Puadhਪੁਆਧ

Where is Puadh?

Puadh is the eastern region of Punjab, the land that runs from the Sutlej river down and across to the Ghaggar, with the Shivalik foothills along its eastern shoulder. It begins around Rupnagar on the Sutlej and spreads through Mohali and Fatehgarh Sahib districts, takes in Rajpura and parts of Patiala district, reaches into the Doraha, Samrala and Payal side of Ludhiana district, and brushes the south eastern corners of Sangrur and Mansa. No river separates it cleanly from Malwa, which is one reason the two are so often confused.

Puadh does not stop at the Punjab border. The same Puadhi-speaking country continues into Haryana through Ambala, Panchkula and parts of Kurukshetra, Kaithal, Yamunanagar and Jind districts, and touches Himachal Pradesh around Nalagarh and Kala Amb. At its centre stands Chandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, which was built on the land of 22 Puadhi-speaking villages.

Water shapes the region as much as speech does. At Rupnagar the Sutlej is held at the Ropar headworks, where the Sirhind Canal draws off water for the Malwa plains, and the river's old floodplain near the town is protected as the Ropar Wetland, a Ramsar listed home for migratory birds. Between the canal network and the seasonal choes running off the Shivaliks, Puadh is a patchwork of orchards, wet lowlands and drier upland fields.

What does Puadh mean?

The name is generally explained as a joining of purava, meaning eastern, and addha, meaning half: Puadh is the eastern half of Punjab. The explanation fits its position on the map, the last Punjabi country before the land slopes toward the Yamuna plain, and it also fits its history, since before the reorganisation of Punjab in 1966 this tract was administered from Ambala rather than from the Punjab heartland.

The region the official maps forget

Ask the Punjab government and the state has three regions: Majha, Doaba and Malwa. Puadh has no official place on that list, and because the rule of thumb says everything south of the Sutlej is Malwa, Puadh is routinely folded into its bigger neighbour. Its people and scholars have long pushed back: the dialect is different, the customs are different, and the region's memory is its own. The complaint of political neglect is an old one in Puadh, which is why the appointment of Charanjit Singh Channi, the first chief minister from the region, was celebrated here as a landmark.

Puadhi speech and culture

Puadhi is spoken from Kharar, Kurali, Zirakpur and Morinda across to Ambala, Pehowa and Shahabad. Westward, in the Puadh tract of Ludhiana, it melts gradually into Malwai; northward it blends with Doabi. The region guards folk forms it claims as its own inventions: the Dhadd Sarangi and the Kavishri style of singing are both said to have originated here, along with a tradition of akharas, the village performance grounds, associated with singers such as Rabbi Bhaironpuri. Puadh had poets at Akbar's court, among them Mai Banno of Banur, and in more recent times the folk poet Bhagat Asa Ram Baidwan of Sohana. Small details mark the region out: where rural Malwa wraps a chadara, Puadh wears the kurta pyjama, and even the turla style of tying a turban is done differently.

The countryside has its own look too: mango orchards, green cover fed by seasonal nullahs and choes running off the Shivaliks, and wheat and sugarcane in the fields.

Sacred geography

For Sikhs, Puadh holds ground of the first importance. Anandpur Sahib, the city founded by Guru Tegh Bahadur and the birthplace of the Khalsa, stands in its north in Rupnagar district, and nearby Chamkaur Sahib remembers the battle of Guru Gobind Singh's last stand with a handful of Sikhs. Fatehgarh Sahib marks the martyrdom of the Guru's younger sons at Sirhind, a town whose older layers run from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughals. Rupnagar itself sits beside one of the earliest excavated Indus Valley sites in Punjab, so the region's sacred and ancient geographies overlap.

Puadh today

The Chandigarh effect has remade Puadh faster than any other part of Punjab. Mohali has grown from a planned suburb into a city of technology parks, a cricket stadium and new universities; Kharar, Zirakpur and Rajpura have swollen along the highways; and land that was once dismissed as backward now commands city prices. Yet a short drive from the expressways the Puadh of orchards, akharas and Puadhi speech continues, the eastern half of Punjab finally getting noticed on its own terms.