Two Punjabs, Countless Punjabis

What does it mean to be a Punjabi today?

Where are you from? Your parents? Your grand-parents?

Many of us have often encountered these questions any time we have stepped out of our homes, whether literal or metaphorical. In the age of nauseatingly instant and global online connections, it still somehow means something to trace one’s roots to a place. But when we do that, it’s not just about a latitudinal and longitudinal point but an entire universe that exists within it. It spans religions, languages, traditions and customs, architecture, food, clothing, dance, music, literature, poetry, and popular entertainment, and so much more. Almost as if out of nowhere, this place can bring alive a past, present, and possibly even a future that didn’t exist minutes ago. It brings forth much that we didn’t consciously know but which still feels like an important part of who we are, even if only subconsciously.

A traditional Punjabi home in Bathinda. Photo by Garima Garg.

As common as these experiences are for most of us, they can be stranger still for some. For Punjabis, for instance, a part of this universe can be rather inaccessible and feels almost like a mythical land due to the complexities of the India-Pakistan Partition in 1947. The land was divided into two parts arbitrarily and Punjab became one of the regions that bore the heavier brunt of the event. This is where our tale of two Punjabs and countless Punjabis begins.

While home is a source of comfort and nourishment, it also shapes who we are intrinsically. So, what happens when the very idea of home itself is complicated? For an Indian, it would be natural to connect with a fellow citizen but for a Punjabi, it can be even more joyful to connect with a counterpart from across the border. In over seven decades post the Partition, Punjabis from India and Pakistan have mostly found each other abroad or online. Whenever this happens, it can be a pleasant surprise, lead to a surge of painful memories, or an existential crisis.

Punjabis, irrespective of where and how they live today, are an incredibly diverse cohort. They come from religions of Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Jainism; speak languages of Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and English; live in countries of India, Pakistan, and rest of the world; and finally, while some of them are older than the Partition itself, many of the younger ones don’t even know that there is more than one Punjab. Where their Punjabi origins are nothing but home on an individual level, collectively the shared identity spans a tragic and difficult past, a paradoxical and chaotic present, and an uncertain future.

For Aanchal Malhotra, 32, this complexity manifested in her own family and became the reason for her deep research into the event of Partition leading to her first book, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory. While her maternal grandparents travelled to India from Lahore, her paternal grandparents made the journey from Malakwal (about 250 kms from Lahore) and Muryali in NWFP. But it wasn’t until she started exploring her family’s history that she began to understand how much had remained hidden. “I grew up in Delhi and apart from my last name, I didn’t have much sense of being a Punjabi,” she says. “Of course, there were wedding rituals and the general Punjabi culture but you don’t really have a sense of ancestral ties,” she explains, “like when you are in school and everyone discusses about going to this place or that to their nani’s (maternal grandmother) home because for me, she lived in Delhi itself.”

The author, who is based in Delhi, writes evocatively of the journeys of her grandparents and shares that even though there is so much more to the Partition, hardly anything about it is taught in schools. “We were not taught about human element of it and we were not taught to think about it personally,” she says. The book, then, is an archive of many such stories and packs unlikely and infinite layers to an event that is often taken as a fact today. For instance, she writes of a Pirzada Abd-e-Saeed Pakistani, a man who had wanted the new nation to the extent of wearing it on his sleeves but who also ended up dropping the suffix after the Partition actually took place. He replaced it with Jullunduri when he found out that his birthplace of Jalandhar wouldn’t be included in Pakistan. This change, as simple as it was, was his way of carrying his home with himself. She also narrates the stories of Justice Bakshi Tek Chand and Shib Dai Verma, both of whom went through the motions of the Partition without really believing that it was truly taking place.

“When these people talk about Partition, politics is not the first thing they think about,” Malhotra explains. “They think of home and belonging and so Partition cannot just be a political memory but has to be an ethnographic and familial memory too,” she says. She adds that while she has met many young people who don’t know of the Punjab on the other side of the border, it is also rather paradoxical how there is an instant warmth in the connection when Indians and Pakistanis meet abroad.

Vikram Jain, 34, would agree. During his time in Paris between 2010 to 2012 for his MBA and internships, he found himself gravitating to Pakistani Punjabis more than non-Punjabi Indians. “My roommate was from Chennai and we could only talk in English, which felt quite unnatural to me,” he says. Jain, who works in tech finance, grew up in Delhi though his family belongs to the Ropar city of India’s Punjab. He says his connections were often based on music, food, and language. “It was much easier to be around Pakistani Punjabis because I could play Harbhajan Mann or Gurdas Mann songs and they would know of these songs,” he shares. “Once my friends and I were on a quest to find samosas and paranthas in Paris and it was a Pakistani Punjabi friend who ended up locating a place an hour outside the city,” he explains, “this place was owned by a Sikh couple and we would go there atleast once a month for the good, homemade food.” In an another example, he informs how he’d get talking to Punjabi vendors near Eiffel Tower only to discover much later in the conversation that they were from Pakistan.

