What Punjab is

Punjab is not a state. It is a region of roughly 350,000 square kilometres across two countries, with something like 150 million people, one language in two scripts, and no political unit that corresponds to it.

Pakistani Punjab holds about 127 million people and is the largest province of that country by population. Indian Punjab holds about 30 million and is one of its smaller states. Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and parts of Rajasthan and Jammu were all Punjab within living memory.

Everything in this region's history happened to the whole of it and is now remembered by pieces of it separately. The Sikh Gurus' sites are split. The canal system is split. The literature is split by script. The gharanas are split. The families are split.

This site is written from the Indian side and tries not to pretend that is the whole. Where a place is in Pakistan it says so and does not use the past tense about it.

There is no reasonable prospect of the two halves being administered together and no reason they should not be able to read each other.

That is the smallest useful thing anyone could work on, and it does not need anybody's permission.

By land it is the plain of five rivers between the Indus and the Yamuna, most of it now in Pakistan.

By language it is a belt running from the Pothohar to the Ghaggar, containing at least four things that could be called separate languages if their speakers chose to.

By administration it is two provinces in two countries, one of them a majority of its country and the other about two per cent of its own. All three definitions are in use and none of them contains the others.

What we don't know

  • What Punjab would look like as one readable body of record. Nobody has tried.

Where to check this

  1. Census data for both countries. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • This project's own scope.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 76 accounts in What the Land Holds, the chapter of this site covering the rivers, the soil, the weather and what lives here.