The manifesto of the five waters

This land is not ordinary

Five rivers come down from the snows, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej, and lay their silt across a plain as flat as a threshing floor. Out of that silt the world's first cities rose, brick by measured brick, at Harappa on the Ravi, when most of the earth was still forest and hunting.

Here the oldest hymns of the Vedas were sung to the rivers by name. Here monks taught the Buddha's word at Taxila, and the Greeks came and stayed to listen. Here Baba Farid spoke to God in the language of the field and the spinning wheel; Guru Nanak sang that there is no Hindu and no Musalman, only the One; Bulleh Shah danced in the bazaar and asked who he was; and Waris Shah made a love story that every Punjabi still knows by heart.

This plain has fed half a continent. It has given its armies their bravest and its poets their longing. Its people learned to plough by day and sing by night, to share one tandoor in one lane, to lay a Muslim pir's lamp beside a Sikh gurdwara and a Hindu shrine. That is the Punjab: not a border, not a faith, but a way of living together on the banks of five rivers.

Every road to India crossed it

Because it was rich, and because it lay on the road, everyone came. Persians and Greeks, Scythians and Huns, Ghaznavids and Ghurids, Mongols, Mughals, Afghans and the British: each came down the Khyber or up from Delhi for its grain, its water and its young men. The Punjab paid at every crossing. Its cities were sacked and rebuilt, its fields trampled and replanted, its people taxed, conscripted and sent to die in other men's wars.

For a thousand years it was ruled from somewhere else. For fifty it ruled itself from Lahore, and then that too was taken. The British drew canals across the bar and filled it with wheat, and drew soldiers from its villages for every war of the empire, from Flanders to Gallipoli to Burma. They called it the sword arm and the granary, and they spent both.

The cruellest cut

In 1947 a stranger who had never seen the Punjab drew a line across it in five weeks. The line ran through fields, through villages, through the middle of families. A million people were killed and ten million driven from homes their grandfathers had built. Trains arrived full of the dead. Wells were filled with women. Lahore and Amritsar, sister cities thirty miles apart, woke up in different countries.

Since then two Punjabs have looked at each other across wire. One language is written in two scripts that cannot read each other. The shrines of one faith stand empty on the far side, and pilgrims need visas to visit the birthplace of their own Guru, the grave of their own saint.

What the land has become

The five rivers are dammed and divided by treaty and sold downstream; some run dry for months of the year. The water table falls a little further every year. The fields that fed a nation are tired with chemicals, and the smoke of burning stubble hangs over them each autumn. Young men leave on aeroplanes and young lives are lost to the needle. The songs are still sung, but more and more of them abroad.

None of this was written into the soil. It was done to the Punjab, and it can be undone.

The way home

We do not need to redraw a map to bring the Punjab back. Its glory was never in its kings. It was in the sanjha chulha, the shared tandoor; in the trinjan where girls of every faith spun and sang; in the langar where anyone may sit; in the qissa that a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh would all weep at.

The Punjab returns when we know its story whole, from Harappa to today, on both sides of the line. It returns when we read each other's script, sing each other's saints, and walk each other's fairs. It returns when the rivers run clean and full again, when the fields are healed, when the sons and daughters who left come home, or take the Punjab with them wherever they go.

This atlas is one small offering to that return: the land of five waters, told whole, for everyone who has ever loved it.