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India Booked | Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines
121 Plays3 years ago
‘Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines’ is a rigorous investigation and a personalized narrative by Amandeep Sandhu about the matters of Panjab, an account on the recovery from its past and the discovery of its present.
This episode of India Booked is illuminating and comprehensive, much like the book itself, which brings an alternative outlook to the pre-existing perspectives on Panjab by discussing the impacts of militancy, separation, farm bills and egalitarianism, underlining the contrasts of a Panjab that was and a Panjab that exists now.
This conversation between Ayushi and Amandeep spans across the representation of Panjab in political and entertainment media and details into the concerns of drug addiction and the laws regarding it, agrarian havoc caused by political mismanagement during the green revolution, and the reality of rampant exodus in Panjab and much more.
Tune in to understand all in all, the events, issues and contributions of the state that shaped the Panjab we know today!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'India Booked' and Amandeep's Book
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello, everyone. I am Ayushi Mona, your host on India Book, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature.
The Importance of Amandeep's Non-Fiction Work
00:00:39
Speaker
Today, I have with me Amandeep, who's essentially a written Punjab journey through fault lines.
00:00:48
Speaker
It encapsulates Punjab very much through the written world as it tried to do via this podcast. Amandeep was born in Orissa. He studied at the University of Hyderabad, worked as a journalist, as a technical writer. His first two books, you know, were autobiographical fiction. But this piece is his first nonfiction work and it's an absolutely important book.
00:01:17
Speaker
And the reason I call this an important book is because of the kind of narratives it brings together. When I was thinking of an appropriate adjective right to describe the book, and I also went through a few reviews of what people were saying, you know, I heard things like well-written, excellent, brilliant book. But to me, Aamandeep, this is an important book and I want to talk to you about
Impact of Operation Bluestar and Militancy
00:01:44
Speaker
it.
00:01:44
Speaker
And I'm thrilled that you're on the show. First of all, a very, very warm welcome and thank you for sharing your time with us. Thank you very much, Mona. I'm really happy to be here with you and talking to everybody else through this podcast. So, Amman, my first question, usually I lead with, you know, the beginning of the book, but I want to ask something that you say in the epilogue, right? You mentioned how the people of Punjab
00:02:13
Speaker
who have seen one generation lost to militancy, one to drugs, and the present to exodus, are looking for new directions, new voices, and new leadership. To begin with, I want to first ask you on the generation that was lost to militancy. What do I say about it? It's lost. I mean, the struggle between a region and the nation state,
00:02:43
Speaker
sadly a bloody turn in the late 70s early 80s and the nation state I think did not pay enough attention it believed that it can crush anything that comes up and that we had the Operation Blue Star which to me is a watershed moment not only of my life but of anybody who is in their 40s now because
00:03:11
Speaker
We were just beginning to understand the world and here Operation Bluestar happened. The way I talk about it in the book is that it was actually a rupture of the trust between a citizen and a state. And when that kind of rupture happens and then the state does not heal it, it becomes quite sad.
00:03:30
Speaker
And it takes turns which took turns and it became militancy. Then Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the anti-sick program happened. And even then there has been no justice to the victims of the program.
Historical Struggles of Punjab
00:03:45
Speaker
And it is a continuous wound festering on the conscience of India, I think, that we have not learned from our mistakes. And we then repeated them later on in other parts of the country as well.
00:03:59
Speaker
So the generation who, see, we must recognize that India was a young country at that time in 1984. It was barely 35, 37 years old. The Sikhs by themselves had been an empire which was lost to the British and then which was divided through partition. And the Sikh community was also looking for ways to better their lot.
00:04:26
Speaker
And unfortunately, naturally others jump in when such things happen. And it took a very, very bloody turn. About 50,000 people were lost. About another 25,000 people have still disappeared. So it's a generation lost in many, many ways. And you know this, the battle of the Darbar Sahib during Operation Blue Star, right? And you speak of it as an engagement between the nation state and the fighters of a religion.
00:04:55
Speaker
right? Whose ethos lies in standing up for justice and honor right? This
00:05:02
Speaker
I mean, this happens in a certain moment in obviously India's political history. And also there is this legacy right of the partition that Punjab has struggled with. Your book, in fact, and when I started this, I said that, you know, there is militancy and drugs and exodus, but your book, I think you've so beautifully divided this in these 16 chapters, right?
