Author Topic: History of Gurdaspur (Read 6897 times)

Kudi Nepal Di · « **on:** June 27, 2010, 12:48:19 PM »

Gurdaspur is a city in the state of Punjab, situated in the northwest part of the Republic of India. It is located in the center of and is the administrative head of Gurdaspur District. It was the location of a fort (later turned into a Brahmin monastery) which was famous for the siege it sustained in 1712 from the Mughals.

History

Gurdaspur was founded by Sahib Deep Chand and was named after his grandfather Guriya in the beginning of 17th century. In his honour, this city was named Gurdaspur. He bought land for Gurdaspur from the Jats of the Sangi Gotra. Guriya, a Sanwal Brahmin of the Kaushal Gotra came from Paniar, a village situated 5 miles north of Gurdaspur. The ancestors of Guriya had come from Ayodhya and settled in Paniar. Guriya Ji had two sons Nawal Rai and Pala. The descendants of Nawal Rai settled in Gurdaspur and Nawal Rai’s son Baba Deep Chand was a contemporary of Guru Gobind Singh. It is believed that Guru Gobind Singh gave the title of Ganj Bakhsh (Owner Of Treasure) to Baba Deep Chand. The descendants of Baba Deep Chand are called Mahants
Gurdaspur was the last bastion of Banda Bahadur. Banda Bahadur's legend lives on in the poem "Bandabir", by the Indian Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. The poem, written in the Bengali language, has been translated into English, since.

Geography

Gurdaspur is located at 32.03°N 75.52°E. It has an average elevation of 242 metres (793 ft). The district comprises an area of 1889 km². It is bounded on the north by the Jammu region, of Jammu & Kashmir. Chamba, on the east by Kangra district and the Beas River, on the south by Amritsar district, and on the west by Sialkot, and occupies the submontane portion of the Ban Doab, or tract between the Beas and the Ravi River. The district includes sanatorium of Dalhousie mountain which stands 7687 ft. above sea-level. This station, which has a large fluctuating population during the warmer months, crowns the most westerly shoulder of a snowy range, the Dhauladhar, between which and the plain two minor ranges intervene. Below the hills stretches an undulating plateau covered with abundant timber, made green by a copious rainfall, and watered by the streams of the Ban Doab, which, diverted by dams and embankments, now empty their waters into the Beas directly, in order that their channels may not interfere with the Ban Doab canal. The district contains several large Jheels or swampy lakes, and is famous for its snipe-shooting. Pathankot is another town from which one has to pass to enter Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh state.

Demographics

According to the 2001 India census, Gurdaspur had a population of 67,455. Males constitute 53% of the population and females 47%. Gurdaspur has an average literacy rate of 78%, higher than the national average of 59.5%: male literacy is 80%, and female literacy is 75%. In Gurdaspur, 10% of the population is under 6 years of age. Sikhs make up about 65% of the population in Gurdaspur the rest are Hindus and Christian. before partition Gurdaspur had majority of Muslim residents(50.6%), mostly Ahmadiyyas and was going to be handed to Pakistan, but was given to India, because if the ruler of the kingdom of Kashmir decided to integrate with the Indian Union, it would be accessible contiguously to India.

