Malwaਮਾਲਵਾ

Where is Malwa?

Malwa is the great southern tract of Indian Punjab, the land that lies south of the Sutlej river. The Sutlej draws its northern boundary, the Ghaggar river runs along its south, the Shivalik hills close it on the east and the Pakistan border on the west. By area it is easily the largest of Punjab's cultural regions, covering some 60 to 70 per cent of the present state, and almost everything a map shows south of the Sutlej in Punjab is popularly called Malwa.

The districts counted in Malwa are Barnala, Bathinda, Faridkot, Fazilka, Ferozepur, Ludhiana, Malerkotla, Mansa, Moga, Patiala, Sangrur and Sri Muktsar Sahib. Its edges are debated, as cultural regions always are: Fatehgarh Sahib is often listed with Malwa, while the strip along the Ghaggar in the east, around Rajpura, Rupnagar and Mohali, speaks Puadhi and belongs culturally to Puadh, even though it too lies south of the Sutlej.

Why is it called Malwa?

The name is generally traced to the Malavas, an ancient people who inhabited this part of the Punjab plains in antiquity and whose name the land kept long after their rule ended. It is a different Malwa from the better known plateau of the same name in Madhya Pradesh, though writers have long speculated about links between the two peoples who carried the name.

The land and its farming

Older accounts describe a Malwa very different from today's green fields. The Sutlej shifted its course over the centuries, and by the early 1500s much of the region had turned dry and thinly peopled, with the great Lakhi Jungle covering the south west around Bathinda, Faridkot, Muktsar and Ferozepur. Settlement thickened as Jat clans such as the Sidhu, Gill, Dhaliwal and Bhatti families moved in, and canal irrigation later transformed the dry tract completely.

Today Malwa is Punjab's farming engine room. Its south western districts form the heart of the state's cotton belt, while wheat, paddy and mustard fill the rest of the rotation, and the Abohar side of Fazilka is famed for kinnow orchards. The contrast with the past is sharp: a region once described as half desert now grows a large share of Punjab's food and nearly all of its cotton.

History: Gurus, misls and princely states

Sikhism reached Malwa later than Majha or Doaba. Guru Hargobind was the first Guru to tour the region, and his stay at Daroli, in today's Moga district, drew many local families to the faith. A century later Guru Gobind Singh travelled for about a year through the Muktsar country, where the battle remembered at Muktsar was fought. In the 1700s the region saw Sikh misls and then the rise of the Phulkian princely states, Patiala, Nabha and Jind among them, whose rulers governed much of Malwa under British protection while the land north of the Sutlej followed a different political story. Ferozepur, founded under Firuz Shah Tughlaq in the 1300s, stood for centuries as the region's western gateway.

Malwai speech and culture

Malwa speaks Malwai, the dialect of Ferozepur, Fazilka, Faridkot, Muktsar, Moga, Bathinda, Sangrur, Patiala, Barnala, Mansa and western Ludhiana. It has its own folk forms, among them Malwai Giddha, the exuberant dance performed by men with drums and folk instruments. Patiala's Panjabi University anchors the region's literary life, and Malwa is often credited with producing more Punjabi writers, singers and actors than any other region of the state.

Malwa today

Malwa's size makes it the political centre of gravity of Punjab: nearly every chief minister of the state has come from this region. Ludhiana, its largest city, is Punjab's industrial capital of hosiery, bicycles and machine parts; Bathinda mixes an ancient fort, Qila Mubarak, with a modern refinery and power plants; and Patiala carries its princely past in palaces, gardens and the Patiala gharana of music. To travel from the Sutlej down to Bathinda is to cross the full width of modern Punjab, and most of that journey is through Malwa.

How is Malwa different from Majha and Doaba?

Majha, north of the Beas and Ravi side, is the historic Sikh heartland whose Majhi dialect sets the standard for written Punjabi. Doaba, between the Beas and the Sutlej, is smaller, greener and shaped by emigration. Malwa is the big southern plain: drier in character, cotton growing, princely in its history and dominant in the state's politics, with a dialect and temperament its neighbours recognise at once.