Books

Punjabi Century
1857-1947
An Autobiography by Prakash Tandon

Foreword by MAURICE ZINKIN

The folllowing is the Foreword to Prakash Tandon's Punjabi Century, first written and published in 1961.

The author, Maurice Zinkin (1915-2002), excelled as an Indian Civil Service (ICS) administrator in British India. He later made his mark as an industrialist and author. He was married to Taya Zinkin (1918-2003), the renowned English journalist and author.

sikhchic.com highly recommends Punjabi Century as a must-read for all who are interested in Sikh and Punjabi culture, even though it is written through the eyes of a Punjabi Hindu. The book is in re-print and available from the usual outlets.

Nothing is more important to the illumination of history  than good autobiography. It becomes particularly valuable in times of transition.

Documents and statistics can give us the facts of change; only Cicero’s letters tell us what the fall of the Roman Republic meant to those to whom the Republic mattered.

Domesday Book gives us the figures, but how much would we not give for a Saxon peasant’s reactions to the Conquest.

In the last fifty years India has been through the greatest transition in its history; the last twenty have been a time of revolution in the whole national life rarely equalled anywhere.

Now, as India settles into its new, managerial world of industrialisation and State Capitalism, of feminine equality and family planning, the generation which is growing up to power no longer knows what the old India was like. They live in their own new ways, and they have the impatience with all others which is necessary if they are to renovate India at the speed they demand.

But there was a charm in the old way too; in its slowness, in the intensity of its family life, in the certainty of everybody’s obligations, in the constant contact with the village and the farmer. It is Mr. Tandon’s merit that, himself one of the most distinguished members of the new generation, he has been able to catch so exactly the flavour of the old.

The men of his generation, in changing their own lives, have transformed India.

His own career is typical.

Thirty years ago, when Indian chartered accountants hardly existed, he went off to England to become a chartered accountant. Over twenty years ago, when Indian officers in big British firms were rarer even than  Indian captains in the cavalry, and when business, to young men of his professional class, had none too sweet an odour, he decided to go into business; and British, hard-selling business at that.

His chosen business was the Indian subsidiary of Unilever, and, as he has made his way up, he has again and again been the first Indian to hold his post; the first Indian in Marketing Research, the first Indian head of a division, the first Indian on the Board, now the first Indian Vice-Chairman.

This has been a common experience of his generation.

As Indians have taken over from Englishmen all the keys of their own society, everybody one knows has become the first Indian to be something - a Major-General, a Collector of Poona, a Governor.

This in itself makes the experience of Mr. Tandon’s generation quite different from that of his sons and their contemporaries, who are growing up in the comfortable knowledge that the keys of power are theirs by right.

This book does not cover the whole of Mr. Tandon’s experience of the Indian revolution. Life in industry must await his retirement.

The story he is describing, the British Punjab as it grew in the years after the Sikh Wars [of the 1840s] and the Mutiny [of 1857], began to die in the 1930’s; it was finally killed in the riots of 1947.

Mr. Tandon is talking of a past which is over, the flavour of which, had it not been for him, would soon have departed never to be recaptured. His memory, his sense of a scene as a whole, his capacity to recreate the past as it was and not as the present day would have it - these combine to give us the old Punjab as it lived, thought, ate and enjoyed itself. This is how marriages were made, this is how the Indian backbone of the administration got tired of the British, this is what the houses looked like and how one went out for a walk.

There is no comparable evocation of India as it used to be, except Kipling’s Kim. Kim is one of the world’s great stories, but Mr. Tandon writes from the inside.  
 

Nothing is more important to the illumination of history  than good autobiography. It becomes particularly valuable in times of transition.

Documents and statistics can give us the facts of change; only Cicero’s letters tell us what the fall of the Roman Republic meant to those to whom the Republic mattered.

Domesday Book gives us the figures, but how much would we not give for a Saxon peasant’s reactions to the Conquest.

In the last fifty years India has been through the greatest transition in its history; the last twenty have been a time of revolution in the whole national life rarely equalled anywhere.

Now, as India settles into its new, managerial world of industrialisation and State Capitalism, of feminine equality and family planning, the generation which is growing up to power no longer knows what the old India was like. They live in their own new ways, and they have the impatience with all others which is necessary if they are to renovate India at the speed they demand.

But there was a charm in the old way too; in its slowness, in the intensity of its family life, in the certainty of everybody’s obligations, in the constant contact with the village and the farmer. It is Mr. Tandon’s merit that, himself one of the most distinguished members of the new generation, he has been able to catch so exactly the flavour of the old.

The men of his generation, in changing their own lives, have transformed India.

His own career is typical.

Thirty years ago, when Indian chartered accountants hardly existed, he went off to England to become a chartered accountant. Over twenty years ago, when Indian officers in big British firms were rarer even than  Indian captains in the cavalry, and when business, to young men of his professional class, had none too sweet an odour, he decided to go into business; and British, hard-selling business at that.

His chosen business was the Indian subsidiary of Unilever, and, as he has made his way up, he has again and again been the first Indian to hold his post; the first Indian in Marketing Research, the first Indian head of a division, the first Indian on the Board, now the first Indian Vice-Chairman.

This has been a common experience of his generation.

As Indians have taken over from Englishmen all the keys of their own society, everybody one knows has become the first Indian to be something - a Major-General, a Collector of Poona, a Governor.

This in itself makes the experience of Mr. Tandon’s generation quite different from that of his sons and their contemporaries, who are growing up in the comfortable knowledge that the keys of power are theirs by right.

This book does not cover the whole of Mr. Tandon’s experience of the Indian revolution. Life in industry must await his retirement.

The story he is describing, the British Punjab as it grew in the years after the Sikh Wars [of the 1840s] and the Mutiny [of 1857], began to die in the 1930’s; it was finally killed in the riots of 1947.

Mr. Tandon is talking of a past which is over, the flavour of which, had it not been for him, would soon have departed never to be recaptured. His memory, his sense of a scene as a whole, his capacity to recreate the past as it was and not as the present day would have it - these combine to give us the old Punjab as it lived, thought, ate and enjoyed itself. This is how marriages were made, this is how the Indian backbone of the administration got tired of the British, this is what the houses looked like and how one went out for a walk.

There is no comparable evocation of India as it used to be, except Kipling’s Kim. Kim is one of the world’s great stories, but Mr. Tandon writes from the inside.   

July 31, 2011

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