Reconsidering Sikh architecture: The Sama̅dhi of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed an increasing interest in Sikh heritage in Pakistan (Singh 2015, 2018; Khalid 2016; Pannu 2019) that has been fuelled largely by the diaspora’s curiosity about artefacts in west Punjab. This concern has been given further momentum by the policies of the governments in Pakistan that recently culminated in the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor and the efforts to promote pilgrimage tourism by pitching the country as the ‘homeland’ of the Sikhs (Singh 2019). Although the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government under Narendra Modi has been in power has cast a dark shadow on the relationship between the two countries, the engagement of Sikhs with Pakistan is unlikely to diminish any time soon because it is a permanent part of collective Sikh religious and historical consciousness, a troubling legacy of Partition. Within Pakistan scholarship on Sikhs has remained deeply embedded in the ideological narrative of national liberation. At best there is recognition of a fraternal Punjabi minority that was misled by the Hindu Congress leadership to throw its lot in with India whereas a united Punjab in Pakistan offered a more realistic prospect of maintaining the integrity and cohesion of the community. At worst, the demonisation of the Sikhs with Partition violence become a trope of Islamisation of the state and society under President Zia-ul-Haq, reflected in Pakistan Studies, the compulsory teaching of state ideology to all pupils. Even established scholarship has generally failed to address the obvious paradox of the Pakistan movement: that its division of India logically implied the division of Punjab, and no amount of diplomacy from the Muslim League about religious minorities such as the Sikhs would endear them to Pakistan (Jalal 1985). More recently, efforts by Pakistani scholars to reinterpret the Partition violence (Ahmed 2012) remain largely unself-reflective of the fact that violence was at the heart of the Pakistan movement or the changes in the historiography of the subject (Singh 2016). How refreshing and surprising therefore to come across a work that transcends the pervasive influence of Pakistan’s national ideology. It is also rarer still for the effort to avoid current fashionable methodologies with hackneyed cliches about diversity, deconstruction and equalities that have become all too common in the historical scholarship on Punjab. Nadhra Shahbaz Khan’s The Samad̅hi of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore: A Summation of Sikh Architectural and Decorative Practices (2018) is an exceptional example of painstaking scholarship by a dedicated art historian now based at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. What began as PhD thesis by a young