00:05:31
Speaker
whether it's a satt or a beruki or zameen, karza. And for those of you listening to the podcast, right, there are 16 sections which cover everything from Inlet's Faith
00:05:45
Speaker
masculinity corpses you and you have to read the book to learn more about it of course but never before and and i much like a lot of other people have perceptions of Punjab have a perception based on the kind of media i've consumed or the news i've listened to etc right but never before had i read such a comprehensive
00:06:08
Speaker
personal history which was still so well tied with every single aspect of the state you know because you hear this in bits and pieces right you hear i mean in a public imagination
00:06:23
Speaker
You have a certain bollowed imagination, you have a certain imagination that comes from watching the recent kind of media that a film like a Urta Panchabara Patal
Contradictions in Sikh Ideals vs. Caste Issues
00:06:34
Speaker
Lok show you, right? But then we don't really, really ever see very mainstream discussions, right? Apart from occasional flashes on the news of say, of the Dalit issue.
00:06:48
Speaker
right because Sikhism was the premise really was to do away with the perils and all the trappings of the caste system that Hinduism imposed that Sikhism could do away with but today there is and your book really brings a lot of these stories to the fourth of how this is still thriving yes absolutely I mean the 31.9 percent
00:07:17
Speaker
of Punjab is Dalit, which is the highest population of the Dalit people anywhere in any state in the country. But the very fact that it exists continuously flammoxes me because, as you said, the Sikhism stood on two basic ideals. One was justice and one was equality.
00:07:38
Speaker
And we have not really followed the gurus. We fight for identity, but we haven't followed the real teachings of the gurus because by that there should be no discrimination. And within Punjab, normally there is a narrative about the Soharna classes. In Punjab, it is the juts who are the landowners who are actually about 25% of the population. They are the Brahmins of Punjab.
00:08:08
Speaker
And there is exploitation that happens every day at every level. And this is something the Sikh religion really needs to reflect upon and cure before it goes out as a singular identity to asking for their own rights, because they're also crushing the rights of the Bahujan people then.
Women’s Narratives and Social Justice in Punjab
00:08:28
Speaker
And similarly, there is another side to it is gender. It is also a patriarchal feudal society.
00:08:35
Speaker
and though the Punjabi women are very dynamic and as I show in my book nowadays it is the Punjabi women who are actually coming out more and more leading not only social justice movements but also within families taking care of elder older people doing what technically or traditionally what the male child was supposed to do but yet we don't have their narratives and we need those narratives so both caste and gender are
00:09:05
Speaker
are very very insidious practices of Punjab which we need to cure before we think of ourselves as one people as united by religion or whatever other external symbolism we might ascribe to ourselves. True and you know I think for people who will read the book and for those who have read the book
00:09:29
Speaker
Your amount of rigorous research that you did, of course, I across blurb and the book say that you were trying to fill a hole in your heart and try to understand the texture of the blood that flows in your veins. Even if you, you know, you weren't born there. I thought that was a very beautiful thing. You just said in the before the previous question that
00:09:55
Speaker
We all have perceptions about Punjab based on various images and texts that we see and read, the sounds we hear. And I say it in the first chapter as well, that was like, you like my hand, but you don't like my arm. You like my foot, but you don't like my leg. You like parts of me, but you don't like the whole of me.
Amandeep's Writing Journey and Book Compilation Challenges
00:10:19
Speaker
And I was not born in Punjab. I lived there in the critical period of militancy.
00:10:24
Speaker
I also had impressions about Punjab from various sources and most of them did not fit in together as one state or one people in my mind, you know, there were contradictions between them. For example, how do you look at militancy alongside Jangar, you know, which is one of the big traditions of Punjab and of the Sikh community, you know, how do you hold
00:10:51
Speaker
Sufi music alongside issues of sacrilege of holy book, you know, like, how do you understand this? How do you understand dwindling male-female ratio? How do you understand caste? So I also went looking to understand Punjab, actually, and media friends were kind to me. They commissioned me stories to do. Actually, most of them said, whatever catches your fancy just sent to us. I wrote for Caravan one article per month on various aspects.
00:11:21
Speaker
And traveling for about three years, basically in bits and pieces, I mean, not together, I felt that, okay, here are these stories from Punjab and that should do it. Why do I need to make a book about it? And then I thought that, but these stories were meant for immediate consumption in media. What would give them a long lasting stranger?
00:11:49
Speaker
So I realized that I need to bring in contextual history of everything that was happening, that I had covered already. And that led me to studying history, meeting people, trying to understand history and all that. And then I thought, okay, now we have reportage and now we have history. This should be a book, but that would be a textbook. That won't really be a nonfiction.
00:12:11
Speaker
book, you know, like it won't be a book like it is now. And that's where I realized that I can only make it personal if I talk about my own journeys through Punjab, both in the past, through my lifetime and the current journey, and then contrast what I already knew with what I'm seeing right now. Like some example that comes to my mind is like we used to have the hand pump.
