Instead of Punjab being a state of India, is India becoming a state of Punjab?
If popular culture and social mores are to go by, it does indeed seem that there is what might be called a progressive Punjabification of the country. The current wedding season – which is on at full blast, in more ways than one – provides topical evidence. Ever since Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, marriage a la mode in India has gained a distinctive Punjabi flavour, from the reception of the bhangra-dancing barat to the celebratory dinner which would be incomplete without the inclusion of butter paneer masala and makhni dal with an extra dollop of asli ghee thrown in to give a touch more josh.
Weddings apart, Punjab and Punjabi ways seem to set the pace for the rest of India in everyday walks of life. The salwar-kameez has long been a rival of the sari as the unofficial national dress for Indian women.
And while Hindi might still meet with resistance from diehard lingual chauvinists south of the Vindhyas, even such regional jingoists seem to have little or no difficulty in swallowing either the ‘arre, yaar’ Punjabified ‘dialogues’ of Bollywood or that ultimate in north-south fusion cuisine: the tandoori tikka dosa.
What is it about Punjab – or at least the common perception of it – that makes it such a dominant feature of the Indian mindscape? In many ways, Punjab could be said to be the Texas of India: larger than life, and twice as loud in proclaiming as much. Punjab’s legendary zest for life and living is perhaps best summed up in the old saying that beer is the sixth river that flows through the Land of the Five Rivers, the unabashed culture of which is agri-culture. This image of backslapping boisterousness is amplified and echoed by the Punjabi ‘doublespeak’ of rhyming slang – which has rapidly infiltrated other vernacular languages – whereby a drink becomes ‘drink-shrink’, which you have at a ‘party-sharty’ with your ‘pal-shals’. Such verbal largesse – why make do with one word when using two is so much better? – reflects the bountiful generosity of the land and the people who pioneered the Green Revolution in the country.
But perhaps the most distinctive trait of Punjabis is their mobility. In a country of internal migrants, the Punjabi stands out as the most energetic and adventuresome of them all. In direct opposition to the parochial ‘sons of the soil’ ideology as expressed by the likes of Bal and Raj Thackeray, the Punjabi stands for a ‘sons of the toil’ attitude which indicates a willingness and an ability to go wherever there is work to be found or an opportunity for an enterprise to be run. The cartoon showing the US astronauts landing on the lunar surface only to be greeted by a Punjabi who’s set up a tea stall there says it all.
Indeed the Punjabi dhaba, providing rest and refreshment to the weary traveller through the length and breadth of the country, is as much an integral part of India’s social geography as the pub once was of the British landscape. It is this an-nationalism which suggests that it’s no bad thing at all for Punjab to embrace in its hearty jhappi the whole of India that is Bharat-Wharat.
