Punjab Quotes

He sat in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammeh, on her old platform, opposite the old Ajaib gher, the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.

Not a believer in the mosque am I, Nor a disbeliever with his rites am I. I am not the pure amongst the impure, I am neither Moses nor Pharaoh. Bulleh, I know not who I am. Not in the holy books am I, Nor do I dwell in bhang or wine, Nor do I live in a drunken haze, Nor in sleep or waking known. Bulleh, I know not who I am. Not in happiness or in sorrow am I found. I am neither pure nor mired in filthy ground. Not of water nor of land, Nor am I in air or fire to be found. Bulleh, I know not who I am. Not an Arab nor Lahori, Not a Hindi or Nagouri, Nor a Muslim or Peshawari, Not a Buddhist or a Christian. Bulleh, I know not who I am. Secrets of religion have I not unravelled, I am not of Eve and Adam. Neither still nor moving on, I have not chosen my own name! Bulleh, I know not who I am. From first to last, I searched myself. None other did I succeed in knowing. Not some great thinker am I. Who is standing in my shoes, alone? Bulleh, I know not who I am.

You never know what to expect on encountering royalty. I've seen 'em stark naked except for wings of peacock feathers (Empress of China), giggling drunk in the embrace of a wrestler (Maharani of the Punjab), voluptuously wrapped in wet silk (Queen of Madagascar), wafting to and fro on a swing (Rani of Jhansi), and tramping along looking like an out-of-work charwoman (our own gracious monarch).

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

During Aurangzeb’s rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.

Coming of age in such an environment, the educated elite of Punjab ends up disowning, in fact, ridiculing anything Punjabi, which includes the poetry of Baba Farid, Guru Nanak, Shah Hussain, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah. Whereas the educated elite can quote verses from Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot, they are completely unaware of their local poets.

How secure is a forty-year-old state? I remember the garrison towns of the Punjab plains, the fenced-off lands, the young soldiers, and I have my answer. To a republic, forty is infancy. And this is its horror, as it carves itself from ancient land, ancient water.

People revered his father as the Lion of Punjab, but his mother is the one they should have called Lioness.

It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety. She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.

Though the Mongols stopped (or were stopped) before reaching Delhi, they destroyed much of Punjab.

Many of the sites initially associated with the Indus Valley Civilization were in the portion of the Punjab

Punjab had sent its boys across an ocean. Waves of grief rolled back.

the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’. There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future.

my issue with what they consider beautiful is their concept of beauty centers around excluding people i find hair beautiful when a woman wears it like a garden on her skin that is the definition of beauty big hooked noses pointing upward to the sky like they’re rising to the occasion skin the color of earth my ancestors planted crops on to feed a lineage of women with thighs thick as tree trunks eyes like almonds deeply hooded with conviction the rivers of punjab flow through my bloodstream so don’t tell me my women aren’t as beautiful as the ones in your country

One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.

Even in the palmiest days of the Khalsa it is astonishing how small a proportion of the Punjab population was of the Sikh profession. The fierce fanaticism of the earlier years of the century was succeeded by the unequalled military organisation of the Maharaja, and these together enabled a people who were never numerically more than a sect of Hinduism to overrun the whole Punjab and Kashmir, to beat back the Afghans to the mountains, and to found a powerful kingdom in which they were outnumbered by Hindus and Muhammadans by ten to one.

What do the Gandhi-caps in Delhi know about the Punjab? What is happening on the other side in Pakistan does not matter to them. They have not lost their homes and belongings; they haven’t had their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters raped and murdered in the streets.

The world was different before the war,' he said. 'We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.

...if we accept contemporary literature as sufficient evidence, the society of Paris today is fully as corrupt as that of the Punjab in 1830; and the bazaars of Lahore, while Ranjit Singh was celebrating the festival of the Holi, were not so shameless as Piccadilly at night in 1892.

Taking the logic of Jinnah's demand to its extreme, Congress now offered him a 'Pakistan' stripped of the Punjab's eastern divisions (Ambala and Jullundur), Assam (except Sylhet district) and western Bengal and Calcutta - the 'mutilated and moth-eaten' Pakistan which Jinnah had rejected out of hand in 1944 and again in May 1946. Such a permanent settlement would at a stroke eject Jinnah from the centre, clear the way for a strong unitary government wholly under Congress's sway, and give away only parts of provinces which past experience had shown lay outside the Congress's ken.

...the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxicab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa- and channa-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which I had danced at my cousin’s wedding. In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the colour spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.