00:12:34
Speaker
You know, the hand pump was central to Punjab. Anywhere you look, you would find a hand pump in colonies, on streets, near the railway station, near bus stops, near hospitals. Water was free. I mean, good water could just be consumed. And now I see Punjab, there is hardly a hand pump left anywhere. And water is Punjab. Punjab is named after the five rivers, and yet water is Punjab's greatest crisis right now.
00:13:04
Speaker
You know, so so that is how you then try to so that the book became reportage plus contextual history plus memoir. And that is why, you know, even the structure of the chapterization of the book and my editor helped me a lot with how to how to structure the book. And it's finally in your head says a book which you say
00:13:29
Speaker
is important and I think that has been the universal appreciation for it also. Everybody feels, you know, Punjab was also talked through various different lenses earlier. Somebody would do a political story of Punjab, somebody would do an economic story of Punjab, somebody would do a partition story of Punjab, you know. All these were different books. I wanted to get a book which gave me the whole of Punjab in one book.
00:13:59
Speaker
I did not at that point realize that the scope would become so thick, you know, it's like 558 pages. Actually, I must tell you my editor cut out
00:14:09
Speaker
80,000 words so that would actually have been like 900 pages book you know like we cut it out because we could say what we wanted to say in this much but I wanted to to read a book on Punjab which would help me understand current Punjab I think it is Toni Morrison who said that if you don't find the book you want then make that book you know and so I made the book
00:14:32
Speaker
And I'm so glad you did. You know, in many ways, right, the sense that I got from reading this book was a sense that I got from reading The Discovery of India when I read it for the first time, because while I knew that there was
00:14:50
Speaker
this Indus Valley civilization and this freedom movement and this Gandhi and that irrigation system until I did not read the discovery of India, it did not all come together for me, right? I knew of it in bits and pieces and when you read cohesive, right, it helps you cease
00:15:10
Speaker
things in a completely different new light. Of course, not to say that if you read just an economy or just a political history, you're not consuming information or having epiphanies, but to have
00:15:23
Speaker
If I could call it a single source of truth, right, or something which is so cohesive in its narrative, as a reader, it's a delight because often, you know, you're reading pieces together, but you can't string the kind of impact that they've had across history.
00:15:42
Speaker
especially when you're talking about a state, right? Because there is, you know, say an independence after the partition and there is a Gurudwara reform movement, there is the birth of Akali Dal, there's so much, right? There's a timeline of Punjab, three quarters after the British have annexed Punjab, there is a timeline of Punjab where there is massive drug addiction, there is green revolution, there's so much.
00:16:07
Speaker
Just like a person, right? A status and the nation is very much a living thing. And to have it in a book, right? This book is an autobiography of Punjab to me. Thank you. But just my autobiography of Punjab. And I think that's an important point to make because somebody perhaps who was born and had lived and grown up in Punjab might have written the same book in a very different way, you know.
Subjectivity of Truth in Punjab's Narratives
00:16:36
Speaker
In that sense, I had, as I say in the book as well, I had sensory experiences of Punjab, but I did not have an audio track of Punjab in my head. And I knew what it tastes like, I knew what it touches like, I knew what it smells like, but I didn't knew how it hears like, how one can construct a narrative of Punjab.
00:17:05
Speaker
But I would also like to qualify that it is just my autobiography of Punjab. And I'm sure if others write, and I wish others would write, especially women would write, especially Bhajans would write, then they would write their own stories of Punjab. And somewhere between these stories, a reader might be able to find Punjab. Because he used the word truth earlier, and truth was very bewildering to me in my research phase of Punjab.
00:17:35
Speaker
See, we normally think truth is an objective reality that we need to finally find, you know, and but Punjab is a landmine of narratives because of the wounds that we earlier talked about, you know, the quest for a separate state, the militancy, the Bluestar event, the
00:17:58
Speaker
the pogrom and all that, there is a lot of disquiet in Punjab about many things which are historical in nature. And then those things get repeated also. For example, right now there is a big protest going
Punjab's Contributions and Grievances with India
00:18:13
Speaker
on in Punjab over the
00:18:15
Speaker
new farm builds. And people in Punjab are seeing this as just another phase of the same way in which India has treated Punjab until now. We must remember, despite all these issues of Punjab,
00:18:31
Speaker
Towards the nation Punjab has continued to deliver for the last seven decades. It became the granary of the country. The Green Revolution happened there and earlier it used to contribute 60% of the national tool of grains and now it still contributes about 30 to 40%.
00:18:50
Speaker
This is Punjab's contribution to the nation. In spite of militancy, in spite of the devastation of Punjab's environment, land, water, everything, Punjab continues to deliver to India. But then Punjab asks, what is India giving us? And there they have grudges about what they think they should have got and they have not got. So what happens is that every person has their own sense of truth.
