In the early days of June two years ago the Indian Army was storming the Golden Temple at Amritsar, chief shrine of the Sikhs, and hundreds of lives were lost. To imagine such a thing happening anywhere else in India is nearly as hard as to suppose a band of armed Methodists holding out in a Cornish chapel, or Druids in Stonehenge. The Punjab, Land of Five Rivers, was always an exceptional province, forged on the anvil of India by the hammer of Muslim invasion. In British times its peasantry were the backbone of the sepoy army, and it came to have the biggest irrigation system in the world. More remarkably, in this century it came to be the cradle of some of India's or Asia's greatest poetry. Strife and massacre disrupted it in 1947, but since partition its western half has been the driving-belt of Pakistan, its eastern the principal military base and richest agricultural district of India.

LRB 18 September 1986 | PDF Download