The Punjab: Moving Journeys
Please follow the link for details about the exhibition by the Royal Geographical Society on the Punjab. The exhibition is on from 9 September – 27 November 2008, open Monday – Friday, 10.00 -17.00. Free Entry
http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/Exhibitions/Exhibition.htm
- Bakshi Mulray (Governor of Gilgit) & Mehal Singh (Commanding Radur Regiment) in the Vale of Kashmir, Artist / photographer: Anon, Date: 1865 – 1866, Image taken during the ‘Gilgit Mission’ of 1885-86 with Colonel W.S.A Lockhart and Colonel R.G. Woodthrope. © Royal Geographical Society
Officers of the Gilgit Mission. Date: 1885 – 1886, Caption: Photograph taken on the 'Gilgit Mission' of Colonel W.S. A. Lockhart and Colonel R.G. Woodthorpe. © Royal Geographical Society
The Voice from the Rural Areas: Muslim-Sikh Relations in the British Punjab, 1940-47
Akhtar Hussain Sandhu, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Akhtar Sandhu PRG presentation ‘The Voice from the Rural Areas: Muslim-Sikh Relations in the British Punjab, 1940-47′
Akhtar is currently in the UK attached to the University of Southampton. He presented this paper at the June PRG meeting and would like others to read it and share any comments or provide feedback. Please either post your comments directly on the blog or email Akhtar directly on akhtar.sandhu@gmail.com.
The reader is requested to observe copyright conventions regarding this paper and seek the permission of the author when citing material.
PRG meeting 25 October 2008
Details of the next Punjab Research Group meeting
VENUE: Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR,
DATE: 25 October 2008
The speakers are:
Kiran Kalsi, London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan University
‘Self determination – how Faith shapes and informs the business experience of an Asian woman entrepreneur’
Ruth Pearson and Anitha Sundari, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds and Linda McDowell, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
‘The experience of Punjabi women in the West London labour market: The case of the Gate Gourmet workers’
Amandeep Singh Madra, UK Punjab Heritage Association
‘Preservation of Heritage in the Punjab’
Ilyas Chattha, University of Southampton
‘Perpetrators and Victims of Partition Violence: Case of Gujranwala’
Jasjit Singh, Theology & Religious Studies Dept, University of Leeds
‘Head First: Young British Sikhs, Hair and the Turban’.
Attached is the full programme, including abstracts of all the papers. prg-programme-oct-081
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Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab
Alyssa Ayres is an international consultant based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor of India Review. Please see an abstract of her latest article appearing in the latest edition of JAS, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JAS
Alyssa Ayres, ‘Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab’ in the The Journal of Asian Studies (2008), 67:917-946 Cambridge University Press
Abstract
A movement to “revive the spirit of Punjab and Punjabi” in South Asia has enabled a surprising thaw between the two Punjabs of Pakistan and India. That this revival movement has been catalyzed from within Pakistan rather than India raises intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation-insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land-its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan’s Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the center against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan’s troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture’s critical role in the nation’s political imagination.
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Amrita Pritam – Ode to Waris Shah
Amrita Pritam in 1948. Photograph courtesy of Amarjit Chandan Collection
Translation from the original in Punjabi by Khushwant Singh. Amrita Pritam: Selected Poems. Ed Khushwant Singh. (Bharatiya Jnanpith Publication, 1992)
TO WARIS SHAH
To Waris Shah I turn today!
Speak up from the graves midst which you lie!
In our book of love, turn the next leaf.
When one daughter of the Punjab did cry
You filled pages with songs of lamentation,
Today a hundred daughters cry
0 Waris to speak to you.
O friend of the sorrowing, rise and see your Punjab
Corpses are strewn on the pasture,
Blood runs in the Chenab.
Some hand hath mixed poison in our live rivers
The rivers in turn had irrigated the land.
From the rich land have sprouted venomous weeds
flow high the red has spread
How much the curse has bled!
The poisoned air blew into every wood
And turned the flute bamboo into snakes
They first stung the charmers who lost their antidotes
Then stung all that came their way
Their lips were bit, fangs everywhere.
The poison spread to all the lines
All of the Punjab turned blue.
Song was crushed in every throat;
Every spinning wheel’s thread was snapped;
Friends parted from one another;
The hum of spinning wheels fell silent.
All boats lost the moorings
And float rudderless on the stream
The swings on the peepuls’ branches
I lave crashed with the peepul tree.
Where the windpipe trilled songs of love
That flute has been lost
Ranjah and his brothers have lost their art.
Blood keeps falling upon the earth
Oozing out drop by drop from graves.
The queens of love
Weep in tombs.
It seems all people have become Qaidos,
Thieves of beauty and love
Where should I search out
Another Waris Shah.
Waris Shah
Open your grave;
Write a new page
In the book of love.
NOTES
Waris Shah (1706 -1798) was a Punjabi poet, best-known for his seminal work Heer Ranjha, based on the traditional folk tale of Heer and her lover Ranjha. Heer is considered one of the quintessential works of classical Punjabi literature.
Qaido – A maternal uncle of Heer in Heer Ranjha is the villain who betrays the lovers.
The Punjab – the region of the five rivers east of Indus: Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej.
Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed states in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7,226,000 Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition. About 11.2 million or 78% of the population transfer took place in the west, with Punjab accounting for most of it; 5.3 million Muslims moved from India to West Punjab in Pakistan, 3.4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to East Punjab in India; elsewhere in the west 1.2 million moved in each direction to and from Sind.
The newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude, and massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths range around roughly 500,000, with low estimates at 200,000 and high estimates at 1,000,000.
Photographs from East Punjab, 1978
Photographs taken during a trip to East Punjab in 1978 by Marek Jakubowski, architect and photographer originally from Warsaw and now living in London.
In a village, Dalla, Ludhiana, 1978
Punjab Research Group 
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