Punjab di Vel: History Punjab was taught to forget

A people can be ruled by force for a century and then governed for another by the stories told about its past. Aamir Riaz’s new book is an attempt to retrieve the stories that were set aside.

This review follows the book chapter by chapter. It reads the nine chapters, the preface and the sampled appendices and endnotes; it does not claim to have evaluated fully every page of a 544-page volume. Where we compare the book with Gankovsky, we say plainly that the comparison is ours.

The preface: whose history, and for whom?

The preface (pokho), signed from Hadi in June 2026, sets out the author’s method. History, he argues, is usually written to serve the state that commissions it. The nation-state needs a single language, a single religion and a single origin story, and it teaches its subjects to forget what does not fit. Against this he places a longer view: ancient migrations (he draws on the genetic work of David Reich), the script traditions of Gandhara, and above all the rivers. Punjab, in his telling, was a land of trade routes and waterways before it was a province or a frontier.

The preface also introduces the book’s most original thread: the British interest in Indus navigation. From the steamboat experiments of the early 1830s to the river-trade treaties with Lahore, he argues, the East India Company wanted the Indus as a commercial highway, and Punjab’s political fate followed from that. The preface closes by pointing to the appendices, including interviews with Ayesha Jalal and Pashaura Singh, which the author offers as a second voice alongside his own.[1]

Chapter 1: Lahore Darbar (1799–1849)

A tale of kingship that was deliberately forgotten.

The opening chapter makes the case that the Lahore Darbar was a functioning state with its own administration, diplomacy and diversity, not a footnote between the Mughals and the British. Its court recorded Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Kashmiris, Pathans, Dogras and Europeans; Persian remained the language of record. The author uses the court’s daily diaries from 1812 to 1814 to show a ruler receiving envoys, gifts, petitions and intelligence from Kabul to Delhi.[2]

The argument is that colonial writers had every reason to describe this state as a disorder to be cured. The British feared it, treated with it, and then absorbed it. The chapter ends with the Second Anglo-Sikh War: Chillianwala, the fall of Multan, Gujrat and the proclamation of annexation in March 1849.[3] A reader unfamiliar with the period will find the chapter dense but rewarding; a specialist will recognise the sources and enjoy seeing them read for the river and the market rather than the battlefield.

Chapter 2: Old writings, new riddles

The second chapter is a historiographical survey. It reads the books that shaped what outsiders knew about Punjab: the travel accounts and political reports of Burnes, Moorcroft and Stewart, Lepel Griffin’s chiefs-of-the-Punjab genre, W. W. Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans, and the Persian chronicle of Ganesh Das.

The pattern the author finds is consistent. Writers who came to measure Punjab for commerce or control recorded what mattered to the measurer. The trade of Sialkot, the Indus delta, and the question of who held Shikarpur appear repeatedly, while the lives of cultivators and craftsmen do not. The chapter’s lesson is methodological: before accepting a source, ask what its author wanted from the country.

Chapter 3: Wars of freedom and false narratives (1849–1858)

Here the book turns to what the author calls inherited stories. He examines the Wahabi and mujahidin movement, the trials that followed, the assassination of Lord Mayo in 1872, and the later literature that fitted these events into a nationalist script.[4]

The chapter is sharpest on 1857. The author argues that the label “war of independence” was assigned later, by different political camps for different purposes, and that Punjab’s own experience of that year was far less uniform than the label suggests. The chapter closes by asking which event should properly be called the first mass movement of the freedom struggle, and he points to the agitation against the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh rather than 1857. This is the book’s most polemical early chapter, and it deserves argument rather than assent.

Chapter 4: Jallianwala Bagh and the new politics

The fourth chapter links the massacre of April 1919 to the wider machinery of colonial security. It sets the Defence of India Act, the Rowlatt Act, wartime intelligence services and the Durand Line in one frame, treating them as parts of the same system of control rather than separate episodes.

