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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
Bringing Punjabiyat Back
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| Modern Punjabi culture remains remarkably little known outside the noisy clichés of Bollywood and music videos. Now, more than 60 years after Partition, this cultural heritage is beginning to move forward. |
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KEYSTONE FEATURES / GETTY IMAGES |
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| Amidst the mass migration and devastation of Partition,
Punjabis of all religious persuasions found that they had to
create new identities.
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| “P |
UNJABI IS MY MOTHER TONGUE, my blood, my soul, my language.
I think, dream and feel in it. I
will also die in it,” proclaims
Amarjit Chandan, an acclaimed
poet born in Kenya. “In pardes
(abroad),” he explains of his adult life spent in London, “I
invented the Punjabiland.” |
For a land that has been home to some of the world’s richest
civilisations, modern Punjabi culture remains remarkably
little known outside the noisy clichés of Bollywood and
music videos. As the Indian state of Punjab grapples with
complex social and economic issues, the Pakistani province
of Punjab collapses due to political woes, and a large
diaspora stays settled all over the globe, Punjabi poets and
storytellers of old seem to be disappearing along with the
water levels in the land of the five rivers. But Punjabis are
nothing if not adept at handling change—it is the legacy of
their own turbulent history, after all—and there are small
but significant signs, that this vibrant melting-pot culture
is on the verge of reemergence.
History has not been kind to the people of Punjab. The
brutal division of the state during Partition led to both carnage
and to one of the biggest mass population movements during the 20th century. Amidst the riots, butchery, rape
and devastation, Punjabis of all religious persuasions suddenly
found that they had to create new identities. In Pakistan,
those identities had to be established through a new,
Urdu-speaking nationalist ethos that sought to reimagine
the country’s history and culture by severing ties with its
neighbour. In India, those identities had to be reshaped by
millions of refugees whose culture, possessions, love and
longing belonged to another place. In the decades after Partition,
hundreds of thousands of Punjabis from both East
Punjab, in India, and West Punjab, in Pakistan, left their
homelands to seek sanctuary and a new life abroad. For
all of these people, the historical and cultural ties to their
motherland had to be reforged. The multi-hued complexion
of both states had become altered radically overnight.
| AMARJIT CHANDAN |
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For Amarjit Chandan, a
Kenyan poet of Punjabi origin,
Lahore is the muse. |
Lahore, the united Punjab’s former capital, had long
been considered the jewel in the crown of North India and
had been developed as a cultural capital under both the
Mughals and Maharaja Ranjit singh. “Jisne Lahore nahi
dekhya, woh janmia nahi (Those who have not seen Lahore,
have not lived),” proclaimed popular lore at the time. With
Lahore as its capital, Punjab’s multilingual, multireligious
culture had flourished in poetry, art, music and literature
in Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi, weaving smoothly in and out
of religious boundaries and between both rich and poor
alike who patronised the baithaks and shrines of the “City
of Gardens”. In 1901, the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya,
India’s first music university funded by public support
and donations, was started there by Vishnu Digambar
Paluskar. The famous Takia Meerasian at the city’s Mocchi
Gate played court to a myriad legendary musicians,
such as ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, who, although from
Lahore district, eventually sought Indian citizenship in
1957, having become disenchanted with the Pakistani government’s
official attitude towards music. He is reputed to
have said: “If, in every home, one child was taught Hindustani
classical music, this country would never have been
partitioned.” In order to begin to understand what the loss
of Lahore meant to Indian Punjab, one must try to imagine
either France without Paris or England without London;
a sense of the cultural desolation begins to resonate.
“The land of the five rivers became a land of two and half
rivers each,” says Nirupama Dutt, an eminent Punjabi journalist,
writer and activist based in Chandigarh. Although
a strong body of Partition literature inevitably emerged,
with courageous writers such as Amrita Pritam depicting
the pain of their upheaval in heartfelt poetry and prose, the
destruction of a once-unified Punjab meant that it would
take decades before a new Punjabi identity could begin to
be reborn.
| SALMAN AHMAD |
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Salman Ahmad,
frontman of the famous Pakistani
Sufi rock band Junoon, has a
fanatical following both in India
and back home. |
Punjabi poetry and literature begins in the realms of Sufism.
