How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab

As promised I wanted to write on the ongoing argument about Provinces of Pakistan. Mohsin Naqvi lit it in July by declaring the system of governance collapsed. On 10 September the parliamentary affairs minister, Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, said Parliament would debate new provinces in October. Two days later Rana Sanaullah said the decision belonged to Parliament, with a referendum to follow if a joint sitting approved one. Sindh’s assembly had already passed a resolution on 3 September rejecting any division of the province, and Saraiki nationalists said in August that their claim to a province is older than any administrative tidy-up.

The argument is framed as administration. Punjab has 127 million people; should it be split? The better question is what Punjab is. The province Pakistan inherited in 1947 had already been remade once. The British had moved Punjabi cultivators, including large numbers of Sikh Jats and Muslim agriculturalists from the crowded central and eastern districts, into its west. Partition moved more. The middle of the old continuum was increasingly counted as Punjabi, while Pakistan put Urdu above it. The latest census suggests that linguistic hierarchy is still reshaping how Punjab identifies itself.

What Grierson found

George Grierson gave the western speech forms of Punjab the collective name Lahnda, literally “western”. Nobody called their own language that. They said Multani, Siraiki, Hindki, Jatki, Shahpuri. Grierson admitted it: Punjabis had no general name for the group and might at most say lahnde di boli, the speech of the west.

The 1929 Jhang District Gazetteer says local Jangli and Punjabi are the same language, then lists the differences from the Punjabi of the Majha, including the future and the passive, and sends the reader to grammars of Western Punjabi, Jatki and Multani rather than Lahore. Northern Jhang leaned towards Majhi, southern Jhang towards Multan. That is a continuum. Grierson still mapped the Lahnda of Jhang and Lyallpur, of Shahpur, of Montgomery, and varieties in Gujranwala, apart from Punjabi proper. Later linguists took his taxonomy apart and reassigned those varieties to Western Punjabi, Saraiki, Hindko or Pothohari. The old map highlights that a century ago linguists drew a frontier between central Punjabi and the western speech forms. Today’s census draws none through the middle.

The British moved Punjab west

Geography did that initially. The Majha around Lahore and Amritsar sits on an ecological hinge, with rain, wells and old cultivation to the east and, to the west and south-west, the great uplands between the rivers, the Bars, where dry scrub and limited water supported much lower population densities. Settlement thinned with the rainfall. The speech patterns also shifted from Lahore into the Sandal Bar around Jhang.

Then the canals came. From the late nineteenth century the canal colonies turned the Bars into some of the most productive farmland in Asia, and the colonial state filled them with cultivators from the crowded central and eastern districts. The British did not merely irrigate western Punjab. They moved Punjab into it. By 1901 the Chenab Colony had a net gain of more than half a million people from elsewhere in the province: more than 100,000 from Sialkot, more than 50,000 each from Jullundur, Montgomery and Amritsar, and tens of thousands more from Hoshiarpur, Lahore, Gurdaspur, Gujrat, Ludhiana and Ferozepur. By 1911 Lyallpur district held more than 600,000 immigrants. Migrants from Amritsar, Jullundur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana in the Chenab Colony alone rose from 221,445 in 1901 to 280,232 in 1911.

Lyallpur, now known as Faisalabad, was a new society built on the Sandal Bar by planned migration. Majhi did not replace Jangli; settlers spoke several Punjabi varieties, local speech survived, and Sialkot was as big a source as any district across the later border. However Western Punjab was being peopled from the east and north at the moment irrigation dissolved an ecological barrier that had helped keep its old speech map in place.

Partition did it again

Western Punjab then absorbed one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Pippa Virdee’s reading of the 1951 census puts migrants at 46 per cent of Lyallpur district, 39 per cent of Montgomery, 39 per cent of Lahore and 20 per cent of Bahawalpur State. Many who reached Lyallpur came from East Punjab districts that already had family and colony ties to the canal lands. Work on the Lyallpuri variety records the mass settlement after 1947 of Punjabi speakers from India around Lahore, Sahiwal, Faisalabad and Gujranwala.

