Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bloodshed and turmoil during its four centuries than it had peace
and harmony.
Punjab
means 'land of five rivers' - the Ravi, Jhelum,
Chenab, Sutlej, and Beas, all arterial lifelines flowing from the
western Himalayas. They quench the insatiable thirst of those
abundant Punjabi plains before meeting as one in the mighty Indus,
and eventually pouring away into the Arabian Sea.
Not only the landscape looked rich and orderly. Within twenty
minutes I'd seen more tractors than I had in all of India in two years.
The heavy machines rolled through fields dense with ripening wheat,
snowy cotton, and mustard, and chugged past the emerald squares of
luxuriant rice paddies, along the perimeters of leafy sugarcane
plantations thick as jungles.
The people, too, looked prosperous - the men big, strong,
handsome with their glossy beards and immaculate turbans; the
women graceful, proud, more self-assured in their billowing
salwar-
kameez
trousersuits than their shy, nervous Hindu counterparts
farther south. Warriors by necessity - their symbol the crossed swords
of temporal and spiritual authority - the Sikhs were respected by
the Raj officers far more than the 'effeminate Hindus,' and came to
be disproportionately represented in the British Indian forces, then
remained so in their nation's independent military. Their affinity
for machines and their love of cars has made them the drivers of
India - and made the word
asti
('slow down') one of three entries in
the Hindi dictionary every tourist must learn very quickly. Clearly
close descendants of the invading Aryans, who found a haven of plenty
in the Punjab, the Sikhs are warriors in everything they do: they eat
with the voracity of Ghengis Khan's Mongol troops, they walk with
an innate power and virility, moving like men accustomed to respect,
and they speak like men used to giving orders that are obeyed.
Behind houses along the paved lanes in the Punjab stand well-
maintained coops stocked with fat chickens and neat sties where
corpulent pigs jostle and snort contentedly. There is an overall air
of confident control over the villages.
Just before I arrived in India, the Sikhs had been warrior chieftains
in another kind of revolution. If not for ruinous droughts and the
so-called world oil crisis, India would have achieved her goal of
producing enough grain to feed the entire population. And the credit