A Wrong Planet Chef always take an interest in the origins of the food he cooks. A particular dish of vegetables, herbs and spices could, for instance, have begun life 5000 years ago on the Indian subcontinent, perhaps in Central India where vegetarian Hindi food is considered as God (Brahman) as it sustains the entire physical, mental, emotional and sensual aspects of the human being. The dish may then have migrated to the Punjab region of the Indian-Pakistan border - The Land of Five Waters - around 250 BC, and from here could have moved on to Western Asia or North Africa as soldiers and merchants moved west with their families into the Eastern parts of the Roman empire, where the cooks would have experimented with new combinations of food, adding fruits, shellfish or poultry to the exotic dish. The dish could then have travelled in any direction heading North through Germany or Sweden to Britain or maybe migrating through Persia or North Africa to Spain and Portugal, creating two very distinct and separate menus but meeting once again in France

launching a satyagraha before training a cadre to keep it non-violent was ‘a Himalayan miscalculation’ on his part.

Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government’s Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.

I don’t seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of atheists and agnostics in the six counties of Northern Ireland, even though Ulster as well as Ireland has been divided. Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. There’s an old argument about whether full bellies or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt: it’s an argument not worth having. The crucial organ is the mind, not the gut. People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.

founded by the British hero Sir Henry Lawrence, who died defending the British Residency during the siege of Lucknow in the 1857 “Indian Mutiny.” He authored a legal code in the Punjab that forbade forced labor, infanticide, and the practice of sati, self-immolation by widows. Hard as it may be to accept, things aren’t always as simple as they’re made out to be. The motto of our school was “Never Give In.

He died that night – if not a broken man, then a profoundly disillusioned one. He had wanted an undivided Punjab and Bengal; he had hoped to win Kashmir and Junagadh52; he had fought for the moral high ground. His people, by 1948, were homeless, disorientated and angry. The central government was quarrelling with the Sindhis; the Mohajirs with the locals; the country as a whole with its neighbour. Everybody

In the absence of democratic politics, the dominance of a predominantly Punjabi civil bureaucracy and army heightened the grievances of non-Punjabi provinces and the linguistic groups within them. Te entrenched institutional supremacy of a Punjabi army and federal bureaucracy, not Punjab’s dominance over other provinces per se, had emerged as the principal impediment to restoring democratic processes in Pakistan.

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter’s clothes. Or it’ll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don’t want to be here and they don’t want to be there. They can’t be here and I can’t be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood.

Most of us are so unconcerned with this extraordinary universe about us; we never even see the waving of the leaf in the wind; we never watch a blade of grass, touch it with our hand and know the quality of its being. This is not just being poetic, so please do not go off into a speculative, emotional state. I say it is essential to have that deep feeling for life and not be caught in intellectual ramifications, discussions, passing examinations, quoting and brushing something new aside by saying it has already been said. Intellect is not the way. Intellect will not solve our problems; the intellect will not give us that nourishment which is imperishable. The intellect can reason, discuss, analyze, come to a conclusion from inferences, and so on, but intellect is limited, for intellect is the result of our conditioning. But sensitivity is not. Sensitivity has no conditioning; it takes you right out of the field of fears and anxieties…. We spend our days and years in cultivating the intellect, in arguing, discussing, fighting, struggling to be something, and so on. And yet this extraordinarily wonderful world, this earth that is so rich—not the Bombay earth, the Punjab earth, the Russian earth, or the American earth—this earth is ours, yours and mine, and that is not sentimental nonsense; it is a fact. But unfortunately we have divided it up through our pettiness, through our provincialism. And we know why we have done it—for our security, for better jobs and more jobs. That is the political game that is being played throughout the world, and so we forget to be human beings, to live happily on this earth that is ours, and to make something of it.

Es un momento histórico por otra razón, cargada de un simbolismo que demuestra la diversidad de la India, su capacidad para la convivencia y su creciente movilidad social. Sonia Gandhi, criada como católica, cede el poder a un primer ministro sij, nacido en 1932 en una familia muy humilde del Punjab occidental, hoy perteneciente a Pakistán, y conocido por su irreprochable honestidad. Y lo hace en presencia de un presidente de la República musulmán llamado Abdul Kalam, nacido en una familia paupérrima y experto en física nuclear. Hace menos de un siglo, nadie hubiera podido imaginar que esto pudiera ocurrir en el país donde hasta hace poco el nacimiento, y no el mérito, determinaba el curso de la existencia. Y hace tan sólo un mes, ¿quién hubiera podido predecir semejante ceremonia entre tres representantes de religiones minoritarias?