The first Punjabi poetry dates back to the 12th century
with Baba Farid, some of whose writings later made their
way into the Guru Granth sahib along with those of Kabir.
spirituality, from both the nascent Sufi and Sikh traditions,
is a strong Punjabi literary theme which has often sought
to straddle the practicality and earthy qualities of village
and agricultural life and tales of tragic love. The celebrated
Punjabi kissas such as ‘Heer-Ranjha’, an ancient story of
two ill-fated lovers that became famous when penned by
Waris shah, a fêted Punjabi Sufi poet, and others such as
‘Mirza-sahiban’, ‘sassi-Punnun’ and ‘sohni-Mahiwal’ have
been passed down and written, rewritten, sung and recreated
over history by different artists with different religious
backgrounds. Today, the words of Bulleh shah, born
in 1860, have been revitalised both by the Pakistani rock
band Junoon and the rising Indian singer Rabbi shergill.
Those versions have been runaway successes in India and
Pakistan, and it is perhaps entirely fitting to Bulleh shah’s
humanist legacy that both Muslim and Sikh artists have
reignited his lyrics.
Salman Ahmad, the well-known frontman of Junoon
who has a fanatical following in both India and Pakistan,
says, “I’m interested in the culture of my forebears because culture humanises what politics demonises. Arts and culture
open the doors for people to walk through. That is why
I wrote my book Rock & Roll Jihad, so that it could act as a
viewfinder for a culture which is being hijacked and distorted
by politics and violence.” Now living in the us, Ahmad
uses his fame to spread the message of cultural fusion,
blending qawwali, bhangra, rock and jazz.
Punjabi writers and artists have consistently engaged
with politics in their works, whether in attempts to embrace
or escape the developments around them. The rising
Naxalite and separatist movements of the latter 20th
century contributed to the growing body of literature and
art emanating from East Punjab with revolutionary poets
such as Avtar singh ‘Paash’, a Naxalite whose works, such
as Loh-Katha (Iron Tale) and the literary magazine Siarh
(The Plough Line), led him first to jail and then towards
his assassination during the height of the 1980s ‘troubled’
years in Punjab. Now the revolutionary songs and poetry of
another iconic figure, Bant singh, an agricultural labourer
from Jabbar village in Punjab, have been immortalised in
a Goethe-Institut-supported documentary project titled
Words, Sound and Power. This musical collaboration with
three other musicians, samrat Bharadwaj, Taru Dalmia and
Chris McGuinness, has attempted to spread Bant singh’s
political message about intercaste violence and equality
through the modern mediums of electronic fusion, ska and
dancehall music.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Punjab’s troubled politics has
inspired the work of leading contemporary artists. They
include Amrit and Rabindra singh, known as the singh
Twins, whose award-winning paintings are recognised as
constituting a unique genre in British art and credited with
initiating the revival of the Indian miniature tradition. The two describe their work as “PastModern”, a blend that
seeks to engage with critical issues of serious debate, which
have a meaningful impact in challenging pervading social,
political and cultural attitudes. In paintings such as ‘Nyrmla’s
Wedding’ or ‘Mr singh’s India’, the Twins depict the
multiple layers of their own personal identities as British
Asians, interspersed with more global concerns of ecological
exploitation and multinational domination. They do not
shy away from the political troubles that have rocked their
motherland. In ‘1984’, one of their most famous works, they
examine the storming of the Golden Temple through the
eyes of Sikhs, depicting their profound sense of sadness and
injustice, as well as their critical reflections on the media’s
role in the tragedy. “The bias of the media and the damaging
effect it has had on the reputation of Sikhs is symbolised by
the group of blindfolded reporters who stand as ‘partners
in crime’, shoulder to shoulder with Indian troops,” they
explain. “There is a sense of horror and panic as pilgrims
scramble over one another to find refuge from the bullets
and armoured tanks. The diagonals created by the composition
by the steep line-up of soldiers and the specific orientation
of the square temple complex lend themselves to the
visual disturbance and chaos of the scene. The surrounding
borders of the painting hem in the fleeing crowds, enhancing
the feeling of claustrophobia and revealing the futility
of its attempts to escape.” The pair says their work is a tribute
to the past as well as a celebration of a new reality.
