Celebrating Dalit History: The Punjabi Dalit Christians of Pakistan

Adapted from the powerful and inspiring research and work of Asif Aqeel: Caste Away: The Ongoing Struggle of Punjabi Christians

Most stories of partition leave out the story of Dalits and Adivasis communities.But as Bahujans they were vulnerable to betrayals, violence, and continued on both sides of the border. This was no truer than in the story of the Punjabi Christians of Pakistan.

Punjabi Christians have their origins in Presbyterian missionary drives that began in the 19th century. The United Presbyterian Church took the initiative to bring the most marginalised and oppressed caste of scavengers, described in missionary reports and British census documents as chuhras, into the fold of Christianity. The people belonging to this community were socially excluded, living outside villages and facing serious discrimination in their everyday lives.

Denzil Ibbetson, Punjab’s deputy superintendent in the 1881 census, who later also worked as the province’s Lieutenant-Governor, has written in detail about these converts. “They prefer to call themselves Chuhra,” he wrote. He also noted their occupations. “In the east of the Province he sweeps the houses and villages, collects the cow dung, pats it into cakes and stacks it, works up the manure, helps with the cattle, and takes them from village to village”. In other areas, they worked as “agricultural labourer” and “receive a customary share of the produce”.

As the Christians continued in their lives many realized the violence of being associated with the word chuhra. And so by the 1930’s they were called Isai — after Isa, the Arabic translation of Jesus. In the 1961 census in Lahore, all those who had been categorised as belonging to chuhra caste in previous censuses were now classified as Isai. Others changed their last name to Masih after Messiah, and this last name continues with many Punjabi Christians.

At Partition, S P Singha was the most prominent leader of Punjabi Christians. Before joining politics, he worked as a registrar at the Punjab University during the 1930s. In 1947, he was Punjab Assembly speaker and one of the three Christian members of the assembly who voted in favour of Punjab becoming a part of Pakistan.

His decision was based on pragmatic considerations. He thought Hindus discriminated against Punjabi Christians more than Muslims did. “In non-Muslim villages, we have no graveyards and are not allowed to draw water from the wells,” he told Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s boundary commission.

Additionally, the partition of Punjab being proposed along religious lines meant that there would be more Punjabi Christians living in Muslim-dominated western regions of the province than in the eastern parts dominated by Hindus and Sikhs. When the boundary commission announced its scheme for partitioning Punjab in June 1947, eastern (Indian) Punjab had only 60,955 out of 511,299 Punjabi Christians at the time.

“S P Singha, whom we called Purke Maamoon, one day called my father and told him that he had met with Mr Jinnah and told him that Christians were very poor and could not travel to India and that they wanted to live in Pakistan,” says Indu Mitha. “Jinnah assured Singh of full protection for the Christians.”

As a result, many Punjabi Christians moved to Pakistan. The promise of equality was betrayed right from the beginning For immediately after 1947, Singha was removed as the speaker of the assembly through a no-confidence motion. The reason: He was not a Muslim. This was a chilling harbinger of how life was to change for Punjabi Christians in Pakistan.

Singha addressed the assembly on January 20, 1948, to highlight that change. “Kindly pay attention to the mess created by the Sikhs who, after living for centuries in this province, have at once left and have created a huge problem for [Christians]. The government may have better information but our estimates show that about 60,000 families or 200,000 people of our community, who worked as saipis (landless service providers) or atharis (farmhands), have become homeless after the commotion of Partition,” he said.

The lands vacated by the Sikhs were being allotted to Muslim refugees coming from eastern Punjab and these new owners of land either did not want Christian saipis and atharis due to religious reasons or they did not know them well enough to trust them with such jobs. “They hired us for a while but then they engaged their coreligionists,” says Nazir Masih who was about 13 years old at the time of Partition and was living in Harichand village in Sheikhupura district.

In some cases, Christians were forcefully evicted even from places where they were tilling lands for the state institutions — such as in a few villages set up on the military farms. “Christians are being evicted from some of the villages reserved for them,” Singh said. “They are being replaced with [Muslim] refugees.”

Singha argued that Christians in Pakistan deserved protection from the government because they “have taken refuge in this House of Islam”. When no one listened to him, he suggested to the government to either place the homeless Christians in refugee camps or “bury them alive”.

The number of homeless Christians kept on increasing in the meanwhile. C E Gibbon, another Christian member of the Punjab Assembly, noted in his statement on the floor of the house in April 1952: “I beg to ask for leave to make a motion … to discuss a definite matter of urgent public importance, namely, the grave situation arising out of the policy of the government in respect of the wholesale eviction of Christians … from their home holdings, thus rendering nearly 300,000 Christians homeless and on the verge of starvation, the consequences of which are too horrible to imagine.”

