What’s special about Punjabis
Noted American scholar Mark Juergensmeyer reflects on decades of research, village visits, and bus rides across Punjab to decode what makes Punjabis distinct
Punjabis have the
self-confidence of a people anchored in a sense of belonging, a sense of place. They know who they are. Istock
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I am not a Punjabi, though I’ve been accused of having been one in my past life. In fact, I had never been outside the United States before my first visit to the region as a research fellow at Panjab University many decades ago. But I quickly fell in love with the place. But why?
Maybe it was the awesome geography, the antiquity of the culture, the liveliness of its towns and cities, or just… the people. Yes, the people. There’s something special about the people, Punjabis, and I’m trying to put my finger on what it is.
A young Mark Juergensmeyer with a turban in 1966 during his first visit to Punjab in Jandiala near Jalandhar, where a Sikh friend showed him how to tie a turban. Photo courtesy: The writer
I’ve had some time to reflect on this. After all, I’ve spent several years in Punjab and have visited there every year or so. I’ve stayed in Chandigarh, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Batala, and myriad villages from Hoshiarpur district to Bathinda. I’ve written several books about aspects of Punjab society and culture, and I have ridden in more packed buses than you can count.
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So yes, for someone who is not a Punjabi, I have a fairly good feeling for the Punjabi character. If you put me in a room full of people of South Asian descent, I can usually pick out the Punjabis, even without hearing a word from them. They’re just that distinctive.
So what’s so special about Punjabis?
Embedded earthiness
Punjabis are earthy. When I use that term, I mean it in two senses — people of the earth and people down to earth. I come from a farming community in America’s Midwest, a son of German farmer immigrants, and I know farm people to be direct, straight-shooting, no-nonsense people. That also dovetails with the “down to earth” description, and I think that applies to a lot of Punjabis even if they are city folks.
The cultural tradition of Punjab is rooted in the soil, and there is a great deal of pride in the geography of the region. Punjabis have the self-confidence of a people anchored in a sense of belonging, a sense of place. The very name, of course, relates to the five rivers that come from the great mountains to fertilise the plains below. Punjabis know who they are.
Punjabi earthiness is also embedded in the Punjabi language. Though I studied Hindi before coming to India, I wanted to be able to speak some Punjabi since I would be going to many villages where that would be the main language. So, the Punjabi Department at Panjab University provided a couple of graduate students, Mohinder and Devinder, who were my tutors and buddies for much of my first year in the region. Dev Inder (that’s how he writes his name now) is a famous photographer, but at the time, he was just a goofy graduate student like myself. They were determined that I learn the real Punjabi, and not just the textbook version.
One of the first things they wanted me to know were the dirty words or the words with dirty double meanings. They didn’t want me to embarrass myself inadvertently by saying something that had a racy connotation. It turned out that there were a lot of words like this in the language, and I was impressed.
With my new-found knowledge of Punjabi smut, I was able to follow the epithets thrown at each other in street fights. On one occasion, I could understand two ladies shouting at each other in a bus once when I was in rural Sangrur district. They were loudly discussing certain bodily functions and the men grimaced and looked at me, hoping the foreigner would not understand. I just laughed and we all joined in the levity of the situation.
My wife, who comes from a Chinese Cantonese family, claims that there is a certain kinship among earthy cultures, citing Cantonese, Italians, Midwest Americans and Punjabis, and I think she’s right. I feel at home in each of these places, especially Punjab.
The good side of earthiness is the zest for life and the honest sincerity of abiding friendship. When you have Punjabi friends, you can count on them for life.
Melting pot of cultures
The second distinctive feature of Punjab also relates to its geographical location. It has been for millennia the entry point to the subcontinent, and as such the melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. Pre-Partition Punjab contained an equal mix of three religions — Hindu, Sikh and Muslim — or four if you count the religiosity of Scheduled Caste folk as a separate cultural group.
At the Ravidas Dera, also known as Dera Sachkhand Ballan, near Jalandhar in 2019. To the left of Mark Juergensmeyer (second from right) is Sant Niranjan Dass, spiritual master of the dera. Second from left is dera patron Manohar Mahey, one of Juergensmeyer’s research assistants in the 1960s and ’70s. In the far right is Prof Santosh K Singh, author of a widely read book on deras, The Deras: Culture, Diversity and Politics. Photo courtesy: The writer
My dissertation project focused on a Punjabi attempt in the 1920s and ’30s to create a new religion (well, it actually claimed to be the “original religion”, the Ad Dharm) based on reverence for Sant Ravidas that appealed to one-fourth of the Punjab population that felt marginalised in the other three main religious communities. That special religious identity persists today and the Ravidas fellowship has an imposing dera at Ballan near Jalandhar.
