Sunday, August 29, 2010

INDIAN I.T.WIZKIDS

KRANTHI KIRAN VISTAKULA

A Smart Stitch

Kranthi Kiran Vistakula’s climate control jackets and other gear have propelled him to the No. 1 spot

By 

Smita Sengupta 

 
















          The cold winds of the US East Coast that he faced while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) forced Hyderabad-born Kranthi Kiran Vistakula to invent his first climagear — a jacket that would keep him warm in the biting cold and cool in the sweltering heat. Today, the 29-year-old is trying to turn that project into a business. His two-year-old start-up, Dhama Apparel Innovations, makes functional apparel, mainly jackets, helmets and scarves, using a proprietary technology called ClimaCon (short for climate control).

The company’s tiny office at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad is bustling. “It functions like a workshop. Sometimes we work till 2 am,” says Prasenjit Kundu, an apparel design student at NID, who joined Dhama after attending one of Vistakula’s workshops.

Vistakula’s jackets, called Climagears, are sleeveless vests that have 20 plastic tiles called peltiers (named after French physicist Jean Charles Peltier) sewn on the inside. Each peltier, which converts electrical energy into heat, is linked to a bigger, plastic tile that is sewn on the garment. It draws power from lithium polymer batteries fitted on to a belt and can maintain the inside temperature at 20-40 degree celsius. A separate panel allows the user to control the temperature. The apparel is lightweight (the jacket weighs about 650 gm) and a single charge of batteries lasts eight hours at a stretch.

R&D accounts for most of Dhama’s cost of operations. “The product is still undergoing a refinement process,” says Vistakula. Venture capital firms invested in the company, however, are positive. “It is surprising that with a population of 1.2 billion, there is not a single Indian player in sports apparel. The product has a market,” says Harshal Shah, CEO of Reliance Venture Asset Management, part of the Reliance ADAG group. The Mumbai-based firm made an undisclosed investment in Dhama last June along with investor group Mumbai Angels.

 RANK NO 1
DHAMA APPAREL INNOVATIONS
BUSINESS: SPECIALISED APPAREL
FOUNDER: Kranthi Kiran Vistakula
YEAR OF INCEPTION: 2008
HQ: Hyderabad
CAPITAL RAISED: About Rs 5 crore
INVESTORS: Self, family, friends, awards,
competitions, Department for Scientific
and Industrial Research, Reliance
Venture Asset Management and 
Mumbai Angels
EMPLOYEES: 5
KEY CUSTOMERS: Military personnel,
outdoor workers, sports enthusiasts
KEY COMPETITORS: Aspen Systems,
Med Eng, Foster Miller

    
 So far, Dhama has invested about Rs 5 crore in the business. Vistakula’s jacket won him the MIT 1K Business Plan Competition in 2005. Armed with $1,000 in prize money and a prototype, he came back in 2007. He got Rs 12 lakh from Department for Scientific and Industrial Research, part of the Ministry of Science and Technology. After refining his prototype for six months, NID offered him incubation support.

Marketing is going to be Dhama’s big challenge. It is negotiating a tie-up with a multinational sports apparel company and already has one with Tata Advanced Materials to sell under the Tata-Dhama brandname to the Indian military. “The jackets that the military uses currently are heavier than what Dhama has to offer,” says Dakshina Murthy, general manager, operations at Tata Advanced Materials. The military is using five jacket variants from Dhama on a trial basis. Next fiscal, Vistakula hopes to sell 1,000-odd jackets to the military and 5,000 helmets, scarves and shoes to retail consumers.

Mass production is another issue for Dhama. At present, it manufactures its products at NID. Vistakula is negotiating a deal with Idea Corporation, an Ahmedabad-based product design consulting firm, ahead of setting up manufacturing facilities in Hyderabad. He hopes to raise about $2 million from venture capitalists, half of which will be used to scale up manufacturing.

Dhama’s revenues are projected at $1 million in 2010-11 and $100 million in five years. “It’s a new product and a lot of educating has to be done. This is hitting our marketing plans,” he says. Dhama is creating animation and video material to reach out to potential users of such jackets.

Vistakula has got the first part of his business model in place — a product high on innovation. He has to put the other pieces together.
[Courtesy: Businessworld]

Saturday, August 28, 2010

INDIAN I.T.WIZKIDS

Indrani Medhi

ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER

         
           Contact me at indranim at microsoft dot com
 About me:
Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design. Her current work has been in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. She has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA (2005) and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India (2002). Currently, she is also a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, India.

Projects:
Text-Free User Interfaces: are design guidelines for computer-human interfaces that would allow any first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. We arrived at the following design principles through an ethnographic design process involving over 300 hours and 250 people from urban slums in Bangalore, India: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application. We have applied these principles to three applications – job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, and an electronic map. Rigorous user evaluations show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that first-time, non-literate users are, in fact, able to navigate through text-free UIs meaningfully.
Recently, we have also begun exploring design principles for mobile phones, and have conducted ethnographic design with 80 subjects across India, Philippines and South Africa. So far we have looked specifically at applications for mobile banking. This work is a part of the joint project on Mobile-phone-enabled banking and payments.
In this project we have observed a number of challenges encountered by subjects in interacting with the mobile banking services and navigating through mobile phones in general. Broad lessons from this ethnography resulted in developing design recommendations. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate subjects on three systems that incorporated the design recommendations: text-based, spoken dialog, and rich multimedia. The tests confirmed that non-literate and semi-literate subjects were unable to make sense of the text-based UI and that while task-completion rates were better for the rich multimedia UI, speed was faster and less assistance was required on the spoken-dialog system.
In addition to this we are also trying to understand characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and their implications for UI design for this population.

Hope PC: The goal is to understand (1) what a very low-income family would want out of a PC, (2) what usability issues they might encounter, and (3) what impact a PC might have on the family’s socio-economic status and behaviors. We have provided a PC with Windows XP to a low-income family residing in a Bangalore slum community for understanding usage.

  
Publications:
  • Medhi, I., Cutrell, E., and Toyama, K. It's not just illiteracy. Proc. of India HCI/IDID conference, Mumbai, India (2010).
  • Medhi, I., Nagasena, G. S. N., and Toyama, K. A Comparison of Mobile Money-Transfer UIs for Non-Literate and Semi-Literate Users. Proc. ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Boston, USA, (2009)--[Best paper nomination CHI'09]
  • Medhi, I., Ratan, A. and Toyama, K. Mobile-Banking Adoption and Usage by Low-Literate, Low-Income Users in the Developing World . Proc. Human Computer Interaction International, San Diego, USA, (2009).
  • Medhi, I., Menon, G., and Toyama, K. Challenges of Computerized Job-Search in the Developing World. Proc. ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Florence, Italy, (2008).
  • Medhi, I. and Toyama, K. Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate PC Users. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, India, (2007).
  • Medhi, I., Prasad, A. and Toyama K. Optimal audio-visual representations for illiterate users. International World Wide Web Conference, Canada, (2007), 873-882.
  • Medhi, I. and Kuriyan R. Text-Free UI: Prospects for Social Inclusion. International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing countries. Brazil, May 2007
  • Indrani Medhi. User-Centered Design for Development. ACM interactions. Vol. 14. Issue 4 (July+August 2007)
  • Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama K. Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. IEEE/ ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Berkeley, USA, (2006). (Selected for the best paper edition of the ITID-Information Technologies and International Development journal)
  • Medhi, I., Pitti B. and Toyama K. Text-Free UI for Employment Search. Asian Applied Computing Conference. Nepal, (2005).

