Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines

About the book

Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines is Amandeep Sandhu's first book of non-fiction, published by Westland in 2019. Part reportage, part memoir and part history, it follows more than three years of travel across Punjab that began in 2015, as Sandhu, a Punjabi born and raised outside the state, tried to understand the land his family came from and to close what he calls the hole in his heart, his emptiness about matters Panjab.

Even the spelling is an argument. Sandhu writes Panjab with an a, not Punjab, to point to the Persian origin of the name: panj, five, and aab, water, the land of five rivers. The first edition runs to xvi plus 560 pages (ISBN 978-9388754569), and the author has described his intent plainly: to present Panjab as a post conflict zone and open conversations so that healing can begin. The book opens with verses of the thirteenth century Sufi poet Baba Farid, and its starting image, suggested by his editor, is a photograph taken from the Ramgarhia Bunga at Darbar Sahib in Amritsar just after Operation Bluestar in 1984, with onlookers looking down at the damaged Akal Takht. The whole journey grows out of that wound.

What are the fault lines in Panjab?

The fault lines are the cracks Sandhu finds running through everyday life in Punjab: in its farms and its water, its faith and its schools, its caste order and its shrinking place in the country. Reviewing the book for the Sikh Research Journal, Deepak Kumar of Punjabi University notes that Sandhu puts agrarian distress at the core of Punjabi society. The state that fed India through the Green Revolution now faces depleted soil and falling water tables, and a decade and a half of militancy left its economy and governance destabilised. The relationship between the state and the Sikh community remains fractured, the events of 1984 and their aftermath still haunt the collective psyche, and the failure to address the questions that period raised has deepened the crisis the book records.

Sandhu travelled through the state as these pressures showed themselves. In 2015, when he was on the road, a whitefly infestation hit the cotton fields of the south and farmers were agitating for compensation. He followed the protests and, along the way, met farmers, psychiatrists and student leaders, building each chapter from case studies set against historical fact. His method is deliberately personal: the review calls the book autoethnographic, an account of contemporary rural Punjab animated by village visits, and an emotional journey through which a writer explores his own roots.

Sixteen chapters, sixteen Punjabi words

The book is built as sixteen chapters, each carrying a single Punjabi word as its title: Satt (Wound), Berukhi (Apathy), Rosh (Anger), Rog (Illness), Astha (Faith), Mardangi (Masculinity), Dawa (Medicine), Paani (Water), Zameen (Land), Karza (Loan), Jaat (Caste), Patit (Apostate), Bardr (Border), Sikhya (Education), Lashaan (Corpses) and Janamdin (Birthday). The chapters can be read on their own, but together they move from injury to a guarded hope of renewal: the birthday at the end is the possibility that the land can begin again. Family memory runs through the reporting. In Dawa (Medicine), for example, Sandhu remembers a handsome grand uncle and the small rituals of drink and care around him, and personal histories like this one keep amplifying the collective troubles of the state.

Sandhu has explained why the book could not be a straight travelogue: travel is linear, but the issues are anything but linear, so the book mixes reportage, memoir and contextual history instead. Non-fiction, he told The Hindu BusinessLine, has to represent the world it talks about so that it can be compared with what is happening on the ground, and the writer has to be careful to get the true voice and story of the place.

The author

Amandeep Sandhu was born in 1973 in Rourkela, Odisha, into a Punjabi Sikh family, and grew up far from Punjab, in towns across Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh. He took a master's degree in English literature from the University of Hyderabad, worked as a journalist and then as a technical writer, and is based in Bengaluru. Before Panjab he wrote two works of autobiographical fiction: Sepia Leaves (2008), drawn from his childhood with a mother who lived with schizophrenia, and Roll of Honour (2012), about the divided loyalties of a Sikh schoolboy in the years of militancy. Panjab turns the same questions outward: where Sepia Leaves asked what home does to a child, this book asks what has happened to the home itself. His full entry is in the Kosh people section.

Reception and legacy

The book arrived with strong endorsements. The publisher and feminist historian Urvashi Butalia called it more than a history of Panjab: a journey of self discovery and a homecoming that questions the idea of home itself. Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Caravan, wrote that he had read nothing that better explains the interconnected decay of the institutions of the state and the Sikh religion. Deepak Kumar's scholarly review praised Sandhu for going beyond the usual focus on Sikh identity politics, for keeping his attention on the contemporary situation, and for writing in journalistic language without jargon, so that the book reads almost like a novel. The same review is honest about limits: the question of women stays marginal in the book, a gap the author himself acknowledges, and the caste chapter invites a fuller explanation than it gives.

Panjab has settled into the small shelf of books that readers, students and the diaspora reach for when they want to understand the Punjab of today rather than the Punjab of legend. For the Punjabi diaspora in particular, whose connection to the land often runs through family memory rather than residence, Sandhu's outsider-insider journey mirrors their own. The book ends, in his words to The Hindu BusinessLine, in a sense of homecoming: home is language, the language where you can be yourself.