00:19:18
Speaker
And when somebody like me who goes with an empty vessel saying, okay, now put the truth into it, the vessel starts overflowing in a very contradictory way because here the state is saying something, people are saying something. Among people also, there are the Sikhs, especially the radical Sikhs who have a Kalistan narrative. Then there are the left movements who are saying, no, no, no, this whole thing is wrong. There has to be a different way of looking at it. And then there is the
00:19:47
Speaker
minority population of Punjab, the Hindu people, they have their own narrative also. And then there are the narratives of the women, then there are the narratives of the caste. So truth is also multilayered. And to cut through all that and to penetrate to what you think is important, it was an effort which has finally resulted in the book. But I feel truth is very subjective as well, you know, it's not really
00:20:15
Speaker
And that is why, I mean, I am a little amused when somebody uses the term non-fiction for my book because honestly, I feel there can be nothing called non-fiction in the world because all representation is mediated through your mind and there is a subjectivity to it. If non-fiction means absolute objectivity, then I'm sorry. I don't think there's anything called absolute objectivity.
00:20:43
Speaker
I mean, that's a completely, you know, fair point. And I think what you say and how you've articulated this, right, is wonderful because irrespective of who's writing, right, they are bringing their personal, I mean, their perspective and their lens to everything, of course. So I think very, very fair and
00:21:14
Speaker
The next thing that I want to ask you, right, is of course about the Green Revolution. You mentioned it frequently and we are talking about the Green Revolution. No, but can I just add a rejoinder to everything I said? I talked about these various categories of Punjab, Sikh and left and Hindu and
00:21:34
Speaker
gender and caste the matter of satisfaction to me from this book is that all these different factions have accepted the book Punjab is also very divided internally because of recent history and all those things and I find it very satisfying that at least as far as this book is concerned everybody says okay this was good work done you know this does tell the world about us
00:22:04
Speaker
I think that is something that I might have just earned by doing this whole thing. I think, and I say this as somebody, right, who's reading this from an outsider perspective, right? Like none of these stories are, say, my stories or one that I can resonate with as a lived experience directly or via someone I know. But I think it's just
00:22:32
Speaker
The fact, right. And I was there's, for instance, an excerpt on the caravan. And that's really how I discovered the book and you subsequently. I mean, where, you know, you say have that there's an excerpt right where you talk about traveling to the village of Jalur and there are these 500, 600 Dalit families in the community that don't own any land in the village. Right. And there's a brutal assault against them.
00:23:01
Speaker
I mean, certain amount of sensitivity to be writing about, I mean, the kind of political, social, there's so much friction, there is so much tension. There are so many perspectives. And of course, you've traveled and met people and spoken to them. But I am so glad to actually hear when you say that everyone who you sought to represent in the book
00:23:31
Speaker
feels that they've been represented and accepted, which I think is a big compliment to you really. Thank you. I brought it up because once when my second book was out in Jamia, a student asked me, are the people you write about, can they find themselves in your book? And that is a gap that a writer has to address between reality and representation. I said I would be damned if the people I write about can't find themselves in
00:24:01
Speaker
Because often it happens that when writers, filmmakers, musicians, any artists, they go anywhere, they imbibe the experiences of that place. But when they represent it, then there is some break that happens in between. And most often people don't feel themselves represented in works of art. The works of art then become a thing unto themselves. That's an argument. I mean, for art's sake, it's an argument.
00:24:27
Speaker
But I did not want to be a writer like that. I wanted to bring... See, my inspiration in that sense is from a different source. My inspiration is from this Polish journalist called Riziat Kapucinci, who was actually the only Polish journalist allowed to travel outside the iron wall in communist era, you know, in between the 50s and the 90s.
00:24:52
Speaker
And he covered 27 revolutions in those many countries, was already given the death sentence by four countries, survived, lived to tell his stories, and was a big insight into what was going on in mostly African, Middle Eastern, and South American countries.
Green Revolution and Agrarian Crisis in Punjab
00:25:11
Speaker
And I have sought in my life to be able to do the kind of work he did.
00:25:16
Speaker
That is why often while doing this book also, it tired me, it broke me. I was disillusioned by what I carried in my head as the Sikh ethos not fulfilled on the ground. There was many sadnesses, but I kept remembering Kaposinchki saying that when you actually go to get people's stories, you must realize that there are millions wanting to tell about themselves to the world. It's just that nobody listens to them and nobody talks about them.
00:25:44
Speaker
And I thought, I should do what he wanted us to do. That's the reason why it seems personal, it seems lived, is because that kind of work has gone into it. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I mean, I have these sections marked out in the book and you say, right, that nations are imagined community, right? And there is no point living in a nation in which, and this could be a country nation and state nation.