It also revisits uncomfortable details: the support for General Dyer raised in Britain, the reception of the Hunter inquiry, and the record of Indian leaders who cooperated with the empire during the Boer War and the First World War before turning against it. The author’s tone is sceptical of heroic simplifications on every side. The chapter is best read as an argument that the massacre was not an aberration but an expression of a security state.[5]

Chapter 5: Thirty years of religious politics (1905–1935)

This chapter takes up what it calls the number game. Beginning with the Morley–Minto reforms and the arithmetic of the census, it shows how counting people by religion, and then reserving seats by those counts, turned faith into the main currency of politics. The author works through the figures for Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and Bengal, the politics of the depressed classes, and the Lucknow Pact of 1916.[6]

His point is not that religion did not matter to people but that the institutions made it matter politically, and that Punjab, with its balanced numbers, paid more heavily for the arrangement than most provinces. The closing page of the chapter sets up the next one: the pact’s consequences were handled differently in Punjab and Bengal, and that difference shaped the years to 1947.

Chapter 6: Religious parties and language disputes: Shahidganj to 23 June 1947

The sixth chapter begins with a reflection on how languages, religions and regions were separated by borders drawn in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then follows the final decade before partition. It covers the Shahidganj dispute of 1935–36, the 1937 provincial elections and the Unionist Party, the Quit India period, the 1946 elections, the Cabinet Mission, and the role of governors Glancy and Jenkins.

The chapter’s distinctive contribution is its attention to Punjab’s own political class. The author reproduces the names of members of the Punjab Assembly who voted on 23 June 1947 and argues that the province’s division was decided by procedure and pressure as much as by the wishes of its people. We recommend that readers check the division figures against the assembly records the book cites rather than rely on a summary.

Chapter 7: Gains and losses of resistance to the British

A short, essayistic chapter. The author asks what anti-colonial movements won and what they lost, and he answers with examples that range from the Suez crisis and Gaza to student politics in Pakistan. He argues that states tend to remember resistance selectively and to treat peripheral regions as subjects rather than participants.

The second half turns to language. Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi are used to show how a state’s language choices shape who counts as a citizen; Sheikh Mujib’s account of why Bengali had to be recognised is set against the treatment of Punjabi in the 1951 census and in schools. The chapter ends on a line of Waris Shah. It is the book’s shortest chapter and arguably its most open about its own convictions.

Chapter 8: Punjab, the partition of Punjabi, and anti-Punjab narratives (1947 to today)

This is the book’s longest chapter and its centre of gravity. It begins in antiquity, with the river names, the Silk Road and the old overland routes, to argue that Punjab’s history is a history of connectivity. It then moves to the Boundary Commission and the work of Radcliffe and Mountbatten, with the correspondence of the summer of 1947 used to show how the lines were fixed and contested.

The second half addresses the present. The author takes up the grievances against Punjab that circulate in Pakistani politics, the idea of “Punjabisation”, and the structure of the federation. He argues for creating more provinces, through a national commission, on the ground that large units concentrate power and that the provincial map is itself a colonial inheritance. He closes with a long passage from Farina Mir on the Punjabi literary tradition thriving without a nationalist state behind it.[7] Readers who disagree with the proposal will still find the historical argument serious.

Chapter 9: The digital world and the question of the Punjabi language

The final chapter moves from kingdoms to nation-states to the internet. It argues that languages spread through trade, travel and mixing long before states claimed them, and that the nation-state made language a matter of policy. Punjabi’s loss of its place in schools is traced from the nineteenth-century survey of education through to the present, including the shift to Urdu and Hindi and the role of the census.

The author treats digital media and artificial intelligence as both threat and opportunity: a technology that can erase small languages quickly, and one that lets a community write, publish and teach for itself without waiting for a ministry. The chapter is the book’s most forward-looking and its least settled.