Partition tore India into three pieces. Disaster struck. There was East Pakistan, there was West Pakistan, and there was the rest of India. Millions of people were uprooted from their houses, tens of thousands massacred on both sides. It was one of the greatest mass migrations and killings in human history. People today do not realize the tremendous trauma of Partition, whose negative vibrations continue to haunt us even today.

During the eighteenth century the Punjab was the scene of ceaseless turmoil between Sikhs and Moslems, and on January 7, 1761, at the battle of Panipat, the Sikhs were defeated. On their homeward march the victorious Moslems destroyed the holy city of Amritsar, blew up the Golden Temple with gunpowder, filled the sacred pool with mud, and purposely defiled the holy place by slaughtering a lot of holy cows within the temple enclosure. Although this happened in 1761, the Sikhs have neither forgotten nor forgiven it. When the Partition of India took place and Pakistan came into being, the dividing line passed between Amritsar and Lahore, leaving many thousands of Sikhs and Moslems on the wrong side of the line. In the scramble to get out of India and into Pakistan, great numbers of Moslems were killed by Sikhs. On the other hand, the Moslems who were already in Pakistan avenged themselves by slaughtering thousands of Sikhs who were trying to escape into India. How

NATIONAL ANTHEM OF AZAD HIND May Good Fortune, Happiness and ease rain down upon India; On Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha on Orissa and Bengal, On the Indian Ocean, on the Vindhya Mountains, On the Himalayas, the blue Jamuna and the Ganges. May thy ways be priased, from Thee our life from thy body our hope. May the rising sun shine down upon the world and exalt the name of India In every heart may thy love grow and thy sweetness take shape. So that every dweller in every province. Every faith united, every secret and mystery put aside. May come into thy embrace, in plaited garlands of love. May the rising sun shine down upon the world and exalt the name of India. May the early morning with the wings of a bird praise Her. And with all the power and fullness of the winds bringing freshness into life. Let us join together and shout: ‘Long Live India’, our beloved country. The rising sun shines upon the earth, exalting the name of India. Victory! May India’s name be praised. Translated by C.H. IVENS

Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely! And that was one of the reasons why for me moving to New York felt- so unexpectedly- like coming home. But there were other reasons as well: the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxi cab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa-and china-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which I had danced at my cousin's wedding. In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. What? My voice is rising? You are right; I tend to become sentimental when I think of that city. It still occupies a place of great fondness in my heart, which is quite something, I must say, given the circumstances under which, after only eight months of residence, I would later depart.

Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

It was late evening and as she came out to wear her sneakers, she was met by not a very charitable glance of another bhaiji. He always sat there, at the entrance, as a kind of watchman. He commented on Nanaki’s scarf and advised her to come properly clad in a dupatta. She walked out in a huff, heckles raised. Who was this man? Who was he to tell her how she ought to be dressed? Whose rules were these? In all honesty, Nanaki’s visit to the gurudwara was her own personal matter. It was more or less an aesthetic experience, feeding a very personal need for which she felt she owed no one an explanation.

Evidently Nehru, though a nationalist at the political level, was intellectually and emotionally drawn to the Indus civilization by his regard for internationalism, secularism, art, technology and modernity. By contrast, Nehru’s political rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, neither visited Mohenjo-daro nor commented on the significance of the Indus civilization. Nor did Nehru’s mentor, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, India’s greatest nationalist leader. In Jinnah’s case, this silence is puzzling, given that the Indus valley lies in Pakistan and, moreover, Jinnah himself was born in Karachi, in the province of Sindh, not so far from Mohenjo-daro. In Gandhi’s case, the silence is even more puzzling. Not only was Gandhi, too, an Indus dweller, so to speak, having been born in Gujarat, in Saurashtra, but he must surely also have become aware in the 1930s of the Indus civilization as the potential origin of Hinduism, plus the astonishing revelation that it apparently functioned without resort to military violence. Yet, there is not a single comment on the Indus civilization in the one hundred large volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The nearest he comes to commenting is a touching remark recorded by the Mahatma’s secretary when the two of them visited the site of Marshall’s famous excavations at Taxila, in northern Punjab, in 1938. On being shown a pair of heavy silver ancient anklets by the curator of the Taxila archaeological museum, ‘Gandhiji with a deep sigh remarked: “Just like what my mother used to wear.

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The four-month monsoon season ended last week leaving a deficit of 12 per cent. The authorities have called it a below-normal monsoon and the worst in the past five years, but skim the data and the picture seems even more sobering. Nearly one-third of the 36 met divisions in the country have received deficient rainfall, with Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh — which are major agriculture regions — reporting a 50 per cent deficit.

on 12 October 1984, just a few weeks before the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Atal declared, ‘Our hour of trial is approaching. This government is a danger to democracy. In its insatiable lust for power, one single family has jeopardized the unity of an entire nation. In Punjab there is neither peace nor settlement. In Assam there is lull before a storm; a terrible crisis in Assam can erupt now.