INDIAN I.T.WIZKIDS

RANVEER CHANDRA                       
                                                                                            

  Researcher

Networking Research Group
ranveer@microsoft.com
Tel: (425) 706-7034
Fax: (425) 936-7329
Ranveer Chandra is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. He completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, India, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2005. As part of his doctoral dissertation he developed VirtualWiFi - a virtualization architecture for wireless network cards. This software has been downloaded more than 125,000 times, and is among the top 5 downloaded software released by Microsoft Research. Windows 7 supports some VirtualWiFi APIs as well.
Ranveer’s research focuses on system challenges in designing computer networks. He is currently working on four different projects: white space networking, energy saving PC architecture, mobile systems, and network management. Ranveer was invited to the FCC to present his research on white spaces. Spectrum regulators from India (TRAI), China (SARFT), Brazil (ANATEL) and Singapore (IDA) have visited the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA to see a live demonstration of his research. Ranveer has filed over 40 patents on his research, 7 of which have been granted. He has also published more than 30 research papers, two of which have won the best paper awards at ACM CoNext 2008 and ACM SIGCOMM 2009. 
In 2008, he organized the MSR Cognitive Wireless Networking Summit in Snoqualmie, WA, which brought together leading academics and industry people to discuss the challenges in build dynamic spectrum access networks, for example over the TV white spaces. More information can be found here.


Recent Publications

Sunday, August 22, 2010

PROMINENT PAINTERS

MANJIT BAWA

                                 



Manjit Bawa (1941 – 29 December 2008), born in Dhuri, Punjab, India, was an Indian painter

Bawa's older brothers encouraged him to pursue art. He studied fine arts at the College of Art, New Delhi between 1958 and 1963, where his professors included Somnath Hore, Rakesh Mehra, Dhanaraj Bhagat and B.C. Sanyal. "But I gained an identity under Abani Sen. Sen would ask me to do 50 sketches every day, only to reject most of them. As a result I inculcated the habit of working continuously. He taught me to revere the figurative at a time when the entire scene was leaning in favor of the abstract. Without that initial training I could never have been able to distort forms and create the stylization you see in my work today," recalls Bawa.

BAWA's WORKS



Between 1964 and 1971, Bawa worked as a silkscreen printer in Britain, where he also studied art. "On my return I faced a crisis. I asked myself, 'What shall I paint?' I couldn't be just another derivative of European style of painting." Instead, he found Indian mythology and Sufi (school of Islam) poetry. "I had been brought up on stories from the Mahabharat, the Ramayan, and the Puranas (Hindu mythological and sociological texts), on the poetry of Waris Shah (a Punjabi poet) and readings from the Guru Granth Sahib (holy book of the Sikhs)," he says.
Manjit Bawa's canvases are distinguishable in their colors - the ochre of sunflowers, the green of the paddy fields, the red of the sun, the blue of the mountain sky. He was one of the first painters to break out of the dominant grays and browns and opted for more traditionally Indian colors like pinks, reds and violet.
He had painted Ranjha, the cowherd from the tragic ballad Heer Ranjha and Lord Krishna with a flute surrounded by dogs and not cows as in mythological paintings. Indian gods Kali and Shiva, whom Bawa considers as "icons of my country", also figure prominently in his paintings.
                                                                                                           
Nature also plays inspiration here. When young, he would travel widely either on foot, by bicycle or simply, by hitchhiking. "I have been almost everywhere - Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat. I would spread a sheet of paper on the ground and draw the countryside. The colors and the simplicity of people I met fascinated me." Birds and animals make a constant appearance in his paintings, either alone or in human company. Besides nature, the flute is a recurring motif in his works. Bawa learnt to play the flute from maestro Pannalal Ghosh. He has painted Ranjha, the cowherd from the tragic love ballad Heer Ranjha, playing the flute. He has painted Krishna with a flute, surrounded by dogs and not by cows as mythological paintings depict him. Besides these, figures of Kali and Shiva dominate Bawa's canvases; "they are the icons of my country," he feels.
If Bawa is known for his vibrant paintings, he is also known for his love of spirituality, and particularly of Sufi philosophy. "I find a wealth of wisdom in the scriptures. Sufi philosophy has taught me that man and man, man and animals, can co-exist," he says.
The painter has been surrounded by controversies in his life as an artist, the most recent one being accused of forgery by his assistant.
For Bawa, drawing is his first love. "I enjoy doing it, for it isn't decorative and loud. One can use minimum essentials to extract the maximum effect," says the artist. "I was inspired to return to drawing after seeing Michelangelo's sketches and drawings at an exhibition in Amsterdam, where I had gone for one of my shows. The idea stuck in my mind. I don't work on demand, but follow my heart and mind, for I feel everything has a time and a place."

Manjit Bawa lived and worked out of Dalhousie, India, where his studio is, and Delhi, where his family lives. He died on 29 December 2008. He was in coma for three years after suffering a stroke

AWARDS AND HONORS
  • 2002 ‘Meeting Manjit’, film on Manjit Bawa directed by Buddhadeb Dasgupta, received the National Award for Best Documentary
  • 1986 1st Bharat Bhawan Biennale, Bhopal
  • 1981 All India Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, Chandigarh
  • 1980 National Award, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
  • 1963 Sailoz Prize, New Delhi.
 FURTHER READINGS: 
http://old-master-bawa.blogspot.com/
http://virtual-museum-india.blogspot.com/                                                                                                                                                                

Friday, August 20, 2010

CANADIAN SIKHS

SARDAR GIAN SINGH KOTLI

S.Gian Singh Kotli a prominent canandian from Surry (Canada) who's services to the cause of Punjabi language and literature are widely acclaimed, both in Canada and outside who is credited with propagating Sikhism among the white youth in canadian school, colleges, churches and universities, was introduced to the audience and presented with a memento and Siropa of honour. S.Gian Singh Kotli has been teaching Punjabi and Sikhism to the Mayor of Vancouver Sam Sullivan for the last 3.5 years and he speaks Punjabi when ever goes to Gurdwara and Punjabi functions and says if I can learn Punjabi why not your kids?