Faisalabad-Lyallpur captures this story in one city. A Jangli-speaking Bar; a British canal and hundreds of thousands of settlers; the departure of its Hindus and Sikhs in 1947 and the arrival of Muslim refugees from the east; then an industrial boom pulling in still more. Local, migrant and urban speech ran together, the line colonial linguists had drawn between Punjabi and Lahnda became harder still to draw, and the census called the middle Punjabi. The 2023 census returns 67 per cent of Punjab as Punjabi-speaking, 20.64 per cent Saraiki and 7.18 per cent Urdu; in Faisalabad Division 15.3 million of 16.2 million people were counted as Punjabi speakers. Contrast that with Grierson’s Lahnda of Jhang and Lyallpur. He mapped a Lahnda of Shahpur too; Shahpur essentially became Sargodha district in 1960, and in 2023 it returned 3.93 million Punjabi speakers out of 4.33 million. Nobody in Faisalabad or Sargodha swapped Jhangochi or Shahpuri for Majhi overnight. The box changed as much as the speech.

Three fates for Lahnda

If Pakistan had simply Punjabified the Lahnda zone, Saraiki would not exist. In the south-west the opposite happened. Multani, Bahawalpuri, Derawali and their neighbours converged over the twentieth century on one name, Saraiki, and whatever the linguistic line between Saraiki and Punjabi, the political result is beyond argument: the 2023 census counts more than 26 million Saraiki speakers in Punjab, a fifth of the province.

So the old Lahnda country had three fates. Its centre, Jhang, Faisalabad, Sargodha and the country around them, went into the Punjabi box. Its south became Saraiki. Its north-west kept Hindko and Pothohari. Grierson’s Lahnda broke apart, in the classification and in politics. That is why the Saraiki province keeps coming back. The province called Punjab contains regions whose entry into a single Punjabi identity was never completed.

Urdu on top

Pakistan could Punjabify the classification of Jhangochi without making Punjabi the language of the state, because above Punjabi sat Urdu. Colonial Punjab had already put Urdu in the school and the courthouse; Pakistan inherited the hierarchy and made it national. Article 251 makes Urdu the national language and leaves provinces free to promote their own. Punjab’s own cultural-policy documents concede that Urdu and English hold the domains of power, in government, education, media and business, and a British Council study describes the same ladder: Urdu and English at the top of schooling, mother tongues below.

The census measures what people say their mother tongue is. Between 2017 and 2023 the share of Punjab calling Urdu its mother tongue rose from 4.87 per cent to 7.18, nearly half again, while Punjabi fell from 69.67 to 67.00. Whether the households changed their speech or their answer, it speaks to the hierarchy implicit in contemporary Pakistani society.

Razib once used the Rohingya as an example of how a population can remain linguistically close to a larger neighbour while acquiring a separate identity because it sits outside the institutions that created the larger identity. Something similar, though much less dramatic, happened along Punjab’s north-western edge. Hindko remained close to Punjabi while becoming a name people could organise an identity around. Shah Rukh Khan’s paternal family, for example, came from Peshawar’s Hindko-speaking population even though Khan himself has described the family as Pathan (like his co-Khans, Mahira, Fawad and Ayub, he is probably a very distant but completely Urdufied Pathan).

So Punjab has three storeys. On the ground, the actual vernaculars: Majhi, Doabi, Jhangochi, Shahpuri, Pothohari, the Saraiki varieties and dozens more. Above them, Punjabi as the regional identity for most of the province. Above that, Urdu, with English in a narrower room at the top. Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab at the same time.

The ghost in the provinces debate

October’s debate will be conducted as administration. Saraiki activists answered the latest proposals by pointing to a movement decades old, to earlier parliamentary action and to a distinct identity, and Khawaja Asif invoked the Saraiki province this month while attacking the PPP for inconsistency on the question.

The roots are older than any of them. Pakistan’s provincial map froze what its speech map never did. A century ago the picture was Majhi around Lahore and Amritsar, transitional speech across the Rachna and Chaj doabs, Jatki and Jangli across the Bars, Multani and Bahawalpuri to the south, Hindko and Pothohari to the north. Canals moved people, Partition moved them again, the census changed its boxes, Urdu climbed above all of them, and one fragment of the old western continuum found a name strong enough to ask for a province. The border divided Punjab and then changed what Punjabi means on the side that stayed Pakistan by appealing to both Urdu supremacy and Majha hegemony (in a way being more conservative and true to the colonial era than Indian Punjab).