the time of the partition of India and the population exchange between India and Pakistan – the flight of Muslims to Pakistan, and Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan – in Malerkotla in 1947, because of that Afghan nobleman who laid down gold sovereigns over the cremation site of the two sons of the 10th Guru, no Muslim was harmed. In the 1960s the Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, nominated the Nawab of Malerkotla as their candidate, and he got the Sikh vote in three elections.
I was told this by Amarinder Singh. Amarinder was the head of the house of Patiala. Informally – because the titles of princes have been abolished, and the princes ‘de-recognized’ – he was the Maharaja of Patiala. All Sikhs are ‘Singhs’; in the common surname differences of caste and rank were intended to be submerged. The ideal remains; but almost from the start Sikh chieftains arose, and Patiala was one of the grandest. After Sirhind – where the two boys were bricked up – was incorporated into Patiala territory, it became the family tradition to mark the martyrdom of the Guru’s sons with a ritual procession.
‘Sirhind was the seat of the Mogul governor. When the Sikhs eventually captured the fort, there was nothing on the spot. No Sikh emblem had survived. The Moguls had destroyed it all. The sites were located where the bricking was done, and the first gurdwara was built. It was subsequently rebuilt. The rebuilding was done by my father in the early 1950s. The tradition was that, on every anniversary, from the site where they were bricked up to the site of the cremation the Guru Granth Sahib was carried on a bier.’ A mimic funeral procession, with the Sikh scriptures – as finally established by the 10th Guru – standing in for the Guru’s two sons. This went on till the 1960s, when the Akali party acquired control of the gurdwara, and they took over the ceremony.’
The family had a special obligation to the faith. ‘We are the only family to have been blessed twice by the Guru.’ Amarinder was using the collective form of the word ‘Guru’, as Sikhs often do. The first blessing was given by the sixth Guru, Hargobind (1606–1644), who comforted the crying son of the family: ‘What is he crying for? His horses will drink water out of the River Jamuna.’ This was the Guru’s way of prophesying that Patiala territory would eventually stretch to that river.
A later ancestor was one of those baptized by the 10th Guru. It was to this ancestor that, at the battle of Chamkaur, not long after the disaster of Anandpur, the 10th Guru wrote for help.
‘The Guru was surrounded by the Mogul forces in the fort, but he managed to get a message out. In that letter he says, “My home is your home. And I am in danger. Come.” But by the time my ancestor arrived, the battle was over.’ In that battle the Guru’s two other sons died. ‘This was the first generation into the Khalsa.’ Later, when the Guru was on his way to the South, where he died in 1708 (two years before the Sikhs managed to capture Sirhind), he made a prophecy about the Patiala family and the eventual size of their state.
That letter of the Guru’s from Chamkaur was especially precious to the family. It was from that letter that Amarinder’s father or grandfather had derived the current Patiala family motto: ‘My House Is Your House’. The earlier motto had been ‘Heaven’s Light Our Guide’; it could still be seen on old Patiala crockery.
On the roof of the palace there was a gurdwara. The only object of Sikh worship is their holy book, assembled over the years by the various Gurus, and given finally the status of a Guru. But in this gurdwara there were also relics of the 10th Guru. After I had washed my hands and covered my head, I was shown some of these relics: a sword of the Guru, in its velvet-covered scabbard; some spears; a letter, the actual transcription of which must have been done by a secretary or scribe.
On the roof of the palace, old pieties: the historical events of 300 years ago absorbed into religion (the 10th Guru died two years after Benjamin Franklin was born). The palace itself spoke of more recent transformations. It was a new palace, built in the 1950s, sumptuous, but without the oriental motifs such as the European architect of the Maharaja of Mysore had lavished on the Mysore City palace of 1912. This new Patiala palace was like a grand European country house, international or neutral in its feel, built for comfort, using the Indian climate well, converting it into an amenity. In its various reception rooms were signed photographs, such as the visitor sees on open days in grand houses in other countries. But here the photographs – of rulers – marked a changing world, a changing vision, an emerging India: the Kaiser, Victor Emmanuel, the Belgian royal family, Tito, Nehru, Indira Gandhi.