Monday, August 9, 2010

AKAL TAKHT JATTHEDAARS

JATTHEDAR TEJA SINGH BHUCCHAR

Saturday, August 7, 2010

GREAT PUNJABIS

Sardar Ajit Singh: 
Hero of the ‘Pagdi Sambhal Jatta’ Movement












Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s family, which had a rich political heritage of resistance to colonialism, had a deep influence on his development. His great grandfather, Sardar Fateh Singh was one of the valiant Sikhs of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army who had fought bravely till the end against the British in the Anglo-Sikh war wages to defend Punjab from imperialist attack. As a result of his defiance, the British seized all his land and property after they captured the Punjab. Later, during the 1857 ‘mutiny’, the British were in dire need of help, and the Governor of Punjab called upon Sardar Fateh Singh and other Sikh commanders and declared that those who supported the British against the rebels would not only have their confiscated property returned; they would also be handsomely rewarded and honoured. While many others agreed to this deal, Sardar Fateh Singh retorted, “I don’t need property and wealth in return for turning traitor.” Bhagat Singh’s grandfather Sardar Arjun Singh was also an active social reformer in the Arya Samaj; he opposed untouchability and was a staunch nationalist. Bhagat Singh’s father Sardar Kishan Singh and his paternal uncles Sardar Ajit Singh and Sardar Swaran Singh were totally committed to the cause of freedom. Sardar Swaran Singh, during his sojourn in jail, developed tuberculosis as a result of the inhuman conditions and died at the young age of 23.
Ajit Aingh was born on 23 January 1881 at Khatkadkalan village. In those days this village was part of Jalandhar district but now falls in Nawan Shahar district. He went to school in the nearby village of Banga, and later joined the Sain Das Anglo-Sanskrit School in 1894 in his home district for secondary schooling. He was then sent to Bareilly district in UP to study law, but had to discontinue his education and return home due to bad health. Later in 1896 he got his F.A degree from DAV College Lahore.
Following in the footsteps of his father, he committed himself to social causes. India was reeling under famine as a result of imperialist plunder. Ajit Singh worked tirelessly among the sick and starving people. Along with his brother Kishan Singh, he made extensive tours to the famine-affected areas like Barar (Madhya Pradesh 1898); Ahmedabad and other areas (Gujarat 1900); flood-affected areas in Srinagar (Kashmir) and earthquake-affected areas of Kangla in 1905.
Ajit Singh had been initiated into politics during his stay in Bareilly. His experience of visiting the areas affected by natural calamities and interacting with suffering people convinced him that the permanent solution to these problems could not be achieved until the end of British rule and establishment of true democracy in the country. So he made it his life’s mission to struggle for Indian independence. In the course of his social service works in 1903, he met and married Namo (Harnam Kaur), a young woman orphaned by famine, challenging caste and religious codes.
In 1903, when the Viceroy Lord Curzon organised a royal gathering and invited all kings and princes to declare their allegiance to the Raj by participating in this function, Ajit Singh and Kishan Singh came to Delhi, clandestinely met many of these kings and tried to mobilise them to build up another revolt on the lines of 1857. Finding that they got nothing better than formal assurances of support, they decided to continue the struggle by other means.
In 1906, Ajit Singh participated in the important session of the Congress held at Calcutta, to seek out and forge links with patriots who wished to go beyond the Congress’ methods of petitioning the British rulers. On returning to Punjab they founded the Bharat Mata Society which was called ‘Mahboobane Watan’ in Urdu. This was an underground organisation, and besides Ajit Singh, Kishan Singh, Mahashay Ghasita Ram, Swaran Singh and Sufi Amba Prasad were some of its trusted lieutenants and active members. Their main objective was to prepare for re-enact 1857 on its 50 th anniversary in 1907.
In the meantime, peasants in Punjab were on the boil against the new colonial laws – the new Colonisation Act and the Doab Bari Act. The background to these acts was that the British government had constructed canals to draw water from the Chenab river and take it to Lyallpur (now in Pakistan) to set up settlements in uninhabited areas. Promising to allot free land with several amenities, the government had persuaded peasants and ex-servicemen from Jalandhar, Amritsar, and Hoshiarpur to settle there. Peasants from these districts left behind land and property, settled in the new areas and toiled to make the barren land fit for cultivation. But as soon as they had done so, the government had enacted the new laws to declare itself master of this fertile land, denying the farmers the right to ownership! The new laws reduced the peasants to sharecroppers; they could neither fell trees on these lands, nor build houses or huts nor even sell or buy such land. If any farmer dared to defy the government diktat he could be punished with eviction from the land. Also the new laws decreed that only the eldest son of a sharecropper was allowed to have access to the land tilled by his father. If the eldest son died before reaching adulthood, the land would not pass to the younger son, rather it would become the property of the government. Not only this, through the taxes levied for more than one and half decades in lieu of canals on the Chenab river to irrigate these 20 lakh acres of land, the government had not only got back its initial investment, it was also able to extract more than 7 lakh rupees per annum on the abpashi tax.
Ajit Singh and his comrades put in all their efforts to channelise the widespread discontent and anxiety of the peasants against the British policies into a popular mass resistance. The peasants however, deeming their strength to be low first approached the well-known Congress leader and lawyer, Lala Lajpat Rai to lead the movement. However, Lala Lajpat Rai disappointed the peasants by arguing that the Congress would be unable to do anything because the Bill had already been passed as a Law. It was then that the peasants accepted the leadership of Ajit Singh and his Bharat Mata society, which was waging a fearless resistance to the anti-peasant laws.
In no time, Lahore and its neighbouring areas saw a veritable wave of rallies, demonstrations and mass conventions attended by thousands of people. These militants meetings were addressed in the main by Ajit Singh, who did not restrict himself to merely opposing these repressive laws, going on instead to present the true picture of a nation ravaged by British colonialism, and ending with a rousing call for an all-out rebellion against the foreign rule. While his speeches stirred and inspired the masses, the British, clearly seeing this as a sequel of the Great Rebellion of 1857, were rapidly turning anxious. A circular reached the offices of the English collectors and Deputy Commissioners, that the common people, but especially soldiers, should be banned from listening to his speeches. But this only greatly enhanced Ajit Singh’s popularity. The symbol of this movement was a tri-colour flag, mounted on two and a half feet long staff, carried by all those who attended the rallies and demonstrations. Ajit Singh would exhort from his public meetings that the English would be beaten out of the country by this stick.
In a mammoth rally at Lyallpur on 3 rd March 1907, Banke Dayal, the editor of the newspaper, Jhang Syal, introduced his song, “Pagdi sambhal Jatta, Pagdi Sambhal oye”. Such was the popularity of the song that it soon became the very symbol and soul of the movement. So much so that the movement itself came to be called the Pagdi sambhal Jatta movement.
Explaining his choice of Lyallpur as the base of the movement, Ajit Singh wrote: “I had deliberately selected Lyallpur …because it was a newly developed area. This district had attracted people from all over Punjab and was especially populated by retired soldiers. I was of the view that these retired army personnel could facilitate a rebellion.” And indeed, his hunch proved to be true. There was a great deal of attraction and sympathy for the movement within the army. While soldiers would often visit his mass meetings to hear him, on 18 th April 1907, a large contingent of over 200 Sikh soldiers joined a meeting in Multan. A direct fallout of this was that soldiers at many places refused to obey the British government’s orders to fire at the protestors at the peasant rallies. Seething anger at the repression unleashed by the British government erupted in riots in Rawalpindi, Lyallpur, Gurdaspur, Lahore and many other towns and villages. The agitated protestors ransacked government buildings, post offices, banks, overturning telephone poles and pulling down the telephone wires. Those Britishers who fell in their hands were either thrashed or had their faces blackened.
Lord Ibbottson, the Governor of Punjab dispatched an urgent telegraph to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge. He wrote, “Punjab is on the brink of a rebellion being led by Ajit Singh and his party. Arrangements must be made to halt it.” Just prior to this on 29 th August 1906, the Viceroy Lord Minto had written to the then India Minister in Britain, Lord Macaulay: “ground is being prepared for a rebellion in the armed forces. Literature of a certain kind is being distributed among the soldiers and this will no doubt result in a rebellion.”