An international student studying in the UK, originally from Punjab in Pakistan, who did not want to disclose her identity shares her experiences. “The Punjabi language is part of our everyday culture and there is an inherent joy in speaking that as opposed to any other language such as Urdu, English, equally becoming common,” she says. “I had the opportunity to interact with people from Indian Punjab particularly during my academic career in the UK,” she adds, “I didn’t find any difference except perhaps in the differing Punjabi accent, which is also quite common if you travel from Northern to Southern Punjab in Pakistan.” For Punjabi speakers, figuring out someone’s birthplace through their accent or dialect is quite the fun sport, in fact.

Reiterating the Punjabi love for music and stories, she says, “The Punjabi culture is very evident in all aspects of our lives, from the music we listen to, such as Noor Jehan’s famous Punjabi songs, or the stories we have heard growing up and often enact in plays, such as that of Heer Ranjha.” Indeed, the story of the star-crossed lovers, Heer Ranjha, is geographically located in the Pakistan Punjab but reverberates across the modern-day India through Bollywood songs such as Heer and Ranjha.

Many Punjabi songs hark back to connections that may be missed by an uninitiated listener. From Hans Raj Hans’ Panj Baariyan to Hadiqa Kiani’s Boohey Baariyan and most recently, Darshan Raval’s Hawa Banke; from Shaukat Ali’s Kadi Te Has Bol Ve to Neeraj Sridhar’s Aahun Aahun and most recently, Kanika Kapoor’s Roll Roll; from the immensely popular Punjabi wedding song Kala Doriya Kunde Naal to a more hip rendition of it in a Saif Ali Khan movie, Kaala Doreya. These threads, endlessly entwined with each other, are amongst the many infinite ways in Punjabi culture has survived and renewed itself across religions, socio-economic and technological changes, and tense politics. Many Punjabi songs, whether they are Coke Studio productions or albums by independent singers, have listeners on both sides gush and reminisce about their shared culture in comments. In addition to this, Punjabis on both sides swear by the poetry of Bulleh Shah, music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, melancholy of Sahir Ludhianvi and Shiv Kumar Batalvi, and in the wake of passing of the Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar days ago, Pakistan shared the grief.

But beyond the sheer joy of finding one’s home in a myriad of ways, what does this shared identity really mean in broader terms? “I remember having a few drinks and trying to explain to a Singaporean colleague that her Pakistani Punjabi colleague and I were like brothers, just separated by a border,” says Gokul Sahni, 34. “I liken the two sides like either a couple that has divorced, or a set of siblings that has irreconcilable differences, perhaps over a massive property dispute,” he adds. Sahni spent his early childhood in Northern Ireland but grew up in Chandigarh. “My connection with Punjab really exploded in Class 11 and 12, when I hung out with friends who would speak in Punjabi, listen to Punjabi music, etc,” he says. “It was also a 'coming of age' experience when I realized that I had internalized every part of being Punjabi before without realizing it, and now I began to explicitly think of what was Punjabi and what wasn't,” Sahni adds.

Having studied international relations, he now works in risk management with an international bank in Singapore. “Our people-to-people relations are outstanding when overseas,” he reiterates like others. “That is true now, and it will be in the future also. But that is on a personal level. I'm not convinced that provincial relations between the two Punjabs will resolve anything. In some ways, it can never be resolved,” he says. His assessment of the relations between the two countries is less rose-tinted. “I don't think the commonalities makes the pain goes away. In a weird way, it makes it worse,” he adds. “I foresee only one option - the chasm between India and Pakistan will become so large, that a civilian leader in Pakistan will rise one day and say, screw India,” he begins to offer an idea of a potential future. “Take away power from our military that can do nothing to India, and let's focus on developing ourselves a la Bangladesh today. The two siblings looking away from each other is perhaps the best outcome for peace,” he completes.

Malhotra, who visited Lahore and Karachi in 2014 and 2018 to research and talk about her book, recounts having met Pakistanis who were proud of their national identity but also cherished their Punjabiyat, as she puts it. She writes of Khizar Ji who accompanied her for interview visits to older Pakistanis and often helped dig for insights that only he could as a local. She writes of families embracing her as a member, foregoing the ever-present tenseness between the people of two countries. “You really can’t generalize,” she says, “I find the cultural bonds that connect us to be far more impactful and sacred.”

Perhaps, the realities of two Punjabs and countless Punjabis is really that inconvenient and complex to be put in words. While a country is shaped by much more than its culture, it bears repetition that it is in fact not any less important. Because even though the pain of estrangement between India and Pakistan cannot be undone, it might be softened in decades to come. Even though threads of the connections that run through the lives of Punjabis may loosen, even snap at some point, it may be worthwhile to hold on to them in order to constantly remember and renew them.