There were many pictures, most of them apparently bought in Europe; but few were notable. There had been a school of Sikh painting, developing just before the British time. The works of this school had been small-scale, on paper, a private court art, records of faces for the most part, the sheets assembled in albums or wrapped up in bundles and stored in palace libraries. The taste or judgement hadn’t carried over to the art of Europe, larger, in oils, meant for display on walls and serving a purpose that wouldn’t always have been clear. So, though there had been an abundance of money, Amarinder’s father and grandfather had bought neither old masters nor any of the great names of the century.
The most striking painting was a larger-than-life full-length portrait of Amarinder’s father. The Maharajas of Patiala were famous for their great height. The Raja of Patiala whom William Howard Russell met in Patiala in 1858 was more than six feet tall, and heavily built. The exaggeration, in the painting, of Amarinder’s father’s size, with his regal stance, was monumental in its effect, and breathtaking. Of a piece with that was a large salon-style painting, hung above the wide staircase, of the Silver Jubilee thanksgiving celebration of the King-Emperor George V in London in 1935, with Amarinder’s grandfather and other Indian princes, notably Kashmir and Bikaner, shown with the Prince of Wales, the future George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret.
Amarinder said, ‘My grandfather was an autocrat through and through. He came to the throne when he was nine years old. He became a full-fledged ruler when he was eighteen, in 1907. From 1907 to 1938 he was a full-fledged ruler. He put Patiala on the map. He picked an able team to run the state. He was a patron of sports, and music. But he was an autocrat.’
His idea of what he owed himself was shown in the palace where he had lived: the old Patiala palace, on the other side of Patiala city.
‘It had 1000 rooms and 400 acres. It is now a sports college. It was three-quarters of a mile from my father’s room to mine. We actually measured it one day, taking account of all the steps. It was far too big. So my father built this palace in the 1950s. This is still enormous, but at the time it seemed to the family, after the old palace, that it was a little cramped.’
And, before that old palace – the kind of Indian palace that established the idea of the extravagant wealth of the maharajas at the time of the British Raj – there had been the Patiala fort.
The old fort was used when people had to fight. There is a tower from which people could fire down.’
The fort began to be built in 1714, on the site of the hermitage of a Muslim fakir or holy man. The fakir’s fire was
lifted into the fort that was built at the time, and that fire had been kept going ever since.
It was in the fort that in 1858 the then Maharaja (or Raja) of Patiala and his courtiers, all in their best clothes and jewels, had ceremonially received William Howard Russell, showing honour to an important representative of the paramount, and now triumphant, Indian power. It is unlikely that the Raja of Patiala would have understood what Russell’s job was, but he would have known that Russell’s opinion mattered, and he did all that he could to make a good impression. He went out some way from the fort, on his caparisoned elephant, to meet Russell. He offered Russell an elephant as well, and he ceremonially offered a hand – all this ritual of courtesy and welcome in something like dumb show.
The fort was now half in decay. It was in the middle of the bazaar area in Patiala city, with whole streets, or large sections of them, selling shoes, or certain food dishes, or embroidered garments – Patiala specialities. The first courtyard, where Ruseell had entered on his elephant, was now used as a urinal by some people. A house built at a later date for important visitors, a house with classical columns, was falling down. Squatters lodged there; and someone had chalked, roughly, UNSAFE.
Within, the fort quickly became a maze of small courtyards and passages and steps. There was a small Mogul-style garden, restful, even in its semi-ruin, after brick and plaster. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries ideas of elegance came to Patiala from Britain and Europe. In the 18th century elegance was provided by the Mogul. There is an irony, though, in the 18th-century Sikh borrowings from the Mogul enemy: today, long after the disappearance of Mogul power, the decorated 18th-century Mogul dome lives on in the Sikh gurdwara, as much an emblem of the Sikh place of worship as the spire is of the Christian church.