Two weapons were indispensable to the Bharat Mata Society led by Ajit Singh: speeches and publications. Towards this end, he established the Bharat Mata Book Agency, which extensively published anti-government literature. The moving spirit behind the society was the supreme patriot and revolutionary intellectual, Sufi Amba Prasad ji. Bharat Mata (initially a monthly, later turned monthly), India (in English), Peshwa (in Urdu), and Punjabi (in English) were openly partisan to the movement. The Agency published numerous propagandist tracts, each of which was a call to arms. Even as these books and pamphlets were seized by the establishment, it only fuelled their popularity further. In government circles, the Bharat Mata society’s movement came to be known as the ‘little 1857’.
Fearing the tidal rise of revolutionary activities, the British Government issued warrants against Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai on 4 th May 1907. Ajit Singh’s leading comrades--Sardar Kishan Singh, Sardar Swaran Singh, Lala Lachand Falak, Lala Govardhan Das, Mahashay Ghasita Ram and Pandit Ramchand Peshawari--had already been arrested and imprisoned on charges of resorting to violence against the police superintendent Mr. Philip and another British police officer, Mr. B.T during the anti-British rioting in Lahore earlier. Lala Lajpat Rai was arrested on 9 th May but Ajit Singh succeeded in eluding the police in order to conclude his various political responsibilities, at the end of which he surrendered to the police on 2nd June. Like Lala Lajpat Rai, Ajit Singh too was exiled to Mandalay Jail in Burma. This was the same prison in which the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had been incarcerated as a punishment for the Great Rebellion of 1857, and following him in 1882, the hero of the Kuka (Namdhari) rebellion, Baba Ram Singh. Lord Macaulay informed the British Parliament of Ajit Singh’s imprisonment thus: “Between 1 st March 1907 to 1 st May 1907, this prominent revolutionary leader of Punjab addressed as many as 28 meetings. Only five of these were related to the problems of the peasants; the rest all preached revolt.”
While the national leadership of Congress put their weight behind Lala Lajpat Rai’s release, proving that he had no links with any revolutionary movement, they maintained a complete silence on Ajit Singh’s release. The moderate Congress leader, Sri Gopal Krishna Gokhale wrote to the Viceroy’s secretary on 10 th June 1907, expressing the desire to visit Shimla in July end in order to submit a petition to the Viceroy urging for Lala Lajpat Rai’s release signed by all non-governmental members of the Viceroy’s council, and regional councils, as well as senior functionaries of the Congress. Indeed, in his letter, he strongly opposed any allusion to any comradeship between Rai and Singh: “To link Lala Lajpat Rai to Ajit Singh is a grave injustice. When in visited Lahore last February, Ajit Singh had insulted Lalaji by calling him a coward and stooge of the government. All because Lalaji refused to participate in his movement.” Bowing to Congress pressure, the British Government declared the release of Lala Lajpat Rai on 7 th November 1907. Though the Government did not want to risk releasing Ajit Singh, it was under tremendous political and psychological pressure. The “pagdi samhal jatta” movement had spread far beyond the peasants to engulf the army, and the government realizing that it was cornered ceded by withdrawing the new Act in toto, thus reinstating the peasant’s proprietorship over land. In these circumstances, to have continued to keep Ajit Singh alone under imprisonment, the government ran the danger of turning him into the unrivalled leader and hero of the revolutionary movement. The Government reckoned that even a free Ajit Singh would not be able to arouse the same fervour as before since the controversial law had already been withdrawn. As a result, Ajit Singh was released along with LLR—though the British government created a charade that their release had been announced on the happy occasion of George V’s coronation. The people of Punjab belied the hopes and expectations of the Government: their reception of the recently released Ajit Singh was unsurpassed in warmth and grandness. This inevitably led to a rethink in the government.
Soon after his release, Ajit Singh attended the annual session of the Congress in December end in Surat (Gujarat), where he openly supported Tilak’s extremist line against that of the moderates. His revolutionary demeanour and ideas moved Tilak to say: “Such is his talent that Ajit Singh deserves to be the first President of free India. We have no match for him.” Upon his release, he turned his attention once again to the Bharat Mata Society and Bharat Mata book agency. The Urdu newspaper Peshwa, which was published under his guidance, became a staple part of the Punjabi intelligentsia’s intellectual diet. Its print run had reached 1500, with demands continuously rising.
The sharp revolutionary edge of Ajit Singh’s pamphlets, essays and speeches once again attracted the ire of the British Government. But this time, a warrant was issued with the clear intent of securing a death sentence for him Ajit Singh. Sensing this, Ajit Singh preferred to evade the police to escape overseas in order to continue his mission. At the end of 1908, or early 1909, he and his comrades Sufi Amba Prasad, Zia-ul-Haq and Harkesh Lathha had reached Iran traveling secretly via Karachi. He also changed his name to Mirza Hasan Khan. After some time, leaving his trusted colleague Amba Prasad in Shiraj to continue the revolutionary activities in Iran, Ajit Singh reached Paris covering Baku (Russia), Turkey and Germany. There he founded the Indian Revolutionary Association (Bhartiya Krantikari Sangh). He soon established contact with various individuals and organizations who were struggling for India’s freedom in parts of Europe: among them were Shyamji Krishna Verma (a worker at the Indian House in London), Madam Bhikaji Cama with whom Singh interacted whilst trying to bring out the magazine, Indian Socialist; he also met Dr. Savarkar, Sarojini Naidu’s brother Virendra Nath Chattopadhyaya and Mahadev Rao, a close associate of Ras Bihari Bose.
From Paris, he moved on to Switzerland, where he grew close to an international revolutionary organization. He became actively involved in the activities of the group, which drew revolutionary and democratic elements of exiles from Turkey, Finland, Arab, Russia, Ireland, Poland and Iran. He lived in Switzerland till 1913, after which he shifted base to Germany. Whilst in Paris, Germany and Switzerland, Ajit Singh met with the tallest Communist leaders including Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the future dictator and father of Fascism, Mussolini. World War I had turned the situation in Europe very shaky and dangerous. Therefore Ajit Singh decided to leave Europe to move to Brazil. Meanwhile, his closest comrade, Sufi Amba Prasad was martyred in Shiraz whilst fighting the British Army alongside the Iranian nationalists. In his autobiography, Ajit Singh had expressed the hope that “one day Indians would bring his ashes or Samadhi back to India.” Sadly, Amba Prasad remains neglected in the annals of our nationalist history.
While in Brazil, Ajit Singh had close links with the Hindustani Gadar Party, whose leading members, Bhai Rattan Singh, Comrade Teja Singh ‘Swatantra’ and Baba Bhagat Singh Bilga were his confidantes. His autobiography mentions his correspondence with his nephew Bhagat Singh. Once when he advised the young Bhagat to come to Brazil to study the revolutionary struggles of different countries, Bhagat Singh replied that Ajit Singh should return to lead the struggle in India, because the country was ready for a revolutionary struggle.
In 1932, he returned to Europe once again. His autobiography records that he met with Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. They tried to enlist the support of Germany to their cause but abandoned this after they realised that Hitler only meant to use the Indians as a pawn against the British.
Following this, they came to Italy and founded the Friends of India society. Their attempt was to sharpen the struggle against the British through Italian support. They used the Roman Radio to air speeches and programmes in Hindustani and Persian, urging the listeners, especially the soldiers to rise up in arms against the British rule. Through the support of another nationalist, Mohammad Shaidai, Ajit Singh undertook to recruit the Indian soldiers in the British Army who were arrested by the Italians. This was to found the Azad Hind Fauj. Owing to his efforts and amazing propaganda work, over 10,000 Indian soldiers began training to fight against the British. Ajit Singh’s autobiography records the pact they had with the Italian government: that the Indian army would only fight the British on Indian soil, and nowhere else. But given the political turbulence and consequent Italian defeat in the World War, this plan could never be realized.
After Italy’s defeat in the second WW, Ajit Singh was arrested by the allied forces on 2 nd May 1945. From May to December 1946, when he reached London, Ajit Singh was incarcerated in a series of different prisons in Italy and Germany. His health deteriorated rapidly. When news of his failing health reached India, a strong voice for his release and extradition to India emerged. Meanwhile Independence was around the corner and on 2 nd September 1946, the Interim Government had already taken control of the political administration. Ajit Singh’s old comrades and many Congress leaders began to pressurize Nehru for demanding his release. As a result of this, Ajit Singh was finally brought to London in 1946 and handed over to the officials of the Indian High Commission. Ajit Singh recorded with bitterness the pettiness of the Indian officials at the High Commission: citing instructions form Nehru, they prohibited him from attending the various felicitation meetings and programmes that had been organized to honor him on his release. After full 38 years, Ajit Singh returned to Karachi, which he had escaped in 1908. In Karachi, a rousing and huge welcome from Railway workers awaited him. He briefly visited Delhi, where he deliberated upon the country’s future with Nehru. He returned to Lahore on 9 th April 1947, where he was warmly welcomed by people from all walks of life.







