Punjab Di Vel

Punjab Di Vel is not only a history of Punjab. It is a history of the region seen through Punjab: through its rivers and trade routes, its movements and ruptures, its languages, resistances, exchanges, and forms of living together. Grounded in rigorous research and a wide range of sources, it traces Punjab’s political and social movements, the many colours of its economic and cultural life, and its yogi-Sufi inheritance.

This history is essential for Punjabis, but its relevance extends far beyond them. It also belongs to the Sindhis, Pakhtuns, Baloch, Brahuis, Muhajirs, Baltis, Kashmiris, and to all the peoples of South Asia whose lives have been shaped, directly or indirectly, by this land.
At the heart of the book lies a series of questions about geography, memory, power, and loss.
What, after all, is this land of five rivers that has been named and remembered since antiquity? How far did its world once extend: toward Khorasan, Balkh and Bukhara; toward the Shivaliks, Tibet, and the Hindu Kush? By what routes did people, goods, languages, beliefs, and stories move across it? How did roads from Little Tibet and mountain passages from the Hindu Kush meet the riverine and maritime routes that flowed from Lake Manasarovar in Tibetan China, through the five great rivers, and down to the Indus Delta?

From these older routes and relationships, the book turns to their disruption. What became of this connected world under British rule? How were its continuities weakened, redirected, and dismantled? Which routes were closed, which centres were displaced, and which relationships were made to appear unnatural?
The question of disruption leads, in turn, to the question of division. Why has the land of the five rivers been made to pass, again and again, through partition and separation? What did it mean to separate Kashmir from the five-river region? What did it mean to close the river-linked port of Lahori Bandar and develop a new port near Karachi? And why, in the seventy-eight years since, have Pakistan and South Asia more broadly done so little to reckon with the legacy of British-era social engineering?
These questions also open onto the political imagination of the region. Why were the people of this land so rarely imagined as citizens rather than subjects; as communities with memory, agency, and belonging, rather than populations to be classified, administered, and divided?
The consequences of communal politics are central to this history. After the United Bengal movement and the Lucknow Pact, the foundations of religious politics were laid with lasting effect. Why did the heaviest burden of that politics fall upon Punjab and Bengal? In 1947, was it India that was divided, or was the Punjab torn apart? And in the seventy-eight years since, why has so much of what has been done to Punjab and Punjabi on both sides only deepened the distance among its people?

That distance was not only territorial or political; it was also linguistic and cultural. After 1947, why did those who had themselves suffered from the Hindi-Urdu divide go on, on one side, to suppress linguistic diversity in the name of a national language, while on the other, Punjabi was targeted in both Punjabs? What did this do to the linguistic and cultural life of the region? And why has the imprint of the colonial mindset continued into the present?
Punjab Di Vel is an attempt to contend with these questions—and to recover what has been fractured.