CHAPTER VIII

THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ.

The Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers, differs as widely both from the Deccan and from Bengal as these two differ the one from the other.  It has been more than any other part of India the battlefield of warring races and creeds and the seat of power of mighty dynasties.  Among its cities it includes Imperial Delhi and Runjit Singh’s Lahore.  It is a country of many peoples and of many dialects.  It is the home of the Sikhs, but the Mahomedans, ever since the days of the Moghul Empire, form the majority of the population, and the proportion of Hindus is smaller than in any other province of India, except Eastern Bengal.  Owing to the very small rainfall, its climate is intensely dry—­fiercely hot during the greater part of the year, and cold even to freezing during the short winter months.  Nowhere in India has British rule done so much to bring peace and security and to induce prosperity.  The alluvial lands are rich but thirsty, and irrigation works on a scale of unparalleled magnitude were required to compel the soil to yield beneficent harvests.  At the most critical moment in the history of British India it was against the steadfastness of the Punjab, then under the firm but patriarchal sway of Sir John Lawrence, that the Mutiny spent itself, and until a few years ago there seemed to be no reason whatever for questioning the loyalty of a province which the forethought of Government and the skill of Anglo-Indian engineers were gradually transforming into a land of plenty.  Least of all did any one question the loyalty of the Sikhs.  Many of them believed that British rule was the fulfilment of a prophecy of one of their martyred gurus, and the Sikh regiments were regarded as the flower of the Native Army.

Yet it was in the Punjab, at Lahore and at Rawal Pindi, that the first serious disturbances occurred in 1907 which aroused public opinion at home to the reality of Indian unrest, and stirred the Government of India to such strong repressive measures as the deportation of two prominent agitators under an ancient Ordinance of 1818 never before applied in such connexion.  Local and temporary causes may to some extent have accounted for those disturbances.  An increase in the land revenue demanded in the Rawal Pindi district was very strongly resented.  The regulations issued with regard to the tenure of land in some of the new irrigation colonies were probably unwise and carried out with some harshness.  Famine in the unirrigated tracts, and especially the plague, which had desolated parts of the province, had created much misery and bitterness.  Other and more remote causes of a social and economic character had also been at work.  Nowhere had Anglo-Indian legislation and the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the Punjab.  The conversion of the occupants