Panchpula, dalhousie

This monument, a samadhi was built in memory of great revolutionary Sardar Ajit Singh who breathed his last in Panchpula. There is Tourism restaurant and several chai shops in Panchpula that offer hot and cold beverages and snacks




But the increasing communal violence and the impending partition alerted him to the realization that this was not the Independence he and his comrades had dreamed of, and for which they had sacrificed everything. This took a toll on his already frail health. He was taken to the hill station Dalhousie for recuperation, where he breathed his last on 15 th August 1947.
In his last message to the youth on 1 st April 1947, this great warrior for freedom said: “India urgently needs social and political revolutions—something we initiated in the beginning of this century. The responsibility now falls on your shoulders to take it to its conclusion. … I wish that India’s youth should emulate martyr Bhagat Singh—that with the cry of Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live Revolution) on their lips, they would not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for the cause of the revolution. ..Do not cease till there is ignorance, injustice and hunger in this country.”
His words continue to call out to us to intensify our revolutionary struggles to build a new India.

           Courtesy:—                Sukhdarshan Nat

Friday, August 6, 2010

GREAT PUNJABIS

TEJA SINGH SWATANTAR
















SWATANTRA, SHRI TEJA SINGH, M.A., (Com.) Punjab-Sangrur—1971, Son of Shri Kirpal Singh; b. at Aluna [Distt. Gurdas Pur], Punjab, July 16, 1901; educated at Punjab University and Kutb University, Moscow, and also graduated in Military Sciences (Turkey); married to Shrimati Tej Kaur Bhajan, June, 1918; Prominent Social Worker, political activist; associated with Congress, 1919; Akali Movement, 1921, Kirti Party and Founder, C.P.I.; Member, Punjab Legislative Assembly, 1937—45 and Punjab Legislative Council, 1964—69.
Social activities.—Working for the betterment of peasants and was President of All India Kisan Sabha.
Hobbies and favourite pastime and recreation.—Studies and touring.
Special interests.—Fighting for the poor classes regarding land reforms.
Books published.—Punjabi Suba. 
Sports.—Hockey.
Travels abroad.—Afghanistan, U.S.S.R., Turkey and toured the whole world.
Permanent address.—Village Aluna (अलूणा ), P.O. Hardo Chhanni (हरदो छन्नी ), District Gurdaspur, Punjab. 
A BRIEF NOTE:
Comrade Swatantar was a truly  versatile personality. He was a polyglot with proficiency in about a dozen languages. His father Sardar Kirpal Singh was a Zaildar. Like every other zaildar he too was expected to be a toady of British imperialists. But the patriotic and self-respecting zaildar stood against the firangees and supported his son's anti-British activities in the wake of Jallianwala Bagh massacre. As a result his zaildari, along with whole his property was confiscated, but the valiant father and son duo did not betray the national movement. On the other hand Teja singh emerged as fearless and far-sighted young leader.
    He, along with his close confidants organized group of dedicated nationalist youths. They worked as an radical outfit within the fold of  Sikh reform  and anti- British movement  known as THE GURDWARA SUDHAR LEHAR. This group was  'Swatantar Jathaa'. From then on the name 'Swantantar' struck to his name. Teja Singh Tibri, Kishan Singh Naano Nangal Were prominent members of this group.
[Updated on April 14, 2019]

SIKH LEADERS

Teja Singh Akarpuri














Teja Singh Akarpuri, Jathedar, was an Indian politician, an active figure in the Gurdwara Reform movement. He was born at Akarpura, a village 13 km northwest of Batala (31°49'N, 75"12'E), in the Gurdaspur district of the Punjab. His father was Pala Singh and mother Partap Kaur. He matriculated from Khalsa Collegiate School, Amritsar, in 1911, and enlisted in the 24th Sikh Battalion of the Indian Army the following year. Leaving the Army, he became a patvanin the revenue department of the Punjab at the end of 1914. He was promoted ziledarm 1918.
The Nankana Sahib massacre of February 1921 proved a turning point in the life of Teja Singh. He resigned from government service and joined the Akali agitation. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee appointed him administrator of Gurdwara Premsati at Kamalia, in Montgomery district, now in Pakistan.
In 1921, he was appointed Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht at Amritsar.
On 13 October 1923, he was taken into custody by the Punjab Government and released on 27 November 1926, in the second batch of Akali detainees.
He resumed his duties as Jathedar Sri Akal Takht which position he retained until 21 January 1930.
During 1932, he was appointed as first acting president and later president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and president of Shiromani Akali Dal.
He became a member of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee again in 1933 and was elected its vice president.
He was president of Sri Nankana Sahib management committee from 1935 to 1938.
In the Punjab Assembly elections in January 1937, he contested the Batala constituency as a nominee of the Shiromani Akali Dal, but lost to Sir Sundar Singh Majithia, leader of the Khalsa National Party.
He was again elected a member of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 1939.
In 1940, he became president of the Shiromani Akali Dal and presided over the first Sarb Hind (lit. All India) Akali Conference at Atari, in Amritsar district, on 1011 February 1940.
Jathedar Teja Singh Akarpuri was a member of the first Lok Sabha from 1952 to 1957 representing his native district, Gurdaspur. He died at his ancestral village Akarpura on 20 November 1975.

SIKH EDUCATIONISTS

PRINCIPAL TEJA SINGH


















Teacher, scholar and translator of the Sikh sacred texts, Principal Teja singh (1894 - 1958) was born Tej Ram on 2 june 1894 at the village of Adiala in Rawalpindi district, now in Pakistan. His mother's name was Srusti (Saraswati) and his father's name was Bhalakar Singh. At the age of three, Tej ram was sent to Gurdwara to learn and to read and write Gurmukhi and later to the Mosque to learn Urdu and Persian. While still a small boy, he received the initiatory rites of the Khalsa at the hands of Baba Khem Singh Bedi, taking the name, Teja Singh.
His early life was very hard and full of adventure. Since his father could not afford to send him to a regular school, one day he ran away from home in search of an education. He managed to attend schools in Rawalpindi and later in Sargodha, but after passing his matriculation examination, he was enrolled at the Khalsa College, Amritsar.
Teja Singh had a sensitive nature. The babbling brooks of Pothohar and the stories of the Gurus and heroes, he had heard as a child, shaped his imagination. In his seventh form, he wrote a treatise on painting, in English, and depicted in drama the noble and heroic martyrdom of the sons of Guru Gobind Singh. He painted pictures and although he had to work to pay his way through college, he had engaged a musician from a neighbouring village to come daily to his hostel to play the sitar for him.
After passing the intermediate examination from Khalsa College, Teja Singh returned to Rawalpindi to join the Gordon College which had afforded him a fee concession. He took his master's degree in English literature in 1916. In March 1919, he got an appointment back at the Khalsa college at Amritsar. He first taught history and then for a quarter of a century he taught English literature.
AS A POLITICAL ACTIVIST
Those were the days of much political activity in the Punjab and Amritsar was one of its important centers. Teja Singh was among the 13 Sikh professors of Khalsa College who resigned as a protest against government's control in the management of the institution. This gave rise to a widespread agitation and the government was forced to replace all 11 official members of the Khalsa College Managing Committee by "non-official" Sikhs. Teja Singh was also connected with the Sikhs long-drawn struggle, in the twenties, for the release of their Gurdwaras from the control of an 'effete and corrupt priestly order'. In 1923, he was arrested during this campaign and served more than one year in jail. He was released in 1925, for reasons of health, and returned to Khalsa College and his old profession of teaching, but he retained his contact with public causes through his writings and lectures. In 1939, he undertook a lecture tour of Malaya and delivered neatly 300 speeches in two months time. 

A CULTURAL TITAN
A gracious and kindly figure radiating warmth and friendliness, Teja Singh presided over the cultural and literary activity in the Punjab for three decades. Punjabi letters and Sikh history and philosophy were his special fields of study. In the former he exercised an almost 'pontifical' influence, initiating new values and standards. With his vast background in 'oriental learning', combined with his in depth study of Western Literature, he was an ideal critic and an 'arbiter' of literary excellence. His writings helped in setting (fixing) the form and structure of Punjabi idiom. He encouraged and introduced to readers many young writers and it became an accepted custom for all new practitioners of the literary arts to first show their work to him.
As a scholar of the Sikh religion, he wrote copiously and authoritatively on the subject, for many years he was the interpreter and expositor of Sikhism to the outside world through his articles in English. Such writings of his were collected in book form and published under the titles; Sikhism: Its Ideals and Institutions (1938) and Essays in Sikhism (1944). In collaboration with Dr. Ganda Singh, he wrote, A Short history of the Sikhs ( 1950). Some of his renderings of the holy texts such as japu, Asa ki Var and Sukhmani had established themselves as classics, during his lifetime. The Sabadarth, an annotated edition of the Guru Granth Sahib (sponsored by the Gur Sevak Sabha), which was completed in five years ( 1936-41), was primarily the work of Teja Singh. Teja Singh also compiled an English-Punjabi dictionary. One of his ambitions was to render the entire Guru Granth Sahib into English. The portion he had completed during his lifetime was published by the Punjabi University in 1985 under the title The Holy Granth (Sri Rag to Rag Majh).
In Punjabi literature Teja Singh is remembered primarily as an essayist. The first collection of his essays in Punjabi was published in 1941 under the title Navian Sochan, followed by Sahib Subha in 1942 and Sahit Darshan in 1951. His autobiography, Arsi (Finger-glass of Memory), a model of chaste and crisp Punjabi prose, was published in 1952. A scholarly work in Punjabi was Sri Guru Granth Sahib vich Shabadantik Lagan Matran de Gujhe Bhed (Subtle distinctions of word ending vowel symbols in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib).
In 1945, Teja Singh took over as Principal at the Khalsa college at Bombay. He stayed at this post for about three years and then returned to Punjab as secretary of the Publications Bureau of the Panjab University. In January 1949, he was appointed principal of Mohindra college, Patiala. At Patiala, he also held additional charge for a time as Secretary and Director of the newly established Punjabi department. He retired from the service of the PEPSU (the Patiala and East Punjab States Union) in 1951.
"Next to Bhai Vir Singh, perhaps, the substantial contribution to the progress of the Punjabi language is that of Prof Teja Singh," wrote the celebrated Punjabi historian, Sita Ram Kohli. His works included a translation of Japji Sahib (1919) and of Sukhmani Sahib, which he called The Psalm of Peace (1938), it was published by Oxford University Press. Reviewing a reprint of this book, The Sunday Tribune, Ambala, dated 7.1.1951, said: "The English speaking world owes Prof Teja Singh a debt of gratitude for his translation."
Other famous books by this scholar in English include:
  • Growth of Responsibility in Sikhism (1919)
  • The Asa-di-Var (1926)
  • Highroads of Sikh History, in three volumes (1935), published by Orient Longman
  • Sikhism: Its Ideals and Institutions, published by Orient Longman
  • Punjabi-English Dictionary, revised and edited for Lahore University
  • English-Punjabi Dictionary, Vol.1 (Punjabi University Solan).
He also wrote a number of books in collaboration with other scholars, including, The Short History of the Sikhs. Besides these, he also penned 18 books in Punjabi, including his famous autobiography Arsi.