00:26:12
Speaker
in which one does not feel that they belong or where they don't feel that their dignity or sense of justice or resources for a better life or not. Anyway, we were at Green Revolution. You wanted to ask. The Green Revolution, of course, is something which I think in your book you say that Punjab was the laboratory where social and economic experiments failed.
00:26:40
Speaker
But they were still implemented across India. And Green Revolution is, of course, one of the pivotal economic experiments in this country. And a lot of, I think, imagination of Kate and Farmer and Sarsoke Kate and hand pumps and whatever.
00:27:00
Speaker
especially in non-political media, right? And entertainment media is born out of that imagination of a land overflowing with plenty, right? But then there's obviously a certain crisis that you've spoken about in the book, right? And you don't call it a crisis just of Punjab, but by virtue of the fact that it's a crisis of Punjab, it's a national agrarian crisis.
00:27:26
Speaker
that the Punjab, one of the reasons it's so relevant is because of the Green Revolution, right? But there are a lot of political aspects that I don't really want to detail out too much because I want people to read the book and experience some of these things for themselves. But what about the Green Revolution spurred
00:27:52
Speaker
the imagination for it to become one of the pivotal ways that we view Punjab today. Firstly, perhaps that's something. And if you agree or disagree with that, of course, it's just my understanding. No, no, it's absolutely right. And see, this is again how perceptions are formed. Right. And let's start with the word Punjab itself. You know, I mean, I spell it with an A, you know, because that's how even Batuta used the word.
00:28:22
Speaker
Punjab, five rivers, the words are Persian actually. But is this Punjab that Punjab? Now we have two and a half rivers flowing through this Punjab. The other Punjab is in Pakistan. So should we then carry out the name Punjab itself? That's the question that I'm problematizing here. Similarly, the green revolution that we see, and I argue quite elaborately in the book,
00:28:47
Speaker
that the actual Green Revolution was when the British created the canal colonies, when Raul Pindi, Lyle Port,
00:28:55
Speaker
Faisalabad, these areas were set, Montgomery, these were settled in what is now Pakistan, you know. That is when the empire, the British Empire chose this area overflowing with water to feed the entire empire and especially the armies that they were deploying in Africa and Europe. It was also their way that by building railroads, they managed to reach the bottom of
00:29:24
Speaker
the Russian Empire because the threat at that time was Russia, the large Czarist Russia. So they reached up to Afghanistan which was all part of Punjab at that time. So parts of Afghanistan were part of Punjab. So with partition, the whole idea of Punjab has changed.
00:29:45
Speaker
And with what we call the Green Revolution in the 1960s, actually, this was putting the same cultivation system on those steroids through pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, hybrid seeds. You know, the area was pumped up to produce more and more. Punjab is 1.5% of nation's land.
00:30:12
Speaker
And yet, as I said earlier, it was producing 60% of the nation's food needs. Because in the 60s, our crisis was hunger. There was, of course, an attack by China, then by Pakistan. These were external enemies. But internally, we had memories of the great Bengal famine in which approximately 4.3 million people had died. And we didn't want to do that to India again after independence. And so the government chose Punjab to be the Green Revolution state.
00:30:42
Speaker
Yet what happens later on is that once Java started producing, then Java is also encountering issues with how farming is being done. And there could be smaller issues like not very good tractor quality or not very good machinery coming in. So you need to protest against the tractor maker or
00:31:06
Speaker
you know, the government that, okay, don't deport such tractors. We're mostly importing from Russia at that time. Or there is a problem of, you know, electricity cuts are happening. Why are we not getting enough electricity? Or why are we getting electricity at a higher rate? Why isn't our crop picked up at a better rate than why it is being picked up? These were issues that had started boiling over in Punjab, even in the sixties and seventies, especially in the seventies.
00:31:32
Speaker
But the nation, so busy building itself, forgot to look about on the issues of Punjab. 30 years later, the same very Green Revolution model continues in Punjab, but it has devastated it ecologically, environmentally, even economically and socially. Because caste, as we talked about, is perpetuated in the rest of the Central India in a way in which it is not perpetuated in Punjab.
00:32:01
Speaker
You know, the lines are much harder in central India. In Punjab, it was not so as much as it was there. It existed, and that is sad about Punjab. But the Green Revolution, the money that the juts got from it, and suddenly the non-involvement of other castes in the farming work because of heavy machinery coming in, actually aggravated the caste lines in the villages. Now, this is a fallout of the Green Revolution and social returns.
00:32:30
Speaker
If you look at how much money you were deriving from wheat or paddy, paddy, for example, is not a crop of Punjab, yet it was growing it for the nation. But if you look at the graph of whether the price of paddy and wheat have grown as per, say, the jobs that you hold in government services, like a teacher or an official or whatever, not at all.