Apart from this garden, the fort was built up, all paved, no earth showing. Passages, courtyards, terraces, roofs: crumbling brick and plaster, more perishable than wood. Here and there were small, oppressive, over-decorated, dark rooms, with dark mirrors on the walls and carved ceilings. Here and there a ceiling had collapsed, and it could be seen that the village way of building a brick roof, as in the farmhouses at Jaspal village – the bricks set on end on timber beams – had also been the way of the men who had built for the rajas and rulers. Impossible to restore or preserve the old fort: it was in the nature of this brick to crumble. A palace like this could last only while it was lived in. Here and there small attempts at restoration – concrete patching, whitewash – added to the feeling the fort gave of having been built over many times, grown room by room and space by space to its limit, and then finally abandoned.
In some rooms at the top, even with all the decay, the religious rites connected with the foundation of the town and the Patiala fort – blending Muslim and Hindu and Sikh piety – were going on. It was necessary here to take off shoes, because the site was still consecrated. The fire of the Muslim fakir that had been lifted up into the original fort of 1714 was kept going: it was one of the wonders of Patiala. Only oak was used for this fire, and the ash was offered to make a holy mark (a Hindu form). Hindu images of Krishna and Kali were tended in an adjoining room. In another room, opening on to a roof patio, a dark-complexioned reader was chanting from the Sikh scriptures, with a barefoot attendant swinging a whisk over the holy books, which were covered with very fine silk cloths. So, at the very top of the abandoned fort, as at the top of the contemporary palace, there was a reminder of the beginning of clan or family things.
It would have been touch-and-go for the clan in the early part of the 18th century. But the Mogul power declined; the Afghan invasions and raids ceased; the Sikhs came into their own. Patiala state at the end had territory of nearly 7000 square miles. A fair amount of this came in the early 19th century.
‘In the 1830s the Gurkhas decided to take the entire mountain range. In 1830 they marched and attacked our hills. All the hill rajas got together and asked for help, and we sent our troops. It was a six-months’ war. The Gurkhas were defeated. The head of the Nepalese general hung on the Patiala gate until it disintegrated.’
Patiala never got on with the great Sikh ruler, Ranjit Singh. ‘When Ranjit Singh threatened, Patiala entered into a treaty with the British. Patiala stayed neutral in the Anglo-Sikh wars.’ Even before the Sikhs were defeated in 1849, two battalions of Sikh irregulars were recruited by the British in Patiala. When the Mutiny broke out eight years later Patiala remained loyal to its treaty with the British. That support was crucial; without it the British might have been defeated in North India.
‘In our family archives there is a letter from the last Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah. In our archives we keep rulers’ personal documents; the other documents have gone to the state. In the palace we have a librarian looking after our archives. The mutineers pressed Bahadur Shah into being their titular ruler, and he wrote letters to all the Indian states asking for their support. But at that time his domain wasn’t even Delhi. His domain was literally only the Red Fort. The letter was in English, very flowery, probably written by a scribe. It was a scroll two feet long. But we had this mutual defence pact with the British, and it was that which we had to honour.’
In June 1858, when the Mutiny had been more or less suppressed, William Howard Russell went ‘with a party’ to look at the defeated emperor in the Red Fort at Delhi. The Red Fort was occupied by British soldiers and Gurkhas (recruited now, like the Sikhs, to replace the soldiers from other mutinous communities). The emperor was squatting on his haunches in an empty passage off a small roof patio. He was a small, withered man of eighty-two, barefooted, in a dirty muslin tunic and thin cambric skullcap. He was vomiting into a brass basin; Russell didn’t ask why. The old man was mentally far away from the people who had come to stare at him. He had a habit of poetry, and Russell said that a day or so before he had composed a poem, writing ‘some neat lines on the wall of his prison by the aid of a burnt stick’. This didn’t arouse Russell’s wonder or compassion, only his mockery. He never thought to find out what the words meant.
