Punjab Doabs · Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
Punjab's part in the freedom struggle is unusual in three specific ways. First, it was largely quiet in 1857 — the province had been annexed only eight years earlier, and its regiments were used against Delhi rather than joining it — so the region's nineteenth-century resistance sits before and after that date instead: Bhai Maharaj Singh's rising of 1848–49, and the Kuka movement, which began as religious reform and became one of the earliest organised boycotts of British courts, schools, goods and posts anywhere in India. Second, the twentieth-century revolutionary politics were organised abroad before they were organised here: the Ghadar Party was founded on the North American Pacific coast by emigrants, and came home in 1914. Third, the biggest mass movement of the 1920s in this region was not the Congress campaign but the Akali campaign for control of the gurdwaras, which was disciplined, deliberately non-violent, and ended in a statute. Doaba, the smallest of the four interfluves, produced a share of all of it out of all proportion to its size, because it was the doab people emigrated from.
Risings and revolts
During and after the Second Anglo-Sikh War, Bhai Maharaj Singh organised resistance across the doabs through village and congregational networks, attempting to keep a campaign going after the Lahore state's field armies had been defeated.
Outcome: Captured in December 1849 and deported to Singapore, where he died in 1856. The Punjab was annexed on 29 March 1849.
A reform movement led by Ram Singh of Bhaini Sahib in the Malwa tract that turned into political non-cooperation — a boycott of British courts, schools, manufactured goods and the postal service, with a parallel internal administration of its own districts. In January 1872 a party of Kukas attacked Malerkotla over the killing of cattle.
Outcome: Sixty-six Kukas were executed at Malerkotla on 17 and 18 January 1872 by being blown from cannon, without trial, on the orders of the local Deputy Commissioner. Ram Singh was deported to Rangoon and died there in 1885.
Formed at San Francisco in 1913 by Punjabi emigrant workers and students, the Ghadar Party published a paper in Gurmukhi and Urdu and, on the outbreak of war in 1914, sent several thousand members back to India to attempt a general rising. The Komagata Maru, chartered by Gurdit Singh of Sarhali to test the Canadian exclusion laws, returned in the same period and was fired on at Budge Budge in September 1914.
Outcome: The rising set for 21 February 1915 was betrayed by an informer two days before. The Lahore Conspiracy trials followed; a number of the accused were hanged in November 1915 and many more transported.
A campaign to transfer control of the historic gurdwaras from hereditary managers to elected committees, fought by successive jathas who submitted to arrest and beating without retaliation — at Nankana Sahib west of the region in 1921, at Guru ka Bagh in 1922 and at Jaito in 1924. A section that rejected the non-violent method broke away in 1921 as the Babbar Akalis and operated in the Doaba districts.
Outcome: The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 established elected management of the shrines — one of the few mass campaigns of the period to end in the statute it had demanded. The Babbar Akali movement was declared unlawful in 1923 and broken by the conspiracy trials that followed, in which five men were sentenced to death and many more transported.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhai Maharaj SinghNaurangabad, Amritsar district | died 1856 | The rising of 1848–49 | Organised armed resistance across the doabs during and after the Second Anglo-Sikh War.Captured in 1849 and deported to Singapore; died in confinement there in 1856. |
| Ram SinghBhaini Sahib, Ludhiana | 1816–1885 | The Kuka or Namdhari movement | Led a reform movement that became an organised boycott of British courts, schools, goods and posts in the Malwa tract from the 1860s.Deported to Rangoon in 1872 and died there in 1885. |
| Ajit SinghKhatkar Kalan, Jalandhar | 1881–1947 | The agrarian agitation of 1907 | Among the organisers of the campaign against the Colonization of Land Bill and the canal water rates in 1907, which carried the song Pagri Sambhal Jatta. He was Bhagat Singh's uncle.Deported to Mandalay in 1907 and spent most of the following four decades in exile; he died in 1947. |
| Sohan Singh BhaknaBhakna, Amritsar district | 1870–1968 | Ghadar | Emigrant mill worker on the American Pacific coast and the founding president of the Ghadar Party in 1913.Sentenced to death in the first Lahore Conspiracy case; the sentence was commuted to transportation for life and he was released in 1930 after sixteen years. |
| Kartar Singh SarabhaSarabha, Ludhiana | 1896–1915 | Ghadar | Left his studies in California to run the Gurmukhi edition of the Ghadar paper, returned to India in 1914 and was among the principal organisers of the rising planned for February 1915. At his trial he took the responsibility on himself.Hanged at Lahore Central Jail in November 1915, aged nineteen. |
| Kishan Singh GargajBanga, Jalandhar | died 1926 | Babbar Akali | The principal organiser of the Babbar Akali movement in the Doaba districts from 1921, after the group broke from the main Akali campaign over the question of non-violence.Convicted in the Babbar Akali conspiracy case and executed at Lahore in 1926. |
| Lala Lajpat RaiDhudike, Moga | 1865–1928 | Congress; Swadeshi; boycott of the Simon Commission | Congress leader, writer and founder of schools and banks in the province; deported without trial to Mandalay in 1907 alongside the agrarian agitation, and a central figure in the province's politics for two decades afterwards.Died on 17 November 1928, weeks after being injured in a lathi charge on the Simon Commission demonstration at Lahore. |
| Bhagat SinghKhatkar Kalan, Jalandhar | 1907–1931 | Naujawan Bharat Sabha; Hindustan Socialist Republican Association | Organiser and writer, founder of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926, and the author of the movement's most widely read political writing of the period. Tried in the second Lahore Conspiracy case.Executed at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931 with Sukhdev Thapar of Ludhiana and Shivaram Rajguru. |
| Udham SinghSunam, in the Malwa tract | 1899–1940 | Ghadar associations; acted alone in 1940 | Shot Michael O'Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab in 1919, at Caxton Hall in London on 13 March 1940, twenty-one years after the Jallianwala Bagh firing.Tried in London and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940. |
People from Punjab Doabs who resisted colonial rule, and the regional risings and revolts that shaped that resistance. (13)