The number of homeless Christians kept on increasing in the meanwhile. C E Gibbon, another Christian member of the Punjab Assembly, noted in his statement on the floor of the house in April 1952: “I beg to ask for leave to make a motion … to discuss a definite matter of urgent public importance, namely, the grave situation arising out of the policy of the government in respect of the wholesale eviction of Christians … from their home holdings, thus rendering nearly 300,000 Christians homeless and on the verge of starvation, the consequences of which are too horrible to imagine.”

Earlier, in 1948, Singha had highlighted another problem. He described how young Muslim students were harassing Christian nurses, insisting that Christian women in Pakistan were like war booty and the Muslims possessed the right to use them whichever way they liked. “If this mindset continues, then I fear there will be no Christian nurses left in Pakistan,” he warned.

Singha also talked about how Christians in Pakistan were viewed with suspicion. “… [the Christians] are ready to assure the government of Pakistan of our loyalty but sadly we are being accused of committing strange things. One group of people says we are spies and another says we are agents of Hindus.” He went on “to humbly state” that the government should “stop demanding” that Christians prove their loyalty to the state every day as “Muslims are required to do in India”.

In early 1971, all this culminated in what is perhaps the first mob attack against Christians in Pakistan. A Pakistani living in Manchester wrote to Lahore-based English daily Pakistan Times, “complaining about a book called The Turkish Art of Love in Pictures (first published in 1933), which he said … contained insulting assertions about the Holy Prophet.”

The publication of the letter led to large-scale attacks on Christians in Lahore. Churches were ransacked and liquor shops (which were legal at the time) were looted. Jeffery quoted one Christian woman as imploring during the violence that “Christians in Pakistan should be seen as ‘true Pakistanis’ and that there should be no stigma attached to being Christians.” This cry to be seen as Pakistani was unheeded as many Christians were continually seen as agents of foreign governments. As a result, hundreds of Christians were arrested in 1965 and 1971 wars over the charges of espionage, though none was proved true.

The few Christian elites who could leave began migrating in droves outside of the country. Philadelphia has the largest Pakistani Christian concentration in North America after Toronto. The choice of the destination has its roots in Presbyterian missions’ activities in Punjab dating back a century. With its headquarters in Philadelphia, the Presbyterian Church had sent such prominent missionaries as Dr Samuel Martin (who founded a Christian-only village in Punjab), Andrew Gordon (after whom the Gordon College Rawalpindi is named) and Dr Charles William Forman (the founder of the Forman Christian College Lahore).There was also a sizeable Pakistani Christian community living in the English city of Bristol.

Meanwhile, the majority of Punjabi Christians who could not leave because of caste and class had limited economic opportunities. They could work at brick kilns — that were springing up next to big cities to cater to the booming housing and construction sectors. Those who took up that option set themselves up for bonded labour for life. And as a result, Christians make up a large amount of the bonded labor sector in Pakistan.

The other option for Christians was to take up menial government jobs as sanitary workers. Traditionally, low-caste Hindus worked as sanitary workers in the cities that became part of Pakistan but, in 1947, most of them went to India. For in 1948 in Karachi, then the capital of Pakistan, underscored the problems created by these departing Hindus. “Within a month of the riots, the government realised, to its alarm, that something entirely unexpected was happening: among the fleeing Hindus were the city’s sweepers and sewer cleaners.” She wrote that the “outraged residents of Karachi … regretted, cajoled and complained” in letters they wrote to daily Dawn.The city “had become an unhygienic disgrace” where “streets were littered with stinking rubbish.”

In a cynical and casteist move, the Pakistani government thought Punjabi Christians would be happy to do that kind of work. When offered those jobs, however, they were anything but happy. “I have heard that Christians are refusing to work as sweepers,” S P Singha said in his 1948 speech. “One deputy commissioner complained to me that Christians do not want to do menial tasks and refuse to pick up cow dung and dead animals,” he added.

The violent origins of Pakistan’s Punjabi Christians continue into very real discrimination today. Many Punjabi Christians faced systemic discrimination and accusations that they are spies in their own country. Punjabi Christians can be found in all of the slums in Pakistan and are relegated to the worse jobs. While Thousands of Pakistani Christians are stranded in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Malaysia currently awaiting their applications for refugee status with the UNHCR there is a new generation of Punjabi Christians who are determined to succeed that are are coming up through education and speaking about their experiences. Further in cities like Quetta Punjabi Christians inherited all the schools built by the colonists an, as a result, there is a thriving community that grows despite the violence.

We salute the struggles and resilience of the Punjabi Christians of Pakistan! #Jaibhim and #Godbless