00:32:54
Speaker
The parity is massively skewed against the farmers. So these are the issues that keep building up. And yet you can't do anything because the country has chosen this to be the green revolution state. It is not putting enough industry here. It is not creating enough jobs here. So people are forced to continue doing
00:33:13
Speaker
farming, which is finally not profitable any longer. That is where farming is in Punjab right now. And the same model of green revolution, I remember a Prime Minister in his campaign speeches seven years back was saying, he said it at seven different states. He said, we will bring green revolution here. We will bring green revolution. The country doesn't bring green revolution.
00:33:35
Speaker
The country needs to learn what has happened in the Green Revolution state and not repeat it in other places. But sadly, our bureaucratic thinking, our policymaking, and our different party political party agendas are such that we do not reflect upon what has gone wrong. We continue perpetuating the same rhombzels here. And now with the new farm bills,
00:33:57
Speaker
I mean, I don't know whether it how it is in Bombay, but in Bangalore, onion is at 100 rupees a kilo. Yes. So, and granaries of the country, the go-downs of the country are overflowing with onions. So there is a market force or crony capitalists who are monopolizing the go-downs and not releasing enough onions in the market. And this is going to get aggravated, this monopolistic activity with the new agrarian laws that have just come in.
00:34:26
Speaker
Kaab, Haryana, Western UP, some parts of Rajasthan are protesting against this. But we are not looking at them. As a country, we don't look at 50% of our region, which is still tied to the agrarian economy. That does not mean only farming, but it means all allied trades with agriculture, even artisans, even farm laborers. The small scale factories which are producing
00:34:55
Speaker
machinery for agriculture you know the whole ecosystem of India of agrarian India is 50% of the nations and we in the cities we don't look at those issues because we think oh it is happening way back in the villages without realizing that most of us I have just been one or two generations out of the villages we who live in cities this is
00:35:23
Speaker
the dichotomy of discourse in the country today. And it is sad because we are not focusing on the real thing. Even during this whole coronavirus lockdown and our economy plunging 23.9%, the only sector that produced profit was agriculture. And yet we don't look at it. So my book is, I mean, of course, it is about Punjab. It is about particular things in Punjab. But it is also largely about what is happening to the country. And we are going the wrong way.
00:35:52
Speaker
A writer can only warn the society. We can't really pick up flags and protest on the roads. We can warn people of where we are heading and we are not heading in good places. Similarly, the other laboratory in Punjab is the laboratory of Hindutva. Like Dayanan Saraswati comes to Punjab and creates the Arya Samaj in the 19th century. And then that is the Arya Samaj that later on
00:36:23
Speaker
breaks into various parts. One becomes a Hindu Mahatma, one becomes RSS. Then there is a Jansan which is created as a political party of the Arya Samajis and then the Jansan morphs into BJP in the late 70s. So again in terms of religious experiments Punjab was the laboratory where the experiments were being conducted because in that sense Punjab is a very fascinating geography here in my opinion. It is
00:36:53
Speaker
neither Western world nor Eastern world. It is somewhere in between the Orient and the Occident. This is the land of the Indus Valley Civilization, in my understanding, and I think it needs to be characterized more.
Drug Issues and Media Representation in Punjab
00:37:10
Speaker
Sadly, current political divisions and geographical boundaries are such that we have about seven regions inside the Indus Valley Civilization. I don't know when we will ever be able to make a
00:37:22
Speaker
comprehensive study of the Indus Valley civilization, which in itself is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Yes. And then the way, I mean, Punjab is why what we know today as state Punjab is not the full land of five rivers, right? It is one seventh of that. You know, it's a pathetic little patch, you know, here, you know, it's like your Dadimas
00:37:47
Speaker
Quilt has torn, torn, torn, torn and you get a patch of it and from that page you try to imagine the whole quilt, you know, like how would that feel? Is that how you feel walking through this Punjab today? That is a wonderful analogy. I was just wondering, you know, that the kind of, so there is this and this whole
00:38:10
Speaker
aspect of the agricultural issue, the bill that we discussed, as well as I mean even the legacy piece of say the Punjab agriculture, indeterminate relief act, etc, which is the debtors protection act, all of that is detailed in your book, but another way, right? There is this being a stray on from
00:38:34
Speaker
Another way that, right at the beginning, I said that we will discuss the drug issue and the exodus, but there are two other ways that the state had to fight
00:38:50
Speaker
and continues to fight its demons. One is of course in detailed in her chapter on Dawaon medicine which is the whole drug addiction that's made all this news in the post militancy years but it's not really considered so much of a blot right it
00:39:06
Speaker
it's still something that flies under the radar right and you've sought to break into this maze of cultural practices and you know this whole alcohol and narcotic use and how the punishment model right here is self-defeating as well perhaps
00:39:26
Speaker
And chapters, I think the sixth and the seventh chapter, which is between masculinity and medicine, right? And how say there is the whole degradation of land and livestock and diet with pesticides and fertilizers that affect the virility of the land as much as the people and how you've touched upon the whole scourge of drug addiction.