The act of immolation is first described in Greek texts, quoting from earlier accounts referring to incidents of the fourth century BC. Widows are burnt on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands among the Katheae (Kshatriya or khattiya) in the Punjab. Unable to explain this practice the author remarks that it was an attempt to prevent wives from poisoning their husbands!

A psychology of looting and disregard for the rule of law took hold of the ruling coterie in Pakistan early on. The initial gold mine was the allotment of properties abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and, subsequently, also in Sindh. Senior civil bureaucrats in cahoots with prominent Muslim League politicians had the pick of the field but did not fail to pass on some of the lesser goods as favors to those with contacts. Individual citizens with little or no influence had to settle for whatever was left over, which in most cases was very modest.

Khalil always gives me food as though I’m worse than a dog. Misty-eyed, I note he doesn’t look the same as usual. He stares at me. He’s about to say something, laughs and tells me: ‘Your guardian angel has just been assassinated because of you. Your beloved Governor Salman Taseer, that Muslim traitor, is now bathing in his own blood. He was killed with twenty-five bullets in Islamabad for defending you. Good riddance! You’d better keep your head down!’ Salman Taseer was a good man. He was governor of my province, the largest and richest in Pakistan. With its ninety million inhabitants, they call Punjab the ‘land of the five rivers’ and ‘the land of the pure’; Salman Taseer was one of those. He wasn’t a typical politician, he wasn’t power-hungry and greedy like some, he was a humanist who was quick to oppose the Taliban and the Islamic extremists. When he heard about my death sentence, he defended me in public.

We went in. I was dazzled by a yellow light. There were a lot of people in there, making a lot of noise. A tall, heavily built man in glasses came towards me. ‘Hello, Asia, I’m Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab. I’ve heard about what happened to you and I know that you’ve been victimised. I’ve organised a press conference, so you can tell the whole world that you are innocent.

Sir John Lawrence, who may be taken as the archetype of the enlightened British administrator in India, was the head of the Punjab committee which was appointed in 1858 to study the military problems that had led to the great revolt.

Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims mainly, but also Dogras and Gurkhas, had enlisted on the Empire’s behalf.)

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I would learn many years later that although Sindh and Punjab had been geographically and culturally close, their experience of Partition was vastly different with respect to violence.

Asia Bibi is a Pakistani wife and mother living under sentence of death. Since 2009 she has been in prison in Sheikhupura, in the province of Punjab, where she is held in appalling conditions unworthy of a democracy. Her crime? She’s a Christian who drank a cup of water from a well used by her Muslim friends.

The black embossed type jiggled in front of my eyes. I should have known. Huntin’ shootin’ fishin.’ It sounded like some sort of joke; the g was missing from all three words. But the Medievals didn’t make mistakes; if they made errors—the Punjab, the Carphone Warehouse—they were deliberate. Henry had written the blood sports like that for a reason, exactly as he said them.

Guru Angad named Guru Amar Das, also a Khatri but of the Bhalla clan, as the third Guru.

Caste taboos had been broken, and a measure of equality introduced. But they had also become a distinct community, which for writing used a new script called

Non-Muslims were asked—in 1679, four years after Guru Tegh Bahadur’s death—to pay the jizya, a practice Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier.

Khafi Khan would record that no Sikh prisoner accepted Islam to save his life.

Rajput forces resisting them did not lack ‘in numbers’ or ‘the martial spirit’, but evidently they were ‘inferior in terms of organization and leadership…and did not have a unified command’.

Baba Farid seems to have said to his disciples, ‘Give me not a knife but a needle. I want to sew together, not cut asunder.

Khanqas not only brought Hindus and Muslims together, but they also narrowed the gulf that divided the Muslims of foreign origin and local converts.

Jatts, Rajputs, Gujjars, Gakhars and others—accepted Islam during the Sultanate era,

Like Guru Nanak after him, Baba Farid suggested that at a basic level a Muslim and a Hindu were the same, sharing the joy and pain of being human.

Deception, war, fratricide, and the murder or blinding of closely-related rivals would mark virtually every succession in Mughal times, as it had done during the Sultanate.

But her confusion gives me hope. If there's one thing dangerously abundant right now it is certainly. Certainty makes possible in men the most extreme good and the most extreme evil. A land like the Punjab, five rivers and three faiths, could do with a little less certainty.