Those from other mediums continue to reap meaning from
the Punjabi tradition as they innovate and break through
boundaries. Navtej Johar, one of India’s top male dancers
in both classical and contemporary mediums as well as the
founder of Delhi’s yoga studio Abhyas, says the poetic and
spiritual ethos of his Punjabi Sikh background has inspired
his creativity. “I find Punjabi thought to have always been
very political and progressive, if not subversive,” he reflects.
“When I was growing up, almost all Punjabi literature was
leftist. I find the creative Punjabi mind very questioning
and not easily satisfied with the status quo. Beginning with
Sufi poetry as well as Gurbani, the common strain that I
find in serious Punjabi art, literature and even music is that
apart from endorsing inclusivity and abandon—be it spiritual,
romantic or political—it always comments upon and
questions, if not opposes, the sociopolitical system of the
time.” Johar also says that neither the Sufi poetry nor the
Sikh Gurbani of Punjab can be considered spiritual texts,
because both were written by people who took very strong
political stands and make very strong sociopolitical assertions. “The Punjabi-self,” he says, “is closely tied to these
expressions that are from and of the land. Gurbani is and
should remain to be perceived as a pan-Punjab voice of an
assertion that is first human and then spiritual.”
Johar has been involved in a number of cross-border
initiatives: He collaborated with composers Madan Gopal
singh and Elangovan Govindarjan in the 2007 production
of Fana’a: Ranjha Revisited. The dance-theatre piece fused
the predominant Punjabi Sufi love legend ‘Heer-Ranjha’
with Kutrala Kuravanji, a genre of dance-drama from Tamil
Nadu. The production, which is accompanied by a powerfully
stirring musical composition by singh, a Sufi musical
genius, took Johar to Lahore. “I love the Punjab of Pakistan,”
he says. “It is in fact ‘my land’, my people, my dialect,
I palpably identify with it. The first time I crossed the border,
I had tears streaming down my cheeks; the first time I
performed in Lahore I was choking.”
Other Indian artists who cross the Punjabi border reveal
that same deep affection for the culture and people there.
For Amarjit Chandan, Lahore is the muse. “A decade ago,
when I first visited Lahore, I wrote down more than 13 poems
in a single day walking the streets. I was possessed,” he
says. His vision of the two states is melancholy and appropriately
poetic. He says that his only desire “is the reunification of the Punjab”.
Beyond the imaginative stirrings of literary Punjabi legend,
however, there are valid questions as to whether the
artistic love shared across the border translates into a reunified
and revitalised Punjabi culture. Professor Rajesh
sharma, from the Punjabi university in Patiala, is downcast.
He believes that there is a crisis of identity, driven by
globalisation, which generates the need for “culture”, in a
commercial sense alone, to fill the gap. History, he believes,
has had a tremendous impact on Punjabi culture today.
“Culture is a process, marked as much by gaps, ruptures
and breaks as by continuities. ultimately, neither Punjabi
culture, nor any other can be sliced off from its historical
moorings, and then celebrated,” he says.
Navtej Johar describes this rupture of historical moorings
mournfully. He says Partition left Punjabis “in perpetual
longing for each other on either side of the border.
‘Lang aajaa patan Chana da yaar’ (Come across over to the
banks of the Chenab, o beloved) says it all. In East Punjab,
the biggest loss has been the loss of dialects. Dialects probably
are a product of the physical landscape and cannot
survive transmigration.” Johar says he longs for the ethos
of saraiki, his parents’ dialect, in which Sufi saints wrote.
“It has been a huge loss to lose out on a whole treasure of multiple oral cultures, the idiosyncrasies and nuances of
which kept our imaginations and our sense of self alive and
afloat. The brevity and profundity of the tappas and maiyas
(traditional forms of rhyming couplets and verse) of the
Rawalpindi area are unparalleled; they are simple, poignant,
human, direct and, most of all, inclusive. With Partition,
I feel we are in a way orphaned. of course, we are very
good at keeping our chins up, but we are a deeply wounded
people. And our truths lie in our wounds, which we are still
struggling to address and heal.”
