Quotes from Rajmohan Gandhi

Guru Amar Das, who died in 1574, also rejected his sons' claims, he named his son-in-law, Guru Ram Das, a Khatri of the Sodhi clan

At the Khyber, 'thanks to the suasive influence of British gold', the Afridis guarding the Pass let the soldiers through.

Jinnah was not tempted. 'India is not a nation', he commented. 'It is a subcontinent composed of nationalities.' More than willing to fight the Congress, henceforth, he would fight even more the notion of one India and seek allies in that fight.

More often than not, a report that a cow was about to be slaughtered, or that a religious procession carrying Hindu idols was interfering with mosque prayers, set off stone-throwing or worse.

Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it was called, contains no Muslim name and only one Sikh name, that of Bhagat Singh.

Thus the Gurus were all from the 'high' Khatri caste of traders and administrators but within that caste from middle-level clans or sub-castes.

Probably between half a million and eight hundred thousand in all were killed in Punjab in 1947.

Caste taboos had been broken, and a measure of equality introduced. But they had also become a distinct community, which for writing used a new script called

About ten to twelve million people were forced to leave their homes and cross the new border.102

Rohilla chief, Najib (who had been expelled from Delhi by the Marathas), secured written endorsements from several Muslim religious leaders and nobles and forwarded them to Abdali

White Punjabis like Nicholson often took a close and continuing interest in a servant or subordinate, but other 'subjects' were usually ignored and no 'subject' was seen as an equal.

Marathas failed to enlist the support either of Rajasthan's chiefs or of the Hindu Jats around Delhi, although for a few days one Sikh leader, Ala Singh, like most Sikh chiefs a Jat, procured food and fodder for the Marathas.

India, Nicholson would say, was 'like a rat-trap, easier to get into than out of

Lajpat Rai, by this time a member of the Central Assembly. Writing a series of articles in the Tribune (November and December 1924), Rai argued that since Punjabi Muslims were unwilling to grant weightage to Hindus and Sikhs, Punjab should be partitioned into Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority portions. (He proposed a similar solution for Bengal.)

In all places, the sangats, a majority of them composed of Khatri settlers, honoured Guru Tegh Bahadur, celebrated his son's arrival, and gave offerings.

Nicholson never brooked the faintest show of insolence towards an officer of the ruling race.

Non-Muslims were asked—in 1679, four years after Guru Tegh Bahadur's death—to pay the jizya, a practice Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier.

Though Dyer and O'Dwyer had destroyed love for the Empire, desire for its titles and positions survived in Punjab.

Ambedkar said he had been 'surprised, immensely surprised' to find 'so much in common' between Gandhi and himself. 'If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Classes', Ambedkar said to Gandhi, 'you would become our hero'.

Muslim preponderance in the police and the army' would be hit.

The word for a lion, 'Singh' was also, as we have seen, the name used by the Mughal empire's Rajput mansabdars.

Tilak had complained that Gandhi was asking too much of the Indian people. He was proved right. Non-violence, not harming the hated British, embracing jails, Hindu-Muslim unity, giving up titles, contributing money, the abolition of untouchability—each item on the long list was desirable, but also costly.

Nursing a powerful drive, a daring leader who believed in God and his own destiny now bonded—through shared danger, a common language, and the breaking of caste barriers—with a Singh following where a majority, scholars tell us, were Jat clans who equated honour with revenge.

Lawrence's 'spirit', his biographer argues, 'was imperial, not provincial'.