G8 Punjab

About G8 Punjab

Punjabi travelled to Australia in the mouths of people who were busy doing other things. This is a magazine about what survived the journey, what changed on the way, and what is worth holding onto now.

Punjab means, quite literally, five waters: panj is five and aab is water, from the rivers that braid across the plain. The name is a piece of geography that became a culture. It describes a wheat country of flat horizons and long light, of villages laid out around a pond, of a farming year that runs on two great harvests rather than four gentle seasons. Almost everything in these pages grows out of that fact. The food, the calendar, the songs sung at weddings, even the shape of the language itself carry the fingerprints of an agricultural life that most readers of this magazine no longer live.

The people of that plain are not one community. Punjab is home to Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and others, and it always has been. The language they share does not belong to any single tradition, which is one of the more remarkable things about it. A wedding song can be sung by families who pray in entirely different ways and mean entirely different things by the word blessing, and the song will still be the same song. We take that seriously here. Where we describe a religious practice, we say plainly whose practice it is, and we leave the theology to those who hold it.

Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi record the same speech in two entirely different alphabets, and the reasons are historical rather than linguistic.

Understand the crop and the buffalo, and most of what appears on a Punjabi table stops being mysterious.

The barrel drum at the centre of Punjabi celebration is a two headed instrument with two completely different voices.

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