 Teja singh died after a stroke at Amritsar on 10 January 1958. He is remembered as a great man of letters who combined with his deep love of learning, a rare personal charm and kindliness.
 

JATHEDARS OF AKAL TAKHT

Achchar Singh 
Twice Jathedar of Akal Takht Sahib (1892-1976)
A Gurdwara offciant and Akali politician who twice held office as Jathedar (provost) of Sri Akal Takht at Amritsar, was born on 18 January 1892 in a farming family of modest means at Ghanienke, a village in Lahore district. The youngest son of Hukam Singh and Gangi, he learnt to read Gurmukhi letters and to recite the Scripture at the village gurdwara. At the age of 15, he migrated to Burma, where he learnt Burmese and Urdu. As he grew up, Achchhar Singh enlisted in the Burmese military police. During World War I (1914-18), Burmese military police was converted into a regular army battalion and drafted to Mesopotamia (now Iraq).
Achchhar Singh served there for about three years. At the end of the war in 1918, his unit was stationed at Tonk, in the NorthWest Frontier Province, until its departure back to Burma in 1920. In 1919, Achchhar Singh married Mahindar Kaur of Ichogil, a village in, his native district of Lahore. He was promoted havildar, or sergeant, in 1920. The news of the Nankana Sahib massacre on 20 February 1921 came as a great shock to him. He resigned from the army and, returning to the Punjab, he made a visit to Nankana Sahib to pay homage to the memory of the martyrs. He joined the Central Majhi Khalsa Diwan and plunged into the agitation for the reform of gurdwara management. As the Akali campaign at Jaito started, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and the Shiromani Akili Dal were outlawed on 12 October 1925, and arrests began to be made all over the Punjab., Among those held were two successive jathedars of the Akal Takht-Teji Singh Akarpuri and Udham Singh Nigoke. Upon the latter's arrest, Achchhar Singh was, on 10 February 1924, appointed to the high religious office. He, too, was taken into custody on 7 May 1924, was tried,and sentenced to one and a half years in jail. Upon his release from the Central Jail at Mianwali at the end of 1925, he resumed his office in Amritsar which he retained until Teja Singh Akarpuri was set free in September 1926.
Amar Singh, editor of the Sher-i-Punjab, who had been a co-prisoner in Mianwali jail and who was now president of the Lahore gurdwara committee, persuaded Jathedar Achchhar Singh to take over as granthi at Gurdwiri Dehra Sahib in Lahore. For 14 years he served in this position. In 1940, he moved to Amritsar as a granthi at the Harimandar Sahib, and continued there until his resignation in 1962. From 1955 to 1962, he was also Jathedar of the Akal Takht. During the Punjabi Suba agitation, he was arrested from the premises of the Darbar Sahib on 4 July 1955, but was released two days later. He headed the Panj Piare named to judge if Master Tara Singh had not violated the vow undertaken at the Akal Takht before starting his fast-unto-death for the realization of the Sikh political objective of a Punjabi-speaking state. The Panj Piare made a close investigation of the circumstances leading to "the abandonment of the fast and on 29 November 1961 pronounced Master Tara Singh guilty of having perjured his pledge and blemished thereby the Sikh tradition of religious steadfastness and sacrifice. They had no comments to make on Sant Fateh Singh's fast which, they said, had been given up under the orders of the Panj Piare and the sangat in general. He was, however, laid under expiation for having acquiesced in Master Tara Singh breaking his fast. Master Tara Singh was awarded a severer penance.
As the Shiromani Akali Dal split into two groups, one led by Sant Fateh Singh and the other by Master Tara Singh, Jathedar Achchhar Singh resigned the office of head of the Akal Takht to join the latter. He was elected president of this party in November 1962. In his address at the 15th All-India Akali Conference held under his chairmanship at Karnal on 7 December 1968, he pleaded for unity between the two Akali factions.
Jathedar Achchhar Singh died in the civil hospital at Amritsar on 6 August 1976 after a protracted illness.

SIKH POLITICIANS

Ishar Singh, Majail Politician, Legislator and Campaigner (1901-1977)
Was born in January 1901, the son of Bhai Asa Singh and Mai Basant Kaur, an agriculturist couple of Sarai Amanat Khan village, in Amritsar district. He was only about two and a half years old when his father went abroad to Indonesia in search of a better living. He died in Indonesia soon after and Ishar Singh was brought up by his widowed mother, a deeply dedicated and religious-minded woman.
He completed his high school by fits and starts owing to narrow financial circumstances. He graduated from school in 1922 from Malva Khalsa High School, Ludhiana. Since the last school he attended was Malva Khalsa High School and since he was one of the fewest students at that school corning from the Majha districts of Amritsar and Lahore, he started using the surname `Majhail', of or from Majha, which stuck to him for the rest of his life. He had grown up into a handsome young man, though somewhat frail, but faircomplexioned and erect with a sharp aquiline nose.
As soon as he had finished school, Ishar Singh received offer of appointment as a teacher at Kokari Kalan, then in Firozpur district, but he declined it and joined instead the Akali movement for the reformation of Gurdwara management. For participating in the Guru ka Bagh campaign (1922), he was sentenced to six months in jail. Ishar Singh Majhail also participated in the Jaito morcha or campaign (1923) in which he was arrested and sentenced to a two-year term. In 1927, he accompanied Baba Vasakha Singh to Burma on a fund-collection drive on behalf of the Desh Bhagat Parivar Sahaik Committee.
In October 1927, Shahid Sikh Missionary College was set up by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee to train Sikh preachers. Ishar Singh Majhail joined the college and completed the two-year course it offered. But he was soon drawn into the political maelstrom. His principal guide, his alter ego, at that time was Jathedar Udham Singh Nagoke. He took part in the farmers' agitation of 1930 and suffered imprisonment for six months. The term was subsequently extended by another year for having in his possession a newspaper while in jail. In 1936 he participated in Gurdwara Shahid Ganj (Lahore) morcha.
In 1937, there was acute tension between the Sikhs on the one hand and Muslims on the other. The point at issue was what was called jhatka. jhatka in Punjabi means a sudden jerk or blow. Among Sikhs the word jhatka is used to designate animal flesh for which a bird or animal has been killed with a single blow of the sword or axe. The singleblow killing was the Sikh way of killing an animal or fowl for food over against the Muslim way of slow killing with the pronouncement of the Muslim religious formula with it. Followers of both faiths had quite frequently fought between themselves over these two styles of killing the animals. An Akali procession supporting jhatka at Jandiala Sher Khan, in Sheikhupura district, was attacked by a Muslim mob. Two Sikhs were wounded and carried away by the mob. Ishar Singh Majhail and Jathedar Mohan Singh Nagoke came out with drawn swords and drove away the mob rescuing the wounded Sikhs.
When Sikh National College was set up in Lahore in 1938, Ishar Singh Majhail was appointed secretary of its managing committee. During 1940-41 he was president of the managing committee of Sri Darbar Sahib, Amritsar. He was one of the group within the Shiromani Akali Dal which opposed the Dal's policy of assisting the British war effort during the 1939-45 war. He on the other hand took part in the Quit India movement launched by the Indian National Congress in 1942 and was detained under Defence of India Rules.
In February 1946, he was elected a member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly. After the partition of the country in 1947, he was given a berth in the Congress ministry formed by Gopi Chand Bhargava. He was re-elected to the state legislative assembly in the general elections held under the new constitution in 1952 and was again appointed a member of the cabinet. In the fifties Ishar Singh Majhail lost interest in active politics and devoted himself to the development of his agricultural farm, in the village of Arno, in Patiala district. His health was also declining and he died on 20 April 1977 at Chandigarh.
Source: TheSikhEncyclopedia.Com