Language, after all, is both the root and tool of any literary
voice within a culture; without it, the life experiences which
build, reveal and unlock the culture become lost, fading into
memories, unrecorded or unexplored. Amarjit Chandan,
writing in London, sums up his fears that the loss of Punjabi
as a language will contribute towards a cultural desecration
in his poem ‘The Peacock in Walpole Park, Ealing’:
…The heart sinks when the peacock screams
The body shivers and the world rejoices
The heart sinks when the peacock screams
It yearns for mango flowers lost long ago ..
Notwithstanding his deep concern over the gradual loss
of a language which, for Chandan, represents both life itself
and the lens through which he comprehends all other languages,
his energetic participation in the literary world outside
India is some cause for celebration. Punjabi is, after all,
statistically the second most widely spoken language in Britain
today. Recently, for example, he took part in the British
Library-sponsored ‘Poet in the City’ event in London, marking
the centenary of the birth of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the
most prominent poets of the subcontinent who wrote in both
Punjabi and Urdu, and whose work was filled with egalitarian
themes of love, dignity and resistance to injustice. Last
year, Chandan’s readings from his bilingual Sonata for Four
Hands were well-received at London’s iconic Whitechapel
Gallery. The increasing interest in Punjabiyat by younger
generations of all religious persuasions amongst the diaspora
suggests that Punjabi cultural heritage is beginning to move
forward, more than 60 years after Partition.
| © THE SINGH TWINS |
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In ‘1984’ The Singh Twins, UK’s leading
contemporary artists, examine Operation Blue Star through the
eyes of Sikhs. |
The Lahori view on the impact of language loss to Punjabi
culture, however, is less than optimistic. Punjab accounts
for some 55 percent of the population of Pakistan, but the
heavy use and encouragement of Urdu as the standard language
has led to a major decline in the use of Punjabi there.
Punjabi publishing in Pakistan has, inevitably, shrunk to
minimal levels. Nadir Ali, a retired lieutenant colonel, has
spent much of the past 30 years developing Punjabi culture
in Pakistan under the mentorship of Najm Hosain syed, a
major Punjabi scholar, poet, critic and playwright who created
a study group of Punjabi poetry in 1976, which continues
to the present day. Meeting several times a week, the
group studies Punjabi poets from the 12th to the 19th centuries, including Waris shah, Baba Farid and Guru Nanak.
Members also publish a regular Punjabi magazine previously
called Ma Boli (Mother Tongue), but now renamed
Pancham. In a deliberate act of bridging the border, the
magazine features major writers from both East and West
Punjab.
The retired lieutenant colonel is passionate about Punjabi
literature and language and bemoans the fact that Kashmiri
Bazaar, the publishing capital of Pakistan’s Punjab, does not
have a single Punjabi bookshop. syed’s group, Ali says, had
to set up its own shop in order to publish the works of Punjab’s
great poets. Ali also complains that the national mood
and ideology has swung so violently towards religious defi-
nition alone that the very nature of free speech, encouraged
and contemplated by art and literature, is no longer available
in Pakistan. He wistfully recalls hearing a Punjabi discussion
on the very existence of God by a semi-rural group
at the shah Hussain Mela in Lahore some 50 years ago.
That, he says, is simply not possible today because in the
current climate, it could lead to death or assassination. He
recalls that, pre-Partition, his religious teacher would quote
Guru Nanak whilst teaching Islamiat. That generation,
he claims with both sadness and anger, is dead and gone
along with the vigour of the Punjabi language in Pakistan,
without which, literature is doomed. Ali is adamant that, perhaps unlike in India or amongst the diasporic communities,
there has been no resurgence of interest in Punjabi
culture in Pakistan. “Punjabi was considered subversive to
the very ideology of Pakistan,” he says. “All Punjabi literary
groups were banned in Pakistan by Ayub Khan in the 1960s.