There are few other places in India that have such a diversity of religious communities living side by side with each other. This means that Punjabis are used to cultural differences, and they are not threatened by them. For that reason, they adapt easily to new cultural surroundings. When the British recruited their army, they looked to Punjabis to fill their ranks. When they needed truck drivers, Punjabis were ready to roll. They would drive throughout the country, and the ubiquitous dhabas that sprang up to cater to their eating habits spread Punjabi cuisine everywhere.
Even today, when you go to an Indian restaurant in the UK, Europe, or America, it is likely Punjabi food that is featured as normative Indian fare. Saag paneer, baingan bharta, gobi aloo — that’s soul food for me!
Bold and risk-takers
The first two characteristics, anchored in a place and being cosmopolitan, may seem contradictory, but in fact they’re complementary. Even though Punjabis mix with a variety of different people and travel and live in different places, they always have a sense of home. They know who they are. This gives them self-confidence and daring to do things, to go to places, and try to achieve. They are risk-takers, since they have solid ground behind them.
There are a large number of South Asians in America today, and the first Indian settlers in the US in the early 20th century were Punjabis. Former soldiers for the British found their way to Canada’s British Columbia and then down to Washington state and California. Many settled in California’s lush Central Valley where their knowledge of irrigation that many Punjabis learned in the canal areas of Punjab was useful information in the newly irrigated California region. Sikhs instructed the California farmers how to weave their irrigation channels efficiently in a pattern that was called “Hinduising the crops”, though the American farmers who employed them didn’t know the difference between Sikhs and Hindus.
In fact, there was a great deal of collegiality among the Punjabis in early 20th-century California. When Prof Har Dayal, a visiting professor at Stanford, began to foster among the Punjabi immigrants in California the idea that they could foment revolution against the British in India, the response was electric. Hindu and Sikh students at Berkeley and Muslim and Sikh farmers in the Central Valley came together to create the Ghadar (‘Revolution’) Party. Almost all of them were Punjabis.
When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, one of my projects was to collect the extant publications and historical documents relating to the movement. These are now archived in the Berkeley research library. It was a bold and quixotic venture, as it turned out, since the British had laced the movement with spies.
But some of these erstwhile revolutionaries managed to return to India, and one of them, Mangu Ram, created a movement of social liberation for the people of his Scheduled Caste. This was the Ad Dharm movement that became the subject of my first book, published in India as ‘Religious Rebels in the Punjab’.
I met with old Mangu Ram at his farm near Garhshankar in Hoshiarpur district, and marvelled at the daring creativity of his task. To think that he could invent a whole new religion to challenge the caste hierarchy of Hinduism was a dazzling project — the kind of thing that a Punjabi would attempt.
The tragic events in the 1980s and ’90s in Punjab are another example. For a recent book on how movements like this come to an end, I talked with old militants and was amazed at the audacity of their project, the confidence with which they attempted the impossible. Tragic though it was, it was a Punjabi thing.
If you’re in India and someone starts talking to you as if you were an old friend, the chances are fairly good that person is a Punjabi. Once, when I was living in Chandigarh, I was riding my motorcycle through the nearby Shivalik Hills when I came across the charming hill station of Kasauli. In the marketplace, a Sardarji spotted me and immediately engaged me in conversation, then invited me to his bungalow to meet his wife and have a shot of whisky. He turned out to be Khushwant Singh, and he was full of stories. I stayed half the night, impressed with someone who embodied the Punjabi spirit par excellence.
Today, much of the Punjabi adventurousness travels abroad. In the United States, for instance, they have become one of the most visible minority groups in the country. There are many immigrants in the US from all over India, of course, but Punjabis stand out. When I see someone of South Asian descent interviewed on television news, I often try to identify their backgrounds by their name. I’m surprised at how many are Singh, or Khanna, or Puri, or Mann, or Dhillon. Punjabis, all of them.
When we created the department of global studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, it was the first in that field in a research university anywhere in the world. It was dedicated to intercultural understanding. One of the first new faculty positions was in Sikh and Global Studies, focusing on the diaspora of communities such as Punjabi Sikhs around the globe. It was endowed by a physicist in Silicon Valley who is regarded as the “father of fiber optics”, Narinder Singh Kapany — a Punjabi, of course — and we named the Chair after his mother, Kundan Kaur Kapany.
There are now over a hundred global studies departments around the world, including at Ambedkar University in Delhi. Our Santa Barbara department has almost 20 faculty members. Five of them are of South Asian descent, and judging from their names, one is Bengali and four just happen to be Punjabis. Hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t choose them because they were Punjabi. We chose them because they were self-confident, articulate, and good at what they do. You know, like Punjabis.
— The writer is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
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