SIKH EDUCATIONISTS

Harkrishan Singh, Bawa Educationist, lover of poetry and intellectual (1892-1978)
Was born at Dera Isma'il Khan on 26 July 1892, the son of Bawa Dasaundha Singh. After taking his Master's degree in English literature from Forman Christian College, Lahore, in 1912, he joined the Khalsa College at Amritsar, as a lecturer in English. Later, he had a long spell at Khalsa College, Gujranwala, where he remained Principal for many a long year. Bawa Harkishan Singh was, among the pioneers of the Sikhs' Gurdwara Reform movement of the 1920's. He attended the divan of the Khalsa Baradari in Jallianvala Bagh, Amritsar, on 12 October 1920, and accompanied the group to the Harimandar and the Akal Takht, which event ushered in the movement for Panthic control of the Sikhs' sacred shrines. He was a member of the 9-member provisional committee appointed by the Amritsar deputy commissioner for the management of the Gurdwaras.
The Sikhs formed on 15 November 1920 their own 175-member Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. Its first meeting was held on 12 December 1920. Bawa Harkishan Singh was one of the Panj Piare who on this occasion checked on the religious claims of those present.
Bawa Harkishan Singh took an active part in the Guru ka Bagh agitation of 1922.
During the Akali campaign demanding the restoration of the deposed Sikh Maharaja of Nabha to his throne, both the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and the Shiromani Akali Dal were outlawed by government. Three Professors of the Khalsa College-Bdwa Harkishan Singh, Professor Teja Singh and Professor Niranjan Singhwere taken into custody on 13 October 1923. Professor Tejd Singh was released on medical grounds, Professor Niranjan Singh because of his basic objection to the aims of the movement. Bdwa Harkishan Singh served a longer term in jail and was released only when an overall settlement was arrived at with the government.
Sardar Bahadur Mehtab Singh, a senior leader of the agitation, offered to implement the provisions of the Gurdwara Act as proposed by government. So did some other leaders, among them Bawa Harkishan Singh. The hardliners such as Teja Singh Samundri and Master Tara Singh who refused to accept the terms suffered further detention.
In March 1927 when all detainees were set free the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee set up a forum to formulate the Sikh Rahit Maryada, i.e. code of conduct for the Sikhs. Bawa Harkishan Singh was one of the members of the committee.
The Sikh Gurdwaras Act provided for democratic elections to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. This gave birth to factionalism. Bawa Harkishan Singh not only kept himself aloof from these internal acrimonious wranglings but also worked for amity among the groups. He along with some other Sikh leaders formed a society, Gur Sevak Sabha, for this purpose in December 1933. After several months of protracted talks and arguments, the Sabha managed to bring round certain contestants from the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Central Akali Dal to agree on a common list of candidates for the 1936 shrine elections prepared by Sant Vasakha Singh and Sant Javala Singh. The unity so achieved however proved short-lived.
Bawa Harkishan Singh himself had no political ambitions nor had he ever sought any official position. He was of a shy and retiring nature. However, during the Punjabi Suba agitation of 1955, he was co-opted a member of the Shiromani Gurdwdra Parbandhak Committee and, after the arrest of Master Tara Singh on 10 May 1955, elected its president. The morcha or agitation continued with the jathas or bands of volunteers daily shouting the banned "Punjabi Suba Zindabad" (long live the Punjabi state) slogan and courting arrest. In spite of the restraint shown by the Akalis, police raided the Darbar Sahib complex on 4 July 1955, burst tear gas shells on pilgrims and made many arrests.
The morcha continued until the ban on sloganeering was withdrawn on 12 July 1955. Master Tara Singh on release resumed the presidentship and Bawa Harkishan Singh again became an unencumbered intellectual committed solely to the Panthic weal. He remained till the end the adviser and counsellor of the Sikh Panth. At all crucial moments and on all crucial issues, his advice was avidly sought. He never hankered after power or position. Positions of honour and dignity came to him unasked.
In 1960, he was nominated a member of the prestigious Punjabi University Commission, but he did not take part in any of the meetings of the Commission. He was totally indifferent to fame and exhibition. Earlier in 1955, he had been called upon to assist a very important Sikh committee in its political negotiations with the Government of India. He was named among the six Sikhs to conduct the talks with the nominees of the government. He kept himself aloof from all active transactions, although he stayed put in Delhi for all those days in Sardar Hukam Singh's residence to make himself available for advice and consultation. The committee on the government side was led by the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself, but Bawa Harkishan Singh did not attend any of its sittings. He was of a unique calibre among the Sikhs of his time.
Bawa Harkishan Singh died on 20 August 1978 at the Military Hospital, Delhi Cantt.

Source: TheSikhEncyclopedia.Com

Thursday, August 5, 2010

TRAVOLOGUE WRITERS

DEAN MAHOMET
(1759-1850)
FIRST INDIAN TO WRITE A BOOK IN ENGLISH

A Closer Look at Dean Mahomet (1759-1850)

Though I've known about Dean Mahomet [दीन मौहम्मद] for a long time, it wasn't until recently that I actually read through the free online version of edition of The Travels of Dean Mahomet, for a class I'm teaching. For people who haven't heard of him, Dean Mahomet is the first Indian writer to have published a book in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794). Having moved first to Cork, Ireland, and then London and finally Brighton, Mahomet opened first the first Indian restaurant in England, The Hindoostanee Coffee House, and then started a profitable business doing "shampoo baths" at the shore resort town of Brighton. He married an Anglo-Irish woman, and was treated with respect by English and Anglo-Irish society around him.

In what follows, I'm not so much interested in celebrating Dean Mahomet as a "hero" (I don't think he necessarily is one), nor would it mean much to condemn him as some kind of race-traitor. Rather, the goal is simply to think about how we might understand his rather unique book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, in historical context. What can be learned from it?


In literary terms, it's probably fair to say that The Travels of Dean Mahomet isn't the greatest book. For one thing, the story Mahomet tells is of his life while he was still in India, and it often seems that the most interesting part of the story is actually Dean Mahomet's life after India and Ireland -- it was only then that he separated from his patrons in Cork, and moved to England and started a series of businesses. Dean Mahomet left a lasting legacy in his trans-culturation of "shampoo" (Hindi: "champna"), and it appears that the word and concept of shampooing (transformed somewhat from his usage, of course) came into widespread usage in the west through him. Fortunately, in Michael H. Fischer's edition of the Travels, there is a substantial account of Mahomet's English experience (click on Part 3).

As a literary text the Travels pales in comparison to, say, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which was published just five years earlier, and which may have inspired Dean Mahomet to try his own hand at writing an autobiography. Equiano is a spirited autobiography with carefully poised arguments against the transatlantic slave-trade, and indeed, against slavery itself. The author of Equiano cleverly used Biblical references and deployed western/Christian values to force his readers to confront their blindness regarding slavery ("O, ye nominal Christians!").