The handful of diehards who remained were leftists, who
themselves were denounced in Pakistan during the Cold
War era. Language became treated as a question of class in
Pakistan and today, Punjabi language and singing survives
only in the villages and small towns of the province. Even
in the village where my grandparents lived,” he laments, “I
have to teach them old marriage songs; they make do instead
with movie songs.”
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Nadir Ali, a retired lieutenant colonel from Lahore, has spent
the past 30 years developing Punjabi culture in Pakistan. |
Music, though, may be the great glue in the Punjabi tradition
which holds it all together, and a new generation’s
interest in Punjabi music could be key to sustaining its revival.
In Pakistan, pop singer Meesha Shafi’s rendition of an old
Punjabi song, ‘Chori Chori’, on Coke Studio, a television series
featuring diverse musical influences in Pakistan, was
met with critical success but also caused a major stir. “I
belong to a Punjabi-speaking household,” Shafi says, “but I
think it surprised people to see a young girl dressed in modern,
Western attire singing a regional, folk Punjabi classic.
It was a milestone for me as an artist and as Reshma’s fan
to be able to do her song some kind of justice.” In India,
Madan Gopal singh has become a fixture at major festivals,
appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year
and regularly enchanting Delhi, international crowds and
cinema audiences with his mesmeric renditions of Punjab’s
hauntingly evocative Sufi music.
Further afield, music has forged a link between the children
of immigrants who are finding new ways to combine
their parents’ language with the street outside. The bhangra
genre, developed in the 1980s and 1990s mostly in Britain,
has hit new heights of popularity, and today British and
Canadian bhangra artists are bringing their music ‘home’
to Punjab, shifting and extending the boundaries of musical
expression and understanding. With record sales often
exceeding those of the mainstream pop charts in the uK,
bhangra and Asian fusion music has provided a strong sense
of pride and identity to Asian youth in the West. Artists like
Talvin singh and Nitin sawhney exploded onto the British
underground music scene in the 1990s, creating a lasting
impact on novel and exciting forms of British Punjabi and
Asian music. The ‘Nusrat effect’, too, brought a new pride to
Punjabi musical culture as the surge of international recognition
for songs like ‘Dam Mast Qalandar’ began to recast the modern realities of a globalised Punjabi culture.
Sheniz Janmohamed is a second-generation Canadiansouth
Asian poet. Her recently published book Bleeding
Light (TsAR Publications), is a composition of ghazals written
in English, one of which (‘Allah Hu’) was inspired by
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Janmohamed herself is not Punjabi
but acknowledges that her work is heavily influenced by
the Punjabi poetic tradition. Her ghazal, ‘Roses are stones’,
begins with a subtle reference to the life of saeen Zahoor,
the Punjabi folk musician whom she describes as “a living
repository of Bulleh shah’s poetry”. Back to ‘Heer-Ranjha’
again, Janmohamed also incorporates its themes and
specific concept of ishq-e-majazi, a metaphorical love that
transforms into true love or the love of the Beloved. Bleeding
Light was written under the tutelage of her mentor , the
late Kuldip Gill, one of the first Canadian-south Asian poets
to write ghazals in English. Gill’s last book, Valley Sutra, is a
strong tribute to her dual homelands of Punjab and Canada.
With each new variation on older themes, Punjabi cultural
heritage is morphing and moulding with the movements of
its people all over the world.
Self-evidently, the Punjabi diaspora does not speak with
a single voice. Having settled in many different places and
spaces, the contributions they offer reflect their personal
and unique experiences in foreign lands. Gurpreet Chana, also known as “The Tabla Guy”, is a talented Canadian Sikh
musician who was born in Toronto. His formal training
with ustad Professor Parshotam singh in the Punjab Gharana
has led him into novel and exciting collaborations with
a wide variety of musicians, including Nelly Furtado and
Wyclef Jean. Chana acknowledges the strong influence of
Punjabi culture on the creation of his music. He says that
“music is integrated in almost every part of Punjabi culture,
whether it is celebration, contemplation or sorrow”. Instead
of the émgirés’ culture becoming frozen in time upon their
leaving their homeland, Chana says the diaspora plays a big
part in rejuvenating Punjabi culture. Even more, the new
Punjabi generations growing up in Canada and elsewhere,
he says, expand the tradition as they incorporate other in-
fluences from their new contexts.
