State of Punjab, India — Towns & Travel Guide

What is State of Punjab known for?

This gilded gurdwara at the heart of Amritsar is the holiest site of Sikhism, ringed by the Amrit Sarovar pool where pilgrims bathe. Beyond it, Punjab is the wheat and rice granary that feeds much of the country, a flat expanse of irrigated fields fed by the Sutlej, the Beas and the Ravi. Ludhiana runs the mills and the textile trade.

The daily flag-lowering drill at the Wagah border, west of Amritsar toward Pakistan, packs the grandstands every evening.

Where is State of Punjab?

Punjab sits in the far north-west of India, on the plain where the Himalayan foothills flatten out toward the Indus basin. Its name means the land of five rivers. Three of those five still cross the state, the Sutlej, the Beas and the Ravi, braiding the plain into fertile tracts before they drain west into Pakistan.

The land is almost entirely flat and green, cut by canals into a grid of wheat and paddy that reaches to every horizon. Himachal Pradesh rises along the northern and north-eastern edge, where the ground begins to climb toward the hills. Haryana wraps the south and south-east, Rajasthan and its deserts press in from the south-west, and Jammu and Kashmir lies to the north. The west is a hard edge. There runs the international line with the identically named Pakistani province of Punjab, split from this one at the 1947 partition.

Chandigarh, the planned city Le Corbusier laid out, sits on the eastern boundary and serves as the shared capital of both Punjab and Haryana. Three broad tracts divide the state between the rivers: Majha in the north around Amritsar, Doaba between the Beas and the Sutlej, and Malwa spreading south beyond the Sutlej toward the desert. Every part of it is river country.

The water made the farming, and the farming made Punjab.

What is State of Punjab like?

Punjab's culture is Sikh to its core. The faith was born on this plain around the end of the fifteenth century, and its ten Gurus shaped a way of life that still runs through the state, the turban, the shared kitchen, the reverence for the Guru Granth Sahib read aloud at the Golden Temple. Hospitality is a religious act here.

Every gurdwara runs a langar, a free communal kitchen that feeds anyone who sits on the floor, and the one at Amritsar serves tens of thousands of meals a day. The Punjabi language, written in the Gurmukhi script, carries a poetry and a music all its own. Bhangra and giddha, the harvest dances, set the tempo at every wedding and at the spring Baisakhi festival that also marks the founding of the Khalsa.

The food travels well beyond the state, tandoori bread, dal makhani, sarson da saag with makki di roti through the winter. Farming is the other half of the character. This is an agrarian society, proud and prosperous, where the wheat harvest still orders the calendar.

City and field are never far apart. The plain feeds the nation, and it knows it.

What is the history of State of Punjab?

The plain has carried empires for millennia, from the Indus Valley towns to the Mughals who ruled from Lahore. Its modern shape is Sikh. In 1799 Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, took Lahore and forged the Sikh Empire, overlaying the temple at Amritsar in gold and holding the country until the British defeated the Khalsa army in 1849.

Then came 1947. Partition tore the province in two along religious lines, sending the Muslim-majority west to Pakistan and the Sikh and Hindu east to India, amid one of the largest and bloodiest migrations in history. The Indian state took its present borders in 1956.

What is the climate of State of Punjab?

Punjab runs to extremes. Summers on the open plain are fierce, with temperatures climbing hard from late May and heat-wave days settling over the wheat fields. Then the monsoon breaks in, sweeping up from the south through July and August to soak the paddy in the growing season the farming depends on.

Winters are short and cool, and mornings near Amritsar can turn cold and foggy from December into February. That cool, dry window is when most travellers come. Between the seasons the sky does the deciding.

How do you get to State of Punjab?

Most visitors fly into Amritsar. Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport sits a short drive north-west of the Golden Temple and takes direct flights from Delhi and the Gulf. Amritsar Junction is a major railhead on the Delhi line, worked by frequent express and overnight trains.

From the east, Chandigarh gives a second gateway by air and rail into the Malwa side of the state. Roads fan out from there across the flat plain to Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Patiala. The border with Pakistan to the west is closed to through traffic beyond the Wagah ceremony.