Certain misconceptions gain currency and with the passage of time for the fact of being reiterated ad nauseam they become common. This is usually the result of not being able to differentiate between appearance and reality which are not only two sides of the same phenomenon but are also deceptive as they overlap each other.

Punjab suffers from a strange fallacy in contemporary times. Imagine Punjab. What does it evoke? You see it as what you find in the images and visuals thrown around you; countryside, villages, cattle and half-naked peasants. Just have a look at the sets of television programmes regarding Punjab. The sets of such programmes would have wells, painted pottery, motifs of cattle and folk stools with gaudy colours, handheld fans with tinsel frills etc. While visualising and erecting the set the set-designer goes brain dead. Some mysterious force seizes his thinking ability and compels him to look at Punjab purely in terms of an agrarian society. His entire concept of set, if one accepts it as one, is drawn from the detritus of bygone era. Flotsam and jetsam are offered as symbols that supposedly represent the reality of Punjab. The producer/director of the programme happily accepts what is offered as compatible with the current social reality of Punjab. Look at the irony of the situation; both the persons live in a metropolis or modern urban centre but when they think of Punjab they exclude all from it except countryside and the traditional life that has almost vanished. The trappings of country life imagined by them have disconnect with ground reality. Stuck in the past they fail to realise that well has been replaced by tube-well, oxen by tractors, colourful stools by plastic chairs and handheld fans by electric fans. What is being stressed here is that an irreversible change has taken place in our countryside which they fail to comprehend. They forget that the cities in Punjab have overwhelming presence as they guide and control life in the rural areas.

Punjab, they ignore, has a very long history of urban society spanning thousands of years starting from Harappa if not from earlier period. It’s not to deny the existence of rural society. Rural and urban societies are twins joined at hip; one cannot exist without the other. The former needs the innovation and knowledge created by the latter and the latter needs the agricultural surplus produced by the former.

Situation is somewhat similar in our literature. You can find in our literary set poets a dime a dozen. They endlessly churn out verses that mostly fall in the category of doggerel or sentimental kitsch. Like television programmers they take Punjab as it was in the past, idyllically painted by the tradition. Their voice is a voice from the past laced with a wistful feeling. It’s remembrance of the things past in a mode of nostalgia coupled with subdued lamentations full of self-pity.

What was valuable has been lost and what is present has nothing worthwhile to offer. Popular poems doing rounds these days appeal to the dead poets or saints and the spirit of an imagined Punjab to stop the wheel of time and resurrect what has been buried underneath its dust. Like others they conceive Punjab as it was, not as it is. They imagine Punjab as an infinite number of rural settlements in close proximity of nature in a state of bliss. Nothing can be more removed from reality. In their mental maps cities do not exist. If they exist at all, they exist negatively. The poets conveniently forget that rural life was marred by poverty, misery, starvation and petty conflicts. It was cities which introduced technology, methods of modern cultivation, new varieties of seeds and pesticide that improved the quality of life in countryside.

Remember peasants have the notion of 13th month of the year, the month when harvest is not ready and they face severe financial crunch. For some months, elders would tell you, they had grass grown in their hearths in the machineless past.

The situation is equally bad if not worse across the border in the East Punjab. They are like their counterparts this side of the border hooked on the past and obsessed with the countryside. Look at their songs and lyrical poetry to discover what they have common with the west Punjabis. Their songs incessantly wax lyrical of village life and ‘Jat’ and “Jati (a Jat woman)’. Jat has multiple meanings. It means a peasant, a rustic, an uncouth person. But it also denotes a tribe, a caste. They in the sense of a tribe were originally nomads and started landing in Punjab after 13th and 14th centuries and gradually became good and hardworking farmers.

When they became a dominant segment of Sikh community they forgot their humble origins; the newly gained power went to their head. Now most of their artists conceive Punjab as a mammoth village dominated by a Jat, dead drunk with a gun on his shoulders, in frantic search of his ideal beloved who cannot be other than a Jati. Their singers glorify village idiocy as a mark of culture as they talk of guns and shootings in their romantic meanderings in gruff voices which lack skill and aesthetic appeal. Finesse is frowned upon as effeteness and machismo is touted as manliness. You no longer find Asa Singh Mastana, Surindar Kaur and Parkash Kaur, Wadali Brothers and Jagjit. All this happens despite the fact that every young man desperately wants to leave his village to settle in the urban centres of the advanced world. But whenever they think of Punjab it’s nothing more than rural settlement.

In the West Punjab our mind evokes Punjab as a rural entity because we are cut off from our history and culture. Above all, we have lost our language. Since we find our language and cultural practices intact to some extent in the rural areas we subconsciously equate Punjab with the countryside. Cities are no-go-area for our mother language and culture. That’s why we tend to have the image of our homeland frozen in the past.

In the East Punjab they own the language but they associate the ethos of Punjab with agriculture and countryside as if cities don’t exist. In a nutshell, both fail to see Punjab as it is; a fast changing countryside that emulates cities, and growing cities in a globalised world that lead the countryside in a new era of modernity. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2024