00:39:51
Speaker
was this aspect of unraveling the history or the climate of the city to dig into, say, the political or the legislative framework or economic issues, right? But there is, of course, a certain, and again, I presume, a certain pathos that comes with trying to reach out to, say, drug addicts or seeing people's personal lives, right, being affected.
00:40:20
Speaker
On a conversation like this, we can't go into details of everything in the drug sphere, but there are two points I would like to emphasize. One is, as an approach in the book, it comes up very often how difficult was anything. You know, I chose not to reportage the way it is now established in the world, mostly through the American School of Journalism, which to me is mostly a pornography of pain.
00:40:50
Speaker
you know that you start your your piece with oh there was a dark dusty room on the mustard wall was hung the picture of this man with a little dried garland around it five weeks back this mind had gone to the tubal and hung himself or drank his pesticide and died and now the widow and five children are all languishing they don't have food for three
00:41:15
Speaker
That's the kind of talk that is done in most of these reportages. I didn't want to do any pornography of pain. I met hundreds of victims of farmer suicides. I met hundreds of victims of disappearances of young boys during the militancy period. I didn't want to talk about a single of them because I believe the audience is mature enough. I mean, if I'm saying that I have met them and they are saying this, then you will take my word for it. Why do I have to
00:41:44
Speaker
paid these ghastly pictures to you. So that is one aspect. So difficulty is there in any trying to understand politics, trying to understand drugs, trying to understand a gradient crisis. All of them are difficult. But there are two things that we need to know here. One is that as far as drugs goes, the social psychology is such that if we could pump up our land with chemicals,
00:42:13
Speaker
to make it produce much more than it usually did earlier. Remember in the 70s, every year the production of wheat and rice in Punjab was doubling. Like 71x amount, 72x by 2 amount, 74x by 6 amount. That's the kind of progression that happened.
00:42:34
Speaker
you know, in the production of grains from land because of fertilizers. People think of drugs as these kinds of fertilizers for the body. Oh, if the land could benefit, the meal also benefit. It is not wrong. Now, that is where we need the correction. That was neither did the land benefit, nor are you benefiting from it. And second aspect is, much of this is also to be seen in terms of what are the laws we have that govern the consumption of drugs. And the NDPS Act
00:43:03
Speaker
1985 is a particularly draconian piece of law and which must must be amended to decriminalize lower amounts of consumption of drugs because that's the we need to look at drugs not through the discipline and punish model which you just mentioned but through the humanitarian model of seeing an addict as an illness and the requirement for treatment and not punishment.
00:43:32
Speaker
And it's only through that that we can cure the drug problem of not only Punjab, but even Manipur, even Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay, there are drugs everywhere. Punjab was typically bloated up because of a wrong statement by a politician, which was irresponsible. I criticize it in the book as well. But the issue, and then you have to look at it in geopolitical terms, that where is Punjab located?
00:44:03
Speaker
on the Golden Crescent, you know, which is Punjab, Pakistan, and Iran, you know, and the production of drugs. So 90% of production of drugs is in Afghanistan. And because of the wars that have happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, the roots of the drug supply to the world stopped massively through the Balkans, through South Russia.
Migration Patterns and Economic Pressures
00:44:27
Speaker
And they naturally came towards Karachi, towards Bombay, towards Delhi.
00:44:33
Speaker
and Punjab was on the way. So it also got taken in by that scrouge of drugs. So it's a multi-headed demon that we are trying to deal with. That's, I think, important. The other thing to look at any issue that happens in Punjab is that overall, for a reader listening to the talk, you need to remember the term a double bind. That there is an issue both
00:45:03
Speaker
between Punjab and the center and at the same time within Punjab itself. So neither of these solutions whether going how the center wants you to go is the right way or fighting between yourselves and ending up with bruises all over is a solution. Punjab has to rise out of the double knot in which Punjab is tied up and that work I hope can happen only when
00:45:30
Speaker
people put their heads together and try to find comprehensive solutions to things. Aman I actually you know this is and while you speak right I am just wondering to myself and for people and I know I've said this that and I'm going to say this again it's a very important book and people should read it and share it with others. There is
00:45:57
Speaker
And I now do not envy your editor at all because they had to remove 80,000 words out of the book because there is, I mean even in such a short snippet of conversation, there is so much going on here.
