My dear and eldest brother S. Gurnaib Singh Gill (85) passed away on July 30 at his home in Faridkot after a brief battle with prostate cancer. His life story covers many shifts in the contemporary economic, social and cultural history of Punjab, especially its rural sector.
We were a family of five brothers and five sisters. As the eldest son, Bai Gurnaib became acutely conscious of his responsibilities to look after our grandparents, parents and his younger brothers and sisters at a relatively young age.
Each of us (brothers and sisters) has stories to tell of the protective role he played. He took a deep interest in our education. I had the privilege of his special affection as I was his youngest brother for nearly 13 years, until a younger brother was born.
He was my mentor in many ways, but especially in encouraging me to be physically fit. I now recall with astonishment that at the age of eight, I used to run two miles nearly every day to prove to him that I was worthy of his affection.
Because he wanted me to study, he would not allow me to participate in any farming work. He feared that if I acquired any farming skills, they might lead me to get interested in farming. Ironic as it may be, he later became the chief and authentic source of my primary-level knowledge about many aspects of farming when I started doing academic research in agriculture.
My first research work was a dissertation on farm size and productivity in Haryana for my MA honours in economics. While my teacher, the late Prof G.S. Bhalla, was the academic supervisor, Bai Gurnaib was the primary source of the economics of different crops.
Our father looked upon Bai Gurnaib – his eldest son – as his chief companion in managing our ancestral land. As our family had land in two different villages, our father deputed him to take control of the entire farming operations in one of the villages at the age of 19.
Though in today’s Punjab, it would certainly seem unthinkable for such a young man to assume the role of head of agricultural operations in a village that is not one’s native village, it was not a common thing even in the late 1950s.
Rural life has many charms, but it is also full of jealousies and a variety of conflicts that vary from being very petty to life-threatening. Bai Gurnaib faced many challenges, including ones which were life-threatening, because of jealousies from other landowners.
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The manner he devised to build alliances in the new village is illustrative of the caste and class dynamics in Punjab’s rural society. Knowing very well that he could not expect friendship from the landowners, Bai Gurnaib built bonds of strong friendship with landless farmers. I recall agricultural labourers who were not only his employees but friends.
I had the first-hand experience of seeing those Jat Sikh-Mazhabi Sikh relations which many writers on Punjab’s rural society describe only in confrontational terms, but are much more complex.
The social and cultural modes of Bai Gurnaib’s friendships with his Mazhabi Sikh workers displayed strong signs of equality, including sometimes eating and drinking together despite economic inequality between him and the agricultural workers. His experience had a formative influence on me in shaping my understanding of caste-class dynamics in Punjab’s rural society.
His relationship with animals, especially with his pair of bullocks in the pre-tractorisation phase of Punjab’s agriculture, had many dimensions of close human-animal relations. The animal power-replacing mechanisation, symbolised by the tractorisation phase, has put an end to those relations.
In that pre-tractorisation phase, our father bought a pair of Nagori bullocks from the famous Nagore cattle market in Rajasthan. The pair were expensive and attracted attention from surrounding villages. It led to a stream of farmers coming to our house to see these new entrants in the village society.
Bai Gurnaib looked after his pair of bullocks with great devotion and a deep emotional bond developed between him and the pair. The cattle would respond actively to his commands in a way one would normally expect from human beings.
They spent their whole life at our farm, and their death at a ripe old age saw a period of deep mourning for all family members – but especially for Bai Gurnaib.
Some of the observations Gurnaib shared with me about the organic phase of Punjab’s agriculture and the industrial-chemical phase later have stayed with me.
He told me that when chemical fertilisers and pesticides started being used with the advent of the so-called Green Revolution, it confused the farm birds so much that they mistook particles of fertilisers and pesticides as seeds and died in large numbers after consuming those chemicals.
Punjab led the Green Revolution in India and drove economic growth in the country in the 1960s and 70s. Photo: CIAT/Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.
He told me that the first time they used these chemicals and went to the farm the next day, they saw rows and rows of dead sparrows. This description of ecological horror still haunts me. This disgusted him so much that he fell ill and even thought of abandoning farming.
The logic of economic returns eventually prevailed and the results of environmental degradation in Punjab’s rural life are in front of us. Bai Gurnaib never forgot that a phase once existed in Punjab’s agriculture which was healthy for the land, people, animals and birds.
I used to talk to him regularly from Oxford about family updates, but also about the changing economic and social landscape of rural Punjab. He always enquired about my wife, daughter and son-in-law, but rarely talked about politics.
This changed dramatically during the farmers’ struggle. He told me: “Please write and give lectures in support of the farmers. I know that what you write and say gets wide circulation. Send me copies of your articles in Punjabi and video lectures in Punjabi.”
I took every minute and every ounce of my energy to honour his request. His death leaves a big hole in my life.
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I once wanted to pursue a research project to collect the memories of farmers in Punjab, such as Bai Gurnaib, who experienced the pre-Green Revolution phase of agriculture and rural life. Their views about the Green Revolution were also in stark contrast to what is widely believed.
I regret that this project never came to fruition. I have lost a brother but also an archive of precious knowledge.
He leaves a beautiful legacy through his lovely children. In the last phase of his life, Bai Gurnaib was witness to a huge socio-economic change in the Malwa belt of Punjab, with unpredictable political consequences, namely the mass migration of the educated Punjabi youth to the West. All his adult grandchildren have migrated and his only great-grandson was born in Canada.
Having experienced two internal migrations – from one village to another and then from the village to Faridkot, the town named after Baba Farid – he had mixed feelings about the migration of the youth in his own family and beyond. Whether in India or abroad, his life story of devotion, hard work and care remains a source of inspiration to his big network of family and friends.
Pritam Singh is Emeritus Professor at the Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford, UK.
