Edited by his great-granddaughter Neera Burra, Ruchi Ram Sahni’s A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab is a remarkable historical document.
In later years, Ruchi Ram Sahni in his compound on 22, Rattigan Road, Lahore, circa 1940s
If many memoirs have nostalgia lingering over them, there is a special poignancy to those of undivided British Punjab. Nothing quite like it is found elsewhere in South Asia except perhaps in memories of the bhadralok Hindu zamindars of East Bengal. Possibly what imparts this special quality is not simple nostalgia for a life that is now in the past but rather that the act of writing is itself a requiem for a way of life that vanished because it was eradicated. Punjab, with the near cent percent ethnic cleansing in 1947, over a large part certainly evokes such memories.
Two classics in this genre are Prakash Tandon’s reminisces in his Punjab Centenary about Gujrat and even more so the Pakistani historian K.K. Aziz’s memories of pre-partition Batala (2006). In both, Lahore inevitably has a larger than life presence and here its Government College reigns supreme, an epitome of colonial modernity and a filtering ground for a future meritocracy.
Its significance lies in the memories and respect it evokes not just in those who passed through its portals in the late nineteenth century and the first three or four decades of the 20th century – for they in the main part are long departed – but in their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab
Ruchi Ram Sahni
Edited by Neera Burra
Oxford Publishing House, 2017
Neera Burra, in editing her great-grandfather’s memoirs has resurrected precisely this sense. The remarkable historical document that begins with describing a Punjab on the verge of modernisation and ends as Jallianwala Bagh shattered the mutual romance of the British with the Punjabi. All this is through the pen of Ruchi Ram Sahni (1863-1948) the milestones of whose own life are no less interesting than the times he lived in.
Ruchi Ram Sahni was born in Dera Ismail Khan (now in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province) where his father had moved to as a merchant and moneylender from Bhera (In Punjab in present day Sargodha district). His schooling was in Jhang and Lala Ruchi Ram’s fierce determination to succeed comes through in some marvellous descriptions of walking from Bhera to Jhang and on occasion covering 50 miles in a day as a boy of 16. The railways had yet to make their appearance. He pushed his way into a high school in Lahore from where the move to Government College followed a tough entrance examination. When he graduated, he was the second batch of students to pass the Punjab university BA examination.
This brief summary is only the bare bones of some wonderful pages in this autobiography describing what in essence was the first generation of Punjabis to have gone to a University. There are evocative descriptions of good and bad teachers and how a young man saw the developing cosmopolitan culture of British Lahore.
Although a bright student Ruchi Ram was no ordinary crammer. His inquisitive mind comes through as he walked through Harappa sometime in 1879 or 1880 and he writes: “I remember walking over the now historical mound- but little did I dream that right under my feet lay buried the oldest known civilisation of the world.”
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Sometime later in the 1890s he made a special effort to visit Jamrud Fort to see the room where Ranjit Singh’s general Hari Singh Nalwa had died. Such asides pepper the book making for a terrific read.
After his graduation Ruchi Ram joined the Indian Meteorological Examination and after a brief stint there was transferred to a teaching position in Government College Lahore. For the next three decades that was where he stayed. He left the College on being superseded in the appointment as professor-in-charge of the chemistry department with the post going to an Englishman. He spent the next two years in Europe on research in radioactivity and on returning to India in 1916 was active in public life. The Khilafat Movement, Jallianwala Bagh, membership of the Punjab Legislative Council and the debate on Non-Cooperation vs opposition from within the legislature crowd this narrative. Incidentally, he was to return the title of Rai Sahib awarded to him earlier after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Ruchi Ram Sahni. Credit: Wikipedia
What gives this memoir a distinctive character is however also the rich cast of characters Ruchi Ram was in touch with and writes about. Many long forgotten but important figures of Punjab and elsewhere in India appear: Lala Harkishen Lal Gauba an institution of early twentieth century Lahore and father of that great but also forgotten sensationalist K.L. Gauba, Rai Bahadur Hira Lal of the Central Provinces, Mohammad Hussain Azad the author of Durbar i Akbari, Bhai Ram Singh possibly North India’s greatest ‘indigenous’ architect, etc. There are also vignettes on A.O. Hume the founder of the Congress, M.G. Ranade, C.R. Das and others. Someone who is missing is Ganga Ram another renaissance type figure of early 20th century Lahore. The omission could perhaps be because Ruchi Ram may well have written about him in detail elsewhere.
Ruchi Lal’s life stands out also for its association with the major social and intellectual currents of the age. He was an early member of the Brahmo Samaj in Lahore – not a small step for him to have taken as he explains. Even more unusually was the step for a college and university teacher to establish a science workshop to repair and then make scientific instruments at a much lower cost than the imported variety. This led also to the setting up of the Punjab Science Institute which must rank as a pioneer in the efforts to popularise science. This book can also be mined usefully for the detail it contains on social life in pre-partition Punjab as Ruchi Ram has many insights into inter and intra community relations – Sikh, Hindu and Muslim. To commemorate the life of this man of so many parts a stamp was issued in India in 2013 on his 150th birth anniversary.
Through all this Ruchi Ram remained also a prolific writer and diarist much of it for private reading and as a personal passion. Many of these notes were lost in the disruption of 1947 but Neera Burra has unearthed others from different libraries and archives. The edition of this memoir is perhaps the first step to adding more to the corpus of available knowledge about her ancestor. Her fine introduction to this memoir as also the detailed annotations of its text both contextualise Lala Ruchi Ram as also summarise the story which led her to match family lore with historical research and present this rich texture of a life and its times that already appear more distant than the century that separates us.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan. He has authored Attendant Lords-Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim: Poets and Courtiers in Mughal India and The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan.