In March 1748, different Sikh jathas or groups agreed to form a Dal Khalsa, an army of the Singhs, under the leadership of another Jassa Singh—Jassa Singh Ahluwalia81—who advanced the idea that the Khalsa should one day govern Punjab.

Ranjit Singh used money and clan rivalries to divide the tribes and, from time to time, the kingdom’s organized force to subdue them.

The year 1834 saw unrestrained fighting between Nalwa’s force and Pashtun tribals. The latter’s ambushes and sniping were countered by the destruction, under Nalwa’s command, of whole villages and the construction of a series of forts.

Guru Nanak was born in 1469 into the Bedi clan of the Khatri caste of Hindus in a Punjab which had seen Timur’s brutal invasion only seventy years earlier.

Thus the Gurus were all from the ‘high’ Khatri caste of traders and administrators but within that caste from middle-level clans or sub-castes.

Thus Punjabi became the ‘Sikh’ language, Urdu the ‘Muslim’ language, and Hindi the ‘Hindu’ language. Language was uprooted from ground-level and tied to religion rather than to the varied people who spoke it, or the tract where it was spoken.

These saints and their associates/disciples converted most of the Rajput/Jat tribes [of Punjab]…to Islam. This process of conversion, begun in the early 13th century, continued till the close of the 19th century.

Each suba contained a dozen or so sarkars, each of them led by a faujdar, usually a military officer.

stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province’s west,

Punjab’s Muslim leaders did not necessarily believe that Pakistan would bring benefits.

elections held during the winter of 1945-46 accelerated polarization across India around the INC and the League,

Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it was called, contains no Muslim name and only one Sikh name, that of Bhagat Singh.

Punjabi political leaders who finally joined the Muslim League’ apparently ‘hoped that that the concession of Pakistan in name’ would somehow preserve ‘a united India in fact’.

stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province’s west, Sikhs in the centre, and Hindu Jats in the east

a minority community would have ‘weightage’, i.e. a representation larger than what the population ratio warranted

when World War I started, and Turkey aligned itself with the Empire’s foe, Germany, India’s Muslims felt even more conflicted.

Iqbal seemed reluctant to defy the Raj over Turkey.

Out of a total of 683,149 combatant troops recruited in India between August 1914 and November 1918, 349,688—about sixty percent—came from the Punjab.

the address urged the Empire through its Viceroy to remember ‘not merely’ the Muslims’ ‘numerical strength’ but also their ‘political importance’, their service ‘in defence of the Empire’, and their past position, lasting until ‘a little more than a hundred years ago’, as India’s rulers.

Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India.

the Empire had enabled Sayyid Ahmed’s ideological successors to walk off with the prize of a separate Muslim electorate in India as a whole.

The Minto-Morley package, for which the INC could take some credit, was initially disliked by many Hindu Punjabis.They saw the INC as having unwisely pressurized the Raj, equally foolishly sought a joint Hindu-Muslim agenda, and then failed to prevent a separate Muslim electorate.

am I inferior simply because I am not English born? Am I to be a slave because I am an Indian?

Dalhousie proved staunch in his imperialist and modernizing convictions and resolute in his conclusion, quickly formed, of Indian inferiority.

Rahmat Ali envisaged a sovereign Muslim state which he called Pakistan, comprising P(unjab), A(fghania—or the Northwest Frontier), K(ashmir), S(indh) and Baluch(stan).

the Empire was naturally attracted towards the foes of its chief Indian foe, the Congress

Churchill in London and men like Hailey in India were troubled by the success of the Salt March of 1930, a Gandhi-Irwin Pact that followed in March 1931, and Gandhi being invited to London later that year.

Congress charged that the Empire was practising divide-and-rule, its Indian and British opponents countered that the INC did not represent all of India.

In Punjab’s 175-strong legislature, Muslims were given 48 per cent of the seats, Hindus 24 per cent and Sikhs 18 per cent.

In the Punjab of 1857, flattery was realism’s sibling.

Nicholson’s force, largely European but with a contingent also of Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, moved out of Amritsar that night.

four separate columns launched into Delhi through breaches in the city’s northern and western walls, between Kashmiri Gate and Lahori Gate.

Sikhs in the raiding party ‘shouted with delight’ when Hodson murdered the princes.

Bloodlust found free play in recaptured Delhi. Wilson ordered that anyone found with a weapon should be killed, not taken prisoner. In the event, the empty-handed too were slain.

Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, Pashtuns and Gurkhas joined the British in the slaughter

400 mutineers were hanged simultaneously, while British officers seated beneath sipped whiskies and sodas and regimental bands played.