The Naqsha

An illustrated map of the land of five rivers. Wander undivided Punjab from the foothills to the meeting of the waters — every shrine, field, courtyard, and riverbank a door into the archive. Hover or tap a place for its margin-note; click through for the full story.

The Naqsha is a modern illustration — a drawn map, not a historical document. Every place on it links to an article that cites its sources.

Prefer to read your way in? Start at the Culture portal. For the land's full story, including its griefs, walk the History timeline.

The word behind the page ਨਕਸ਼ਾ · نقشہ · naqshā — “map, plan, drawing” open the word card

ਨਕਸ਼ਾ

نقشہ

naqshā / nakshā

NUK-shaa — short first vowel, long final vowel

The drawn map — a picture of the land you can travel with your eyes.

Literal: A drawing, design, or delineation — from Arabic naqsh (engraving, painting) via Persian, a word family shared across Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi.
Cultural context: Naqsha is the everyday Punjabi word for a map in both scripts and both Punjabs — itself a small proof of the one-language-two-hands thesis. Related: naqqāsh (an engraver or painter), naqsh-o-nigār (ornamentation).
Example: ਪੰਜਾਬ ਦਾ ਨਕਸ਼ਾ ਵੇਖੋ · پنجاب دا نقشہ ویکھو · Panjāb dā naqshā vekho — “Look at the map of Punjab.”

The index

Every place on the map

The same destinations as the map, as a plain list — grouped the way the land groups them. Entries marked in progress link to the nearest live section until their article is written.

The Waters

River Jhelum — The westernmost of the five waters — Vitastā to the Sanskrit poets, Hydaspes to the Greeks who met Porus on its banks in 326 BCE.
River Chenab — The river of lovers — Heer and Ranjha, Sohni and Mahiwal; Punjabi romance keeps returning to its waters.
River Ravi — The river of cities: Harappa rose on its old bed, Lahore on its banks, and Guru Nanak's Kartarpur beside it.
River Beas — Where, tradition and the Greek sources agree, Alexander's weary army refused to march further east — the limit of his world.
River Sutlej — The longest of the five, running down past Ropar — where Harappan traders once worked — to gather the others in.
The pattan — ford and boatman — The crossing-place, where the boatman carries you to the far bank — the oldest Punjabi image of passage from one shore, one generation, to another.
Panjnad confluence — Five waters becoming one — the meeting that gives the land its name and this site its mark; no stream is lost in the joining.

The Foothills and the North

Shivalik foothills — The low green wall where the plains end — the rivers begin their descent here, and with them everything downstream.
Taxila — One of the ancient world's great centres of learning, on Punjab's north-west edge — students crossed half of Asia to study here. in progress — opens the History timeline for now
Anandpur Sahib — The hill town where, on Vaisakhi of 1699, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five members of the Khalsa.

The Cities and Sacred Places

Kartarpur on the Ravi — Where Guru Nanak farmed, taught, and fed all comers from one kitchen — the first Sikh community, reached today by a corridor across a border the map does not draw.
Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar — Guru Arjan built the shrine low, so every visitor steps down to enter, and gave it four doors — one facing each direction.
Lahore, the walled city — Undivided Punjab's great capital — Mughal court city, Ranjit Singh's seat, and the centre of Punjabi letters for centuries.
Badshahi Mosque — One of the largest mosques of the Mughal world, completed in 1673 — its courtyard faces Lahore Fort across a single square.
Shalimar Gardens — Terraced Mughal gardens of falling water — Lahore's rendering of paradise as the Persian tradition imagined it.
Harappa — A great city of the Indus age stood here on the Ravi's old bed — its streets, seals, and granaries have been coming out of the earth for a century.
Pakpattan — The shrine of Baba Farid, whose Punjabi couplets — the language's first great poetry — were later gathered into Sikh scripture.
Multan — The City of Saints — Sufi shrines sheathed in blue tile, and the potters who still fire that blue today. in progress — opens the Culture portal for now

The Agrarian Heart

Canal headworks — The straight-ruled canals that turned the western bar country into farmland — and moved whole village communities west to work it.
The granary — What is saved from this harvest plants the next — continuity kept in mud brick, the archive's own logic standing in a farmyard.

The Village Common

The Lohri bonfire — Midwinter fire, rewri and peanuts, and the song of Dulla Bhatti — Sunder Mundriye — sung around the flames.

The Bazaar and the Word

The school of two scripts — One language, two hands: Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi side by side on the writing boards — the visual proof that the tongue was never divided.
The poets' baithak — The mushaira — poets trading couplets deep into the night; Waris Shah's Heer was read aloud in gatherings like this one.

Music, the Rivers, and the Passage

The dargah courtyard (qawwali) — Harmonium, tabla, and clapped rhythm at the shrine — verses of Bulleh Shah passed around the circle like embers.
The music stage — Dhol, tumbi, algoza, sarangi — the instruments of the plains, each with its own article in the gallery.
The Sandal Bar (Dulla Bhatti country) — The bar country of Dulla Bhatti — the rebel remembered every Lohri for standing between Punjab's daughters and their abductors.
The ship at the water's edge — Where the waters leave the map, the passage outward begins — soldiers, students, labourers, the Komagata Maru — the diaspora this archive serves.