Punjabi: The Language That Became a Stranger in Its Own Home

A government school classroom in Gujrat, in the heart of central Punjab. The teacher writes English words on the board. The children ask their questions in Urdu. And in the gap between classes, those same children slip into Punjabi with each other — until a teacher happens to overhear, and a strange embarrassment settles over them, as if they had been caught doing something wrong. I have watched this scene more than once, and every time it leaves me with the same question: what psychological knot is this, that makes a people ashamed of their own mother tongue? That question is where this essay begins, but it does not end there.
It is common to say that Punjabi is dying, as though this were some natural process, the way an old man eventually passes away. That is not the truth. Languages do not die natural deaths. They are killed by decisions — decisions made in school curricula, in the choice of official language, in the fine print of job requirements. After 1947, the Pakistani state built Urdu into the emblem of national unity, and Punjabi, despite being the mother tongue of the largest population in the country, was denied any state patronage. This was not carelessness. It was a calculated political strategy: Punjab already dominated the army, the bureaucracy, and the economy, and had it also consolidated a strong linguistic identity, the anxiety this would have provoked in the smaller provinces would have deepened — the very anxiety that is still palpable today in Sindh and Balochistan. The sacrifice of Punjabi was, in a strange twist, made in the political interest of the Punjabi elite itself. This is an uncomfortable thing to admit, but it needs saying. Punjab’s own leadership, in order to preserve its grip on military and administrative power, offered up its own linguistic inheritance as the price. The province’s relative economic strength gave it the illusion that the loss of a language cost nothing — that success could be had in Urdu and English, and that Punjabi could be left behind as a matter for the home, or for the village.
There is another, harder truth that most essays on this subject circle around and quietly avoid: speaking Punjabi, in Pakistan’s urban middle class, has come to be read as a mark of rusticity, of lower standing. In the better neighbourhoods of Lahore, Faisalabad, and Multan, parents deliberately keep their children away from Punjabi, believing that only Urdu and English are the ladder to advancement. This is not merely a linguistic problem. It is a problem of class psychology. Language has been made into a measure of honour or disgrace, and as long as that class prejudice remains unbroken, no government policy and no curriculum reform will save Punjabi. People abandon their own mother language of their own free will, because they have been taught that it is a thing to be abandoned. This shame is passed down the generations — from a mother’s tongue to her mother’s tongue before her — growing a little fainter with each generation that inherits it.
Now for a harder point still. Punjabiyat is usually presented as a once-complete unity that was broken — as though before 1947 Punjab had been a single, harmonious cultural whole that Partition then shattered. That picture is romantic, but it is not entirely true. For centuries Punjab had already been divided along lines of religion, caste, and locality. Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu Punjabis lived side by side, yes, but not without friction along the way. To say that colonial divide-and-rule alone split Punjab apart is to flatten history into something far simpler than it was. In truth, the fault lines of identity were already there inside Punjab; 1947 merely turned those internal fault lines into political borders. This matters, because if we build our ideal on an imagined, seamless past, we can never reckon with the complicated present we actually have. The future of Punjabiyat does not lie in retrieving some lost golden age. It lies in accepting a new, acknowledged plurality — one in which Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu Punjabis, and Punjabis on both sides of the border, can each remain rooted in their own distinct histories while still strengthening what they hold in common through language.
A word of history is owed here too, though it should not be reduced to a mere roll call of names worn as ornaments. Baba Farid, centuries ago, made Punjabi a language of religious and philosophical argument. Bulleh Shah turned it into an instrument of resistance against religious orthodoxy. Waris Shah, through the story of Heer, challenged the social order of his day. These towering names are proof that Punjabi was never merely a language of casual conversation — it has always carried the capacity for intellectual and philosophical expression. When we today reduce Punjabi to something “domestic” or “rustic,” we are, in effect, disowning the very intellectual inheritance that Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah spent lifetimes building.
One last, difficult question: is the revival of Punjabi the state’s responsibility, or society’s? The absence of state patronage is a real fact — Punjabi’s exclusion from the curriculum, from the courts, from official use, are all failures of the state. But we cannot use the state as a shield to absolve ourselves of our own responsibility. Until Punjabi parents themselves begin speaking Punjabi with their children, until Punjabi citizens and writers begin treating the Punjabi script as a living literary medium rather than a relic of an older time, no state policy will be able to save the language. In the end, the survival of a language begins at the threshold of the home, not the threshold of parliament. The state can change a curriculum, can change an official language — but which language a child’s first lullaby is sung in, that decision belongs to the home alone.
Social media has opened up a difficult but real opportunity. On YouTube, in podcasts, in online literary circles, a younger generation is reconnecting with written Punjabi — yet this trend remains at the margins, still to enter the mainstream. The real shift will come when Punjabi stops being merely a subject of cultural heritage and becomes a language of economic opportunity — when business, media, and technology begin to demand it, and speaking it comes to be seen not as rustic but as a skill worth being proud of. Until Punjabi becomes a language people can earn their bread in, it will remain confined to sentimental slogans.
I have no simple solution to offer, and perhaps that, in itself, is the honest position to take. The condition of the Punjabi language is a tangled knot in which political interest, class prejudice, and historical illusion are all wound together. What matters most is that we stop feeling ashamed of our own language — and that unlearning of shame will not begin with any government announcement. It will begin with a mother’s first sentence to her child. The question is not when Punjabi will die. The question is this: will we let it die, or will we take it back into our homes and make it, once again, the language of home?