The complex modern-day realities scarring the peoples of
Punjab notwithstanding, these individual stories of artists
who are spread across the world represent the moulding of
modern Punjabi identity. The forms of art, literature and
music which they create may not have been born or even
recognised in Jalandhar or Ludhiana, but they are no less
integrally Punjabi than the heritage of the previous generations.
In a culture which has known both invasions and
integrations, fluidity and change may come to represent
its strength.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Safina
5 September 2011
04:36 PM
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It really is sad, although here in the UK Punjabis from Pakistan speak our language together, but not with outsiders. Mirpuris (from Kashmir, they're actually ethnically Punjabis though and speak the Potohari dialect of Punjabi which is spoken in Rawalpindi area and some parts of Jhelum and has post-partition immigrant punjabi speakers from Pindi area in India too) speak their language. Pathans will speak Pashto or Hindko. Most of the Pakistanis here like the Indians came in the 60s from rural areas and working class backgrounds and speak our native tongues. Yet I've seen more and more Punjabis here opt for Urdu too. Urdu is offered as a A-Level and GCSE course and families including other Pakistani communites, will make their children take them. What made me really sad is that I was flipping through the Asian channels one time and came across a Sikh Channel, and it's host was interviewing a man who said he was from Sialkot (you could tell by his thick Punjabi accent) and the man was speaking in Urdu and the presenter was translating it in Punjabi! My mind was blown. Could you imagine an Indian Sindhi channel interviewing a Pakistani SIndhi and speaking in Urdu? or a Afghani channel Pashto language channel speaking to a Pakistani Pathan in Urdu? You're right we really do need to bring Punjabiyat back.
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shahbaz
18 March 2011
08:22 PM
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The influnce of urdu speaking ruling elite,who migrated to Pakistan,only because they could not survive in hindu majority areas.As they were ruling class,therefore they promoted URDU;This the reason that East Pakistan separated;due to quaid e azam address in DACCA declaring URDU a lnguage of only less than 1% was made National Language. The PUnjabi leadership was side lined.The Result the punjabi elite now feels ashamed to speak or promote eithe Punjabi language/pubjabi culture in Pakistani Punjab.Thank ALLAH the Sikhs are keeping the punjabi language alive.Now inside Lahore Walled you see PUSHTU being spoken instead of old/typical Bhatti gate Punjabi.If this continues there would no punjabi speaking left in the west punjab.
regards
shahbaz thuthaal
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pervaiz majeed
6 March 2011
10:22 AM
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Though it may be shedding some light, what is going on domestically or globally, certainly it points to a dire need that it may be researched well and thoroughly
@Nadir Ali may be right in clarifying his position viz-a-viz this article. He needs a further elaboration.
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Karthik
5 March 2011
12:30 PM
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Your article though interesting is a very limited view. You have for instance not written very much about what is happening in the Indian Punjab. Who are the writers and poets who are trying to keep the culture alive? What are the initiatives in this regard in the cities of Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Bathinda? Pessimisim is all right, but an a piece has to be well-rounded to truly try and achieve wha it is trying to do -- draw the attention of people to what is happening to Punjabiyat.
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SOCRATES
4 March 2011
08:59 AM
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Where is PUNJABIYAT ? All wanished,In Pakistani Punjab, Urdu is fast dominating every where, Punjabi language is no where in schools , even in villages urdu is being spoken by the new generation.Punjabi speakers are considered to be ''TAHGAAS'' bulls, un-couth ,uncultured, lacking manners. An other fifty years and there will be no PUNJABI speaker here.
Yes in Indain Punjab, Sikhs are endevouring in this respect and need encouragement.
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Nadir Ali
1 March 2011
02:54 PM
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I am not someone "working for the development of Punjabi Culture ", Punjabi culture is a very developed entity , thousands of years old . I am one of the thousands of workers trying to learn it and disseminate.Magazine 'Pancham' is labour of love of its editor Maqsud Saqib , a man of substance.I am only an aspiring Punjabi writer , "Jhony come lately " , post retirement and an American stint .
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