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During a recent visit to the North, Captain Bhag Singh, the Honorary Managing Editor of The Sikh Review had an occasion to meet the present Nawab of Materkotla. The Nawab Sahib informed him in the course of their meeting that his celebrated ancestor, who appealed to the Viceroy of Sirhind not to execute the two younger sons (aged nine and seven years) of Guru Gobind Singh, also sent a petition to Emperor Aurangzeb, urging him, in the name of equity and justice and Islam, to spare the children.

The Nawab Sahib has sent a photostat copy of that petition which forms part of the Malerkotla archives. This has been reproduced in this issue, along with its translation in English.

After the evacuation of Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh’s mother, Mata Gujri, and younger sons Jujhar Singh and Fateh Singh, had taken refuge with an old Brahmin servant of the family, Gangu, who lured by the charm of the valuables in their procession betrayed them to the Viceroy of Sirhind. The boys were committed to trial by the Viceroy and were condemned to be walled up alive. Mata Gujri succumbed to her sorrow at the fate that befell the children.

“While the Guru was listening to the narrative, he was digging up a shrub with his knife. He said, ‘as I dig up this shrub by the roots, so shall the Turks be extirpated.’ He inquired if anyone except the Nawab of Malerkotla had spoken on behalf of the children. The messenger replied in the negative. The Guru then said that after the roots of the oppressive Turks were all dug up, the roots of the Nawab should still remain. His Sikhs should one day come and lay Sirhind waste.” (Macaulife, The Sikh Religion, Vol. V-VI p.199-200)

It now appears that the then Nawab of Malerkotla did not rest content with an appeal to the Viceroy, but petitioned the Emperor himself when his intercession on behalf of the innocent children with the Viceroy proved fruitless.

The Nawab of Malerkotla's humaneness has filled the Sikh people with a lasting sense of gratitude.

After the break up of the Mughal empire, the Punjab has passed through innumerable vicissitudes. But the Sikhs have, with occasional interruptions always had the upper hand in the politics of the region. Even as Maharaja Ranjit Singh established a mighty kingdom in western Punjab and North Western India, a hegemony of powerful Sikh bodies carved out states for themselves in Eastern Punjab. The tiny State of Malerkotla is hemmed in by the Sikh states of Patiala, Nabha and Farid Kot. But even in those days of instability when might determined the right, Malerkotla was left untouched and unharmed.

A more severe test of the Sikh gratitude, however, came much more recently when the Punjab and Bengal were plunged in a wild and widespread communal turmoil in 1946-47. Indescribable Muslim excesses over the non-Muslims in the Muslim majority areas of West Punjab provoked the wildest retaliation in the Sikh dominated areas of East Punjab. While communal frenzy reigned supreme all around, the State of Malerkotla became a Muslim sanctuary. Malerkotla's was a soil sacred to the Sikhs. Not a hair of a Muslim's head could be touched on this soil.

Those of us, who have had the ill fortune of seeing and living through that shameful saga of the butchery of the unprotected innocent in the two Punjabs, offer numerous eyewitness accounts of how hotly pursued Muslim individuals stopped short immediately on crossing into the territory of Malerkota and were abandoned to themselves. The piercing points of the attackers' spears would not get across the boundary of Malerkotla, it looked as though an invisible steel wall rose at the border.

The story of Malerkotla has a charming, tender moral: Humaneness and gestures of charity build bridges between peoples of divers and even hostile persuasions. Mankind needs such bridges more today than it ever before did. We, in India and Pakistan, need them much more. Our tempers are frayed, our moods dark. Even if we plunge ourselves into conflict, which will of course be suicidal, we must, in the name of God and of the religion that we profess, ensure that the bridges, like the one that the Nawab of Malerkotla built and the Sikhs of the following generations kept in good repair are built and are not broken. This we can do by being magnanimous in triumph, humane inspite of provocation and above all civilized men while dealing with things sacred to our adversaries.

Editor
The Sikh Review

Copy of the petition from Nawab of Materkotla to Emperor Aurangzeb (1705 AD) The Sikh Review, January 1967