Pakistan and the Gurdaspur district
The Gurdaspur district in the undivided Punjab had on the basis of the 1941 census an overall Muslim majority of 51%, which came about in the first decades of the 20th century, mainly due to the out-migration of 45,000 Sikhs to the Chenab colony between 1891 and 1901. Gurdaspur had four tehsils (sub-districts) viz., Shakargarh (51.3% Muslims), Batala (53% Muslims), Pathankot (65% non-Muslim) and Gurdaspur it self (50.5% Muslims). Gurdaspur straddled a major river of the undivided Punjab of India, the Ravi, with Shakargarh Tehsil on the West Bank of the river and the rest of three Tehsils on the East Bank. It can be seen from the map that a direct railhead for the State of Jammu and Kashmir ran from Amritsar to Pathankot through the very same three eastern Tehsils of the Gurdaspur district. According to one theory, as Gurdaspur district bordered the State of Jammu and Kashmir, India would find it impossible to have a road communication with the state without these three Tehsils. but the problem with this theory is that looking at the map of India it is clear that the lines of communication ran through Pathankot tehsil which had a non-Muslim majority.
The terms of reference given were that the demarcation should be on the basis of contiguous Muslim or non-Muslim majority areas. With a provision for other factors which could be interpreted in any manner. Gurdaspur was a Muslim-majority District. The contiguous communal argument should have taken it according to the Tehsil boundaries but instead only Shakargarh went to Pakistan, leaving the eastern bank of the Ravi with a clear Hindu-Sikh majority and thus a part of post-independence India.
There were two main pre-partition routes to the Kashmir region: One via Lahore, Rawalpindi and Murree into Muzaffarabad and Srinagar and the other through Sialkot, Jammu and the Banihal pass. Neither would be available to India after Partition as both Lahore and Sialkot were bound to go to Pakistan, even though the city of Lahore itself which straddled the border had a slight non-Muslim majority, but the district overall had a Muslim majority. There was a third route, more a dirt track than a road, via Gurdaspur. If Gurdaspur were also awarded to Pakistan there would be no effective road link between India and Kashmir until a new road could be constructed via Pathankot.
Mountbatten was quoted as saying before the final award was announced that the Radcliffe Commission was unlikely to throw the whole of Gurdaspur with only 51% Muslim majority into Pakistan, as it would exponentially increase the number of Sikh and Hindu refugees as 49% of the district was non-Muslim. Also, the Muslim majority tehsils of Gurdaspur and Shakargarh had a bare Muslim majority of 50.5% and 51% respectively and their partition could only be done along the Ravi even though the eastern parts of Shakargarh tehsil had an overwhelming majority of Hindus and Sikhs.
Also, there was a possibility that if the three eastern tehsils of Gurdaspur were awarded to India by the Boundary Commission the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir to India be a practicable proposition. Mountbatten did appreciate this fact. As he said to the Nawab of Bhopal and the Maharaja of Indore on 4 August 1947, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was so placed geographically that it could join either Dominion. In other words, only by giving Gurdaspur to India would the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir be presented with a free choice; to give Gurdaspur to Pakistan was effectively to guarantee that the State of Jammu and Kashmir would sooner or later fall to Pakistan.
In the original proposals for Partition it was generally understood by the Pakistan side, and probably by at least the majority of Indian side as well (despite a strong hint by Mountbatten to the contrary on 4 June when he observed that "it is unlikely that the Boundary Commission will throw the whole of the (Gurdaspur) district into the Muslim-majority areas"), that Gurdaspur was a Muslim-majority District in the Punjab which could go to Pakistan in its entirety or at least without the Pathankot tehsil. This conclusion was indicated in the notional boundary between India and Pakistan with which the Boundary Commission started in July 1947. This was derived from the First Schedule of the Indian Independence Act of 18 July 1947, which also pointed to a Muslim-majority salient along the southern edge of Amritsar District in the Lahore region of Pakistani territory jutting into the Indian part of the Punjab. Together, this southern salient and Gurdaspur resulted in Muslim-majority territory, which almost surrounded Amritsar, a city of supreme importance to the Sikhs. The Sikh question presented by far the greatest immediate problem for Partition in the Punjab.
On 8 August 1947, there emerged from Sir Cyril Radcliffe's establishment a provisional boundaries map on which, there is strong evidence to indicate, that the southern salient had been modified in what seemed to be in Pakistan's favour by substituting for a small portion of the Lahore District (the tip of the original salient, created by the need to somehow transfer the Indo-Pakistan border from the line of the Ravi to that of the Satluj, which, it could be argued, on this particular alignment encroached more than it was absolutely necessary upon what the Sikhs regarded as their special land around Amritsar), and the adjacent Firozpur and Zira Tehsils of Firozpur District, thus extending Pakistan to the eastern side of the Satluj. The same map also indicated that the three eastern Tehsils of Gurdaspur District were now located on the Indian side of the Partition line.
Sir George Abell, Mountbatten's Private Secretary, immediately communicated the contents of this map to Stuart Abbott, Secretary to Sir Evan Jenkins, the Governor of the Punjab, through whose province the new boundary would run. Jenkins also received at the time a memorandum of some kind on the question of the boundary award from Christopher Beaumont, a member of Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s staff. Thus several members of the Punjab Government were aware of the current state of Radcliffe’s thinking on Partition by 9 August. So, also, it would seem were many other people.
There was, for example, immediate objection from the Maharaja of Bikaner who received vital water supply for his desert state from Harike headworks on the Satluj in Firozpur to the location of the Firozpur and Zira tehsils in Pakistan, it being clearly impossible to confine such a secret to the inner circle of Viceroy's House, New Delhi and Government House, Lahore. Not only were several rulers whose states depended upon irrigation works cut by the proposed Radcliffe Line much disturbed by the dangers which they detected in the Boundary Commission’s proposals, but also a wide selection of officials, not all of them of particular seniority or major importance, found cause for concern. Thus on 9 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Mountbatten enclosing a memorandum by A.N. Khosla, Chairman, Central Waterways, Irrigation and Navigation Commission, reporting various items of gossip, including the account of an eavesdropped lunchtime conversation between Sir Cyril Radcliffe and the members of the Boundary Commission, to the effect that the award of the Firozpur and Zira Tehsils to Pakistan was a compensation for the award of the three eastern Tehsils of Gurdaspur to India. Khosla pointed out that, if true, this arrangement would be most undesirable on technical irrigation grounds: Firozpur and Zira, as well as Gurdaspur; would have to be in India if certain canals were to operate adequately.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Letter of 9 August is intriguing. If a relatively junior official like Khosla could pick up confidential discussion on Boundary matters by Radcliffe and his colleagues, it did not say much for the secrecy in which the Radcliffe Commission was claimed to have carried out its task. Moreover, why should Nehru have chosen to convey this titbit of information to the Viceroy at this particular time? Was he trying to influence the Radcliffe Commission by way of Mountbatten in at least three ways, to ensure that the Ferozepore Tehsil did not go to Pakistan, to guarantee that whatever decision was in the air concerning the award to India of the three eastern Tehsils of Gurdaspur was adhered to, and to provide reasons for both these decisions which could be argued to be Judicial rather than Political? Mountbatten politely rebuked Nehru for this letter. "I hope you will agree" he wrote "that I should not do anything to prejudice the independence of the Boundary Commission, and that, therefore, it would be wrong of me even to forward any memorandum, especially at this stage". All the same, on 10 or 11 August 1947 the Governor of the Punjab, Jenkins, received a telegram from viceroy's House, New Delhi, which told him to eliminate the salient, in other words, delete from Pakistan (as shown in the earlier version of the partition proposals which he had received on 8 August) the Ferozepore and Zira Tehsils, and put them in India. Moreover, in the final award (which was ready on 12 August) the location of the Ferozepore and Zira Tehsils in India was justified on grounds of good irrigation policy, as was, also, the Indian possession of the three eastern Tehsils of Gurdaspur in India (which had already been shown on the map of 8 August). Pakistan's fears of India daming the rivers were assuaged by the Indus Water Treaty.

Author Topic: History of Gurdaspur (Read 6897 times)

Kudi Nepal Di

History of Gurdaspur

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