British people in India at this time were talking of blowing up the Jama Masjid in Delhi, as earlier someone had talked of destroying the Taj Mahal and selling the marble. Even the Raja of Patiala had become suspect to the British, and Russell heard complaints that he had been in communication with the Emperor Bahadur Shah.
It seemed from what Amarinder said that there was some truth in the story. He said, ‘A brother of the maharaja was very fond of Bahadur Shah, because he was a poet. And he went to offer help to the emperor. After the Mutiny he came back to Patiala, and the British then asked for him to be handed over to them. Patiala refused, and the British couldn’t push it because there were few loyal rulers left.
‘So a compromise was reached. The maharaja’s brother left Patiala. And he eventually renounced the world, living first in Rishikesh in the Himalayas, one of the Hindu centres of learning and pilgrimage, and then in the early part of the century he moved south to Bangalore.’ Bangalore was in the princely state of Mysore, somewhat removed from British jurisdiction. ‘There he died in the 1950s, well over a hundred. He became a teacher and a sadhu kind of figure. His wife continued to live in the old Patiala fort. Theirs had been a child marriage. She had come as a child to the fort, and was left by her husband when she was nine. And she continued living in the fort, refusing to leave, until the 1930s. She had never seen anything outside the fort. There was strict purdah in those days. She had never seen a car, a train, people outside the palace, a forest, a field. My grandfather wanted her to take drives. He insisted and insisted, and – it must have been in the early 1930s or late 1920s – my grandfather forcibly took her out in the car to see the things she hadn’t seen before. While she lived in the fort she refused to let anyone draw her water from the well. This was because she wanted to live the difficult life she thought her husband was enduring.’
It was hard to believe in this story. If, say, the brother of the Raja of Patiala was sixteen when he had gone to offer
his help to Bahadur Shah, he would have been born in 1840 or 1841. To have died in the 1950s would have made him over one hundred and ten at the time of his death. And his child bride would have died at the age of ninety or thereabouts. Still, the story as Amarinder told it contained many of the great transformations that had come to India from Mutiny to independence. The lifetime of those people would have contained not only the transformation of the Sikhs from ruffianly frontiersmen to farmers and businessmen; it also contained the transformation of their rulers from warrior chieftains to Raj-style maharajas.
Amarinder said, with a wave of his hand, ‘My grandfather wouldn’t have been able to understand this.’ And by ‘this’, Amarinder meant independence, parliament, universal suffrage. ‘Do you know, my grandfather kept my maternal grandfather in prison, and kept them out of Amritsar for nine years, for being a member of the Praja Mandai. That was what the people involved in the freedom struggle called the Congress in the princely states. My maternal grandfather was man of character, too. He didn’t climb down. All the family’s confiscated property was returned only when my parents got married.’
Two generations lay between the jewelled ruler William Howard Russell saw in the Patiala fort in 1858, and the maharaja who ruled absolutely in the 1000-roomed Motibagh Palace from 1907 to 1938. One role followed on from the other: the British connection enhanced the ruler’s glory. It was altogether different for Amarinder’s father.
‘My father had a difficult life. He took over in 1938 when his father died. He was twenty-five. There was the war in 1939, and then from 1945 there was the independence movement. My father was chancellor of the Chamber of Princes. So he lived with instability. With independence he was the first to sign the instrument of accession, and Patiala merged with all the Punjab states. It was a decline for my father personally. From being a ruler he became a governor of a state. Patiala was being considered as the possible capital of Indian Punjab. But the chief minister at the time got it scotched. He thought that Patiala would always have an influence in state matters, so he cooked up the idea of building a brand-new city at Chandigarh. And then in 1958 the Punjab States Union merged with the Punjab, and my father became a nobody.’ He stood for the Punjab assembly, but he didn’t like politics. He became an ambassador; it didn’t assuage his grief. ‘He was an introvert. He kept the problems inside. When he died in 1974 – he was only sixty-one – the doctors said his heart was like that of a man of eighty-five.’