By contrast, the historical reference points of Dean Mahomet's narrative avoid any negative judgment of British colonial expansion in India whatsoever. In fact, Dean Mahomet clearly marks his perspective as directly aligned with the East India Company's point of view with regard to its military opponents. (His point of view on Indian culture was inevitably different, and his own, or nearly so.) Perhaps it's inevitable that he supported the Company Raj: Dean Mahomet was himself aide-de-camp and then a soldier with the British East India Company's army. He was born in 1759, and left India around 1783 in the company of his "master" (and later, patron), Captain Godfrey Evan Baker, an Anglo-Irish Protestant from a wealthy family in Cork.

Not only was Dean Mahomet associated with the East India Company, but his father was a Sepoy, and died in combat when Dean was about 10 years old. Dean was effectively "adopted" by Baker, and became attached to a European-only regiment. This is really where he mastered the English language, and learned to read and write well enough to be able to think of publishing a book. He certainly did not receive much (or any) formal schooling.

His military association may make us uneasy, but Dean Mahomet's unique status as the only 18th century Indian writer in English was only achieved because of that association. For what it's worth, one notes that Dean Mahomet actually saw very little action during the first decade or so he was associated with Captain Baker. For several of those years, he was a child. And as Michael Fischer points out, even as early as the 1780s, it was the Sepoy regiments that were doing the heaviest fighting in the First Anglo-Maratha War and the Second Anglo-Mysore War. Fischer speculates that Baker and Mahomet, once they were assigned to a more active combat role, may have found their involvement in the subjugation of various opponents of British rule less pleasant. Also, Fischer mentions that Mahomet's patron and friend, Captain Baker, resigned from military service in disgrace in 1782 -- after being convicted of embezzling funds. (Not exactly an uncommon activity for British soldiers at the time; what was less common was to actually be court-martialled for it.)


Within the book itself, one finds generally two different types of chapters. One type of chapter is more action-based, and tells the story of specific military encounters, experiences, and travels. The other chapters are more essay-like, and in those Mahomet describes in close and appreciative detail aspects of Indian society, religion, and geography for English readers.

On the question of culture, one thing that strikes one immediately in Mahomet's account is that he doesn't seem at all defensive or apologetic about, say, the practice of Purdah, nor does he comment on matters of "race." The former question would be commented on by many later British travelers in India, and would become a key sign of the radical difference of "Oriental" culture in the European imagination -- see how they treat their women! But Dean Mahomet is either unaware of all that, or because he's writing before the exoticism of "Purdah" had been established as a staple of Anglo-Indian writing, he overlooks it:

It may be here observed, that the Hindoo, as well as the Mahometan, shudders at the idea of exposing women to the public eye: they are held so sacred in India, that even the soldier in the rage of slaughter will not only spare, but even protect them. The Haram [Harem] is a sanctuary against the horrors of wasting war, and ruffians covered with teh blood of a husband, shrink back with confusion at the apartment of his wife. (Letter XIII)


In vividly describing how strict gender segregation works, I think Mahomet is supporting the practice. But note the graphic allusion to violence in the last sentence -- doesn't it seem to play into a colonial stereotype? That type of language sometimes makes an appearance in the more military-oriented chapters. For instance, in the passage below Mahomet echoes some of the key tropes of colonial discourse when he uses words like "savages" to describe the hill-dwelling tribes in Bihar:

Our army being very numerous, the market people in the rear were attacked by another party of the [Paharis], who plundered them, and wounded many with their bows and arrows; the picquet guard closely pursued them, killed several, and apprehended thirty or forty, who were brought to the camp. Next morning, as our hotteewallies, grass cutters, and bazar people, went to the mountains about their usual business of procuring provender for the elephants, grass for the horses, and fuel for the camp, a gang of those licentious savages rushed with violence on them, inhumanly butchered seven or eight of our people, and carried off three elephants, and as many camels, with several horses and bullocks. (Letter IX)


Such language is disconcerting -- the word "savage" is an extremely loaded pejorative -- but thankfully, rather rare in The Travels. It's clear that Dean Mahomet values the urban and established northern Indian culture he comes from; it's only the people we would today refer to as "tribals" that get called "savages." (The Marathas, who are often mentioned in the book as military opponents, are never called by that name.)

More common are the chapters in Travels were Mahomet directly describes cultural matters such as Muslim rituals (marriage, circumcision, death), the Indian cities he visits (Calcutta, Delhi, Allahabad, Madras, Dhaka, etc.) and the pomp and pageantry of Indian Nawabs. He liberally uses Persian or Hindi words in these passages, though every so often he finds unusual ways to describe things (Ramadan [he says "Ramzan"], for instance, is described as a "month-long Lent"). A good example might be the following passage on a local Nawab in Calcutta:

Soon after my arrival here, I was dazzled with the glittering appearance of the Nabob and all his train, amounting to about three thousand attendants, proceeding in solemn state from this palace to the temple. They formed in the splendor and richness of their attire one of the most brilliant processions I ever beheld. The Nabob was carried on a beautiful pavillion, or meanah, by sixteen men, alternately called by the natives, Baharas, who wore a red uniform: the refulgent canopy covered with tissue, and lined with embroidered scarlet velvet, trimmed with silver fringe, was supported by four pillars of massy silver, and resembled the form of a beautiful elbow chair, constructed in oval elegance; in which he sat cross-legged, leaning his back against a fine cushion and his elbows on two more covered with scarlet velvet, wrought with flowers of gold. (Letter XI)


As I'm looking over this language, it doesn't seem exactly "neutral" or merely appreciative. It actually seems to ply the language of exoticism to excess. Is that really what Dean Mahomet thought as he watched the Nawab's procession, or is this simply an attempt to create a certain aura of mystery and power for his English readers?

One of the difficulties in reading Dean Mahomet's rhetoric about India during the early Company Raj is the fact that he apparently plagiarized a number of descriptive passages from British travel writers, especially John Henry Grose's Voyage to the East Indies (1766). That's right -- here we have a very early Indian writer born and raised on the Gangetic plains, plagiarizing descriptions of key Indian cultural matters from a British writer! According to Michael Fischer (see his comments in Part 3), about 7% of the text of The Travels actually comes from other sources. Why Mahomet chose to do this is open to speculation -- perhaps he simply hadn't encountered certain things, and used Grose to fill in certain gaps (for instance, he knew a lot about Muslim religious practices from personal experiences, but actually knew surprisingly little about Hinduism; he gets some key things wrong in his account of caste in the book). Or it's possible that he simply liked the way Grose and others put things, and borrowed the language out of sheer laziness. Who knows? (One might also note that modern ideas about copyright and copyright law were still in a formative phase in the late 18th century.)

The plagiarism issue brings us back to Equiano, albeit somewhat obliquely. In a 1999 article in the journal Slavery and Abolition, Vincent Carretta argued (I think, convincingly) that Gustavus Vassa was in fact not born in Africa at all, as he states in The Interesting Narrative, but rather South Carolina (see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and this follow-up colloquy). According to Carretta, some of the text from the first three chapters of Equiano's book, describing Equiano's life as a child in Nigeria, and subsequent capture by slave traders, are in fact taken from a Quaker traveler named Anthony Benezet. Equiano probably invented a different early life to strengthen his point about the evils of slavery and the slave-trade: the disruption of the idyllic African childhood makes a better story than being directly born into slavery, which is what probably happened. Carretta also shows that nearly everything Equiano describes as happening to himself in his adult life can be verified by historical documents.

One thing I get from both of these "plagiarism" cases is a distinct sense that, while both books are remarkable and surprising in their own ways, neither author was fully in command of an individualized "voice" as he wrote. Both Gustavus Vassa/Equiano and Dean Mahomet were always in some sense writing within the existing conventions of English travel literature of their day. The fact that they even borrowed aspects of their own self-description from English writers only reinforces how precarious their respective authorial positions were.          [updated April 14th, 2019]