The village
A walk through a Punjabi pind, and how the land is owned and farmed.
A walk through a village
The pindTap a number to look around a Punjabi pind as it was within living memory.
Wheat and mustard in winter, rice or cotton in summer. Today a tubewell with a small brick room stands in many fields, where the farmer sleeps at harvest time.
Before tubewells, oxen walked round and round turning the halt, the Persian wheel, lifting a chain of pots from the well into the channels. The khooh was where women filled pitchers, and where lovers in the qisse met. Persian wheel →
The dirt road that circles the village, with the houses inside and the fields outside. Wedding processions and the jaggo dance go round it.
The village square under the great banyan, where the men sit on charpais, talk, play cards and settle disputes. The panchayat meets here. Bohr →
The shared tandoor, where women of the lane brought their dough in the evening and baked rotis together, swapping news. Its name became a byword for living together across castes and faiths.
A courtyard where the girls gathered to spin through the winter, singing. The spinning wheel →
Before 1947 many Punjabi villages had all three within a few lanes of each other. On either side of the border, the old buildings of the faith that left are often still standing.
Most families lived in flat-roofed kothas of mud brick round a courtyard, with the buffaloes at one end. The lambardar or landlord had a brick haveli with a carved wooden door. The roof's edge is the banera, where the crow caws. The crow on the roof →
The village pond, dug out for the mud to make bricks: buffaloes wallow in it, boys swim in it, and in the monsoon it overflows into the lanes. The buffalo →
A small shrine at the edge of the village, often of a Muslim pir or Gugga, where people of every faith tie threads, light a lamp on Thursday, and hold a yearly mela. Folk faith →
The cremation ground and the graveyard lie outside the phirni, on the edge of the fields.
Land and livelihood
Before the canals, much of the Punjab was dry grazing land, the bar, worked by herders and watered by wells and the uncertain monsoon. Between 1885 and 1940 the British dug perennial canals across the doabs and founded nine canal colonies in the west, settling farmers from the crowded central districts on the new land. Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, was laid out in the 1890s as the colony's market town. The Punjab became the granary of British India, and its sons the backbone of its army.
Partition cut through the canal system, and in 1960 the Indus Waters Treaty divided the rivers: the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to India, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan. India built the Bhakra dam; Pakistan built Mangla and link canals to carry western water east. From the mid-1960s new dwarf wheat and rice, tubewells, fertiliser and guaranteed prices brought the Green Revolution to both Punjabs, and Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana became its laboratory.
The towns built a second economy. Partition refugees from the west rebuilt their trades in the east: Hero Cycles, founded in Ludhiana by the Munjal brothers from Kamalia, became the world's largest bicycle maker, Ludhiana the city of hosiery and Jalandhar of sports goods. In the west Faisalabad became Pakistan's textile city, Sialkot made footballs and surgical instruments for the world, and Gujranwala fans and metalwork. Remittances from Punjabis in the Gulf, Britain and Canada built houses and new villages on both sides.
The price has been high. A wheat–rice cycle drinks more groundwater than the rains replace, stubble burning fills the winter air from Lahore to Delhi, soils are worn by chemicals, and farm incomes have fallen behind debt. In Indian Punjab a drug crisis has taken hold of a generation since the 2000s, and the farmers' protest of 2020–21 grew out of fear for the guaranteed prices that hold the system together.
Indian Punjab figures from the Government of Punjab and Wikipedia ('Agriculture in Punjab, India'); Pakistani Punjab from the Punjab government and Pakistan Economic Survey. Shares vary year to year.