Opinion Past and present
In Pakistan, a memorial to Ranjit Singh is a refreshing change for a country used to looking at all history as Islamic
The monument to the Sikh monarch could also signal a tentative attempt by the country to look beyond its tortuous origins in the politics of exclusion.
The past, historians often say, is never dead. It lives in the present. This adage of historiography is not always about what societies and polities choose to talk about or debate, it’s also about their silences and erasures. Pakistan, for example, has had a long standing discomfort with its non-Islamic past. However, a refreshingly different imagination was on show in the country on Thursday, when a life-sized statue of the 19th century Punjab ruler, Ranjit Singh, was inaugurated in Lahore. The Walled City of Lahore Authority has said that the memorial is in keeping with the Pakistan government’s recent focus on “religious tourism, particularly Sikh religious tourism”. The monument to the Sikh monarch could also signal a tentative attempt by the country to look beyond its tortuous origins in the politics of exclusion.
When Pakistan came into being, a modicum of the non-Islamic history that the country shared with India found a place in textbooks. Students learnt about the Kushana rulers, the country’s Buddhist’s legacy and its Hindu and Sikh pasts. There were also critiques of the excesses of medieval rulers like Aurangzeb. However, less than 20 years after its birth, the historical imagination of Pakistan was overtaken by the anxiety to emphasise an identity different from its neighbour’s. Hagiographies proliferated while textbooks paid short shrift to its shared history with India and chose to efface examples of syncretism.
It might be too much to expect one memorial to undo more than five decades of distorted history writing. But as historians often say, memorials give us clues of the worldview of the societies and polities that commission them. These structures often suggest how people engage with the past. Seen that way, it is interesting that Pakistan is commemorating Ranjit Singh while a debate on whether the Mughals were looters and plunderers threatens to overwhelm the historiography of neighbouring India.
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