The appendices and endnotes

The twenty-six appendices make the book a working archive. They include the Ayesha Jalal interview on partition and the question of translating “nation”, an interview with Pashaura Singh, a piece on the Hazara Punjabis, a centenary essay on the Gurdwara movement, and the text of the treaties with Lahore concerning the Indus: 1809, 1832, 1834, 1838, 1839 and 1840. There are also census tables and short documents from June 1947. The endnotes are dense and bilingual, citing the Calendar of Persian Correspondence, J. D. Cunningham’s History of the Sikhs, Moorcroft and Trebeck, Dalrymple’s Return of a King and Qeyamuddin Ahmad on the Wahabi movement, among others.[8]

Reading Riaz alongside Gankovsky

Yu. V. Gankovsky, of the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies, wrote The Peoples of Pakistan: An Ethnic History (Moscow, 1964; English translation by Igor Gavrilov, Lahore, 1971).[9] It is part of a pair of works with The National Question and National Movements in Pakistan (1967).[10]. It treats Pakistan’s peoples as historically formed ethnic communities and traces their development through stages.[11]

Three points of contact stand out.

First, the multinational frame. Gankovsky’s starting point is that Pakistan is a multi-ethnic state. Riaz shares the premise but reaches it differently. For him the unit is the Punjabi-speaking society of the river plains, whose cohesion rested on trade and language, not on a nationalist programme.

Second, the missing Punjabi nationalism. Later scholarship observes that, unlike most large ethnic groups in Pakistan, Punjabis have generally not mobilised around a distinct ethnic nationalism and have often set their identity aside in favour of a unifying Pakistani one.[12] Riaz’s chapters 5 to 9 are an attempt to explain exactly this. Colonial census politics, religious representation, the 1947 partition and the removal of Punjabi from schools each, in his account, took something away from the language-based identity that other groups kept.

Third, a difference of method. Gankovsky’s school reads ethnic history through stages of economic and class development. Riaz gives more weight to geography, trade routes, state policy and language. The two are more complementary than opposed: Gankovsky asks how peoples form, Riaz asks how one people was made to forget its own formation.

Verdict

Punjab di Vel is ambitious, argumentative and uneven in the way books of this kind usually are. Its strengths are its use of primary sources, its insistence that the Indus trade is part of Punjab’s political story, and its willingness to turn the lens on every camp, colonial, nationalist and religious. Its weaknesses are the occasional compression of complex events into a single thesis, and the polemical tone of some chapters. For readers of Punjabi, it is a major contribution; for those who cannot read it, the need for an English edition is plain.

In our future work on this book, we will turn to the appendices in more detail, including the river-trade treaties, and to the question of provinces and language policy that the book raises for Pakistan today.

Endnotes

1. Aamir Riaz, Punjab di Vel: (1799- 2025): the preface cites David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, and Julien Columeau, Linguistic Resistance in Pakistan: Punjabi Language Movements After Independence(Columbia University Press, 2026).
2. Riaz, chapter 1, drawing on the court diary entries of 1812–1814. For general background on the ruler, see Ranjit Singh, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
3. For the war and annexation, see Sikh Wars, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
4. Riaz, chapter 3, citing Qeyamuddin Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India(1966), and W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans.
5. For the event itself, see Amritsar Massacre, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
6. For the pact, see Lucknow Pact, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
7. Riaz, chapter 8, quoting Farina Mir on Punjabi literary formation.
8. Riaz, appendices and endnotes, pp. 289–492 of the book.
9. V. Gankovsky, The Peoples of Pakistan: An Ethnic History, trans. Igor Gavrilov (Lahore: People’s Publishing House, 1971): HathiTrust record; APNA scanned edition; Richard G. Fox’s review, Journal of Asian Studies (1973).
10. Gankovsky biography, Who Was Who in Indology, listing The National Question and National Movements in Pakistan(Moscow, 1967); see also the conference tribute to Gankovsky.
11. Alina L. Filimonova, “Punjabiyat vs ‘Punjabistan’: Features of Punjabi Ethnic Nationalism”; see also N. Zharbossynova, “State Institutions and Ethnic Identity of Punjabis in Modern Pakistan”, Journal of Oriental Studies110(3), 2024.

Huzaima Bukhari, lawyer and author, has been Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Senior Visiting Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE). She also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 2003.