Badges of Bondage: The Conquest of the Sikh Mind (1847-1947 C.E.)

In 1846 C.E., when they had defeated the Sikh nation of Punjab, the officers of the British East India company found themselves in charge of a vast tract of land inhabited by a proud people with a history of surviving political and religious oppression. The Khalsa Sikhs, the order of "saint-soldiers" founded by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 had weathered Mughal oppression and rebounded from two ghallugharas, or "holocausts" (1746 and 1762). When the Sikh confederacy was joined together by Maharaja Ranjeet Singh in 1801, it governed a domain the size of France. The Punjab was the last part of the Indian subcontinent to fall to the British, and two short years later, the Khalsa would rise again for a second Anglo-Sikh war (1848-49) before settling in, mostly, as loyal vassals of the British Crown. Badges of Bondage is an account of how the British managed to rule their Punjabi Sikh subjects for one hundred years. It is a story of their stratagems to diminish the beliefs and practices of their subjects, while presenting their own doctrines of government, education and justice, together with their race, culture and religion, as inherently superior. It is an historic account of self-assured agents of a Western power encountering a culture and people unlike any they had known: the Sikhs with their legendary thirst for fairness and their unmatched resilience in the face of adversity. This book, first published in 1996 and now updated and illustrated with historic photos and paintings, is a story of the successes and failures of the British to cow the Sikhs into subservience. It is also the account of a spiritual nation that at times stood as one against schemes and strategies employed by their rulers and their stooges to prolong British dominance of the people of south Asia, by far the richest and most important part of their global empire. Finally, this book is a preliminary assessment of long term effects, past India's proclamation of independence in 1947, of British rule on the habits, psyche and self-concept of Sikhs li