00:46:15
Speaker
I think the last question that I would want to ask you is the issue of migration. Very fascinating because a lot of laborers migrate to Punjab as much as the whole NRI interface, if I may call it, that exists today in the imagination of
00:46:38
Speaker
Punjabis in the Kannada to NRI weddings to you know aspirations to migrate right and and of course how that shapes the state as well so perhaps I think to towards the end now what do you what would you say for the exodus right is the exodus something that that becomes a reverse brain brain or is it
00:47:08
Speaker
I don't again want to go too much into the voices of the individual so much, but largely largely what is that shaped this yearning for migration while the state in itself was prospering? Yeah, so very good question. I'm very glad you came back to the three kinds of exoduses from Punjab, you know, like the one that you hit upon right in the beginning, militancy, drugs and migration.
00:47:38
Speaker
See, migration pattern from Punjab is also almost as old as it is in the rest of India. I mean, for example, Bhagalpur and Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. And they have been sending people abroad for a long time now. And similar in Punjab. Soldiers went to Africa in the Boer War in the late 19th century. Then they went for the First World War to Europe. Many of them
00:48:06
Speaker
Second World War as well. Many of them chose to stay back in England and other African countries as well. But later on, at least in this period, for the last three, four decades, there have been two primary causes of migration. One has been militancy itself. A lot of people, as I said, the faith between the nation and the citizen broke. A lot of people felt they should leave the country. They left in the 80s, 90s as well.
00:48:36
Speaker
For the last two decades, it is mostly economic pressure. The fact that there are no jobs here, the fact that land is getting divided between families, so there isn't much to earn from land either. And there are no avenues that people see from living here. And in comparison, the people who go abroad and send money back home, they seem to be the heroes of Punjab. More and more girls now who go abroad
00:49:06
Speaker
send money back home, take care of parents. There are entire villages which are lying empty, big houses built, nobody lives in them. But this migration of Punjab, as you very, very rightly said, is exactly the kind of migration that happens between UP Bihar and Punjab, which has actually, I mean, Punjab takes a credit for the Green Revolution, but the Green Revolution was executed on the back of this Bihari and UP labour.
00:49:35
Speaker
And that is something we need to start acknowledging. Till now there is not a single good narrative about this migrant labor's lives or how they dealt with Punjab, what they did here. And you said brain-brain, I would rather call it brawn-brain because that is what is happening. Mostly Punjab is going abroad and actually doing the same kind of work in better conditions that the migrants from Bihar and UP come and do in Punjab.
00:50:04
Speaker
So in that sense, it has come a full circle. Mostly in the US, they drive taxis and trucks. In Europe, they work as farm laborers. In Australia, in New Zealand, they go through student visas, but they try to become permanent there and work in the farms there. So it is they're doing basically
00:50:28
Speaker
blue collared jobs wherever they are going. That to me should actually bring in a little bit of empathy in them towards the labor who has been coming here for decades and working on our farms. And the irony is that that doesn't seem to happen because the junk who employs this labor but sends his own son to go the same work in Europe has to come down from his high horse and say that
00:50:53
Speaker
Okay, there is a parity in terms of work that these laborers are doing here and my son is going and doing there.
Conclusion: Significance of the Book
00:51:00
Speaker
And whatever my son fights for in those countries, as rights, as minimum wages, as privileges, housing, water, whatever, and we need to give that to these migrants who come to Punjab as well. But that doesn't seem to happen. And that is my pain with Punjab.
00:51:19
Speaker
Because, you know, all said and done, I am a bhaya for Punjab because I come from Odisha, you know. So I understand their plight and I see that Punjab does not extend to them the kind of hospitality it expects its sons and daughters to get anywhere else in the world. That is again something that Punjab needs to look very seriously at. That's such an interesting perspective, Aman. You know, I think what you've done right with this book is you've linked
00:51:48
Speaker
historical narratives of course in your personal voice right with all with all of these contemporary issues and and for anyone who reads this book it will really help them
00:52:02
Speaker
not just understand, but also re-examine the fault lines of what they know about Punjab. So thank you so much for writing the book. I had a great time reading it. For everyone who's listening to this podcast, Aman's book is available at independent bookstores in Amazon and a Flipkart. Do please check it out. You can also read a couple of excerpts that are available over the internet.
00:52:29
Speaker
see if there are any specific chapters that interest you. I personally feel that there is something for everyone whether your interest is to learn about the demarcations around egalitarianism and caste or the people
00:52:49
Speaker
agrarian mishaps, the political and militancy issues, important figures in Punjab. And there is something for everyone. It's a very important book. And I think that's the fourth time I've used that adjective. So thank you, Aman, for taking our time and talking to us in such detail about this rigorous and fascinating book that you've written. Thank you so much, Ayeshi.
00:53:17
Speaker
I really love speaking to you. I don't know where the time went and I really hope that readers can get to the book and read it. I'm very satisfied that it is now in your hands. Thank you. Do not forget to tune into us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Ghana, and HD Smartcuts.