The Land

Punjab is a gift of its rivers. Five of them come down out of the Himalaya, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej, and spread across a plain so flat that from the roof of a village house the land runs to the edge of the sky without a fold. They have been laying down silt for millions of years, and the soil they have made is deep, fine and the colour of wheat straw.

To the north the plain breaks against the Shivalik hills, low, scrub-covered and cut by dry stream beds that roar for a few days each monsoon; behind them the snows of the Pir Panjal and the Dhauladhar stand white above the haze on clear winter mornings. To the west the land rises into the Salt Range and the dry Pothohar plateau, and beyond the Indus to the Sulaiman mountains and the passes to Kabul. To the south it fades into the sand of the Thar.

Between each pair of rivers lies a doab, a 'two-waters', each with its own speech and temper. The people of the Majha, the Bari Doab around Amritsar and Lahore, were the heart of the Sikh armies; the Doaba between the Beas and the Sutlej is the greenest and most crowded; the Malwa south of the Sutlej, once dry and sandy, was turned by canals into the granary of India. Further west lay the bars, high uplands between the rivers where cattle-herding clans roamed until the British dug canals through them and settled them with farmers.

It has always been a land on the way to somewhere. Every army that came through the Khyber to the riches of the Ganges had to cross it, and so its people learned to fight, to farm with one eye on the horizon, and to sing about both.