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The Punjabi settlers
The front page splash MetroPlus gave me last Monday had an irate lady ringing me to complain that I hadn’t said anything about Col. Gurdial Singh Gill, the father of Lt. Gen. Inderjit Singh Gill whose biography I had written. I urged her to buy
a copy of the book and she’d find that I had a bit to say about the Colonel. But that wouldn’t satisfy her, as she kept repeating, “You should have said something, you should have said…” To avoid another such call, let me here say…
Gurdial Singh, like many others of that era, did his medicine in Edinburgh, practised in Bolton, and returned to India with his Scottish wife Rena, to join the Indian Medical Service. In 1930, the IMS was abolished and its members were given the option of joining the defense services or one of the quasi-military services. Gurdial Singh chose the Prisons Service. With the IMS he had served several years in northwest India. The Prisons Department posted him to the South — and, in time, Rena and he preferred it here. When Gurdial Singh retired, he was Inspector General of Prisons, Madras. It was while he was Superintendent, Vellore Jail, that Congressmen like Rajaji, and others who were to become leaders in the New India, were his prisoners. The extroverted Gurdial Singh was soon friends with all of them. It was a friendship that was to have two consequences.
When Gurdial Singh retired, Rajaji invited him to stay on in Madras — and the Gill family became a Madras name, echoed in Gill Nagar, Gill Adarsh, etc. More significantly, Rajaji invited, through him, post-Partition refugees from what became Pakistan to make a home in Madras. And, so, Madras and Coimbatore welcomed 5,000 Punjabi and Sindhi families in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Helping them settle in was the Punjab Association that had been founded in 1942 with the ‘Colonel Saab’ as its Founder President. The Association, which grew out of the weekend social gatherings of the few Punjabis settled in the city in the 1930s, today runs 85 institutions in the city and suburbs, including, from 1953, eight major educational institutions.
In 1951, the Colonel, not the most religious of men, decided the Sikhs in Madras needed a gurdwara. And so there began another fund collection drive. Work on the gurdwara began in 1951 and, in 1952, the Guru Granth Sahib was installed. Then he turned his attention to establishing Guru Nanak College and a secondary school in the 1970s.
Indeed, the contribution he and the Punjab Association have made to Madras is significant. In a neat bit of coincidence, his son belonged to the 1st Para Battalion, which had been 1 Punjab, which in turn had been 1 Madras, its roots the oldest in the Indian Army.
S. MUTHIAH
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