ਇਤਿਹਾਸ·اتہاس·History

c. 2600 – 1900 BCEThe Harappans

Harappa, on an old course of the Ravi, was one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation: covered drains, household wells, bricks and weights made to one standard, and a script still unread. After 1900 BCE its cities slowly emptied. No invasion destroyed them.

c. 1500 – 1200 BCEOral poets of the Sapta Sindhu

The oldest surviving text of the subcontinent takes shape as oral poetry in the river country its hymns call the Sapta Sindhu, the “seven rivers”. Its verses name waters Punjabis still live beside — the Beas, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum. It is the first time the land of the five rivers speaks in a voice we can still read.

c. 6th century BCE – 5th century CEthe teachers of Taxila · Jīvaka · Āmbhi

For a thousand years students walked to this valley between the Indus and the Jhelum to learn from its teachers. It was never the “world’s first university” of modern legend, but something older: a city of independent teachers at the crossroads of empires.

May 326 BCEAlexander of Macedon · King Porus

After a stormy night in 326 BCE, Alexander slipped across the flooded Jhelum to fight Porus and his war elephants. Every account we have comes from the winning side.

c. 260 BCE – c. 1000 CEAshoka · Menander · Kanishka · Xuanzang

For about a thousand years, stupas and monasteries rise from Taxila to the Yamuna, paid for by Mauryan, Greek, Scythian, Kushan and even Hun kings, and by merchants, monks and laywomen. Buddhism is one of the Punjab's great religions, never its only one. Then the faith thins, its scripts fall silent, and its monuments lose their names.

1021 – 1186 CEMahmud of Ghazni · Ali Hujwiri · Masʿūd Saʿd Salmān

Mahmud of Ghazni annexes the Punjab plain, and Lahore passes to the Ghaznavids — first as their eastern capital, at the end as their only one. For the first time the city is a seat of power rather than a provincial town. What grows there is Persian-speaking and Punjabi-living: the poet Masʿūd Saʿd Salmān writes here; the Sufi Ali Hujwiri, remembered as Data Ganj Bakhsh, teaches here and is buried here. Islam arrives in Punjab not as an event but as an address.

c. 1188 – 1266 CEFariduddin Masud · Ganj-i-Shakar

Fariduddin Masud, a Sufi teacher of the Chishti order, settles at Ajodhan on the Sutlej — the town now called Pakpattan. The verses attributed to him are the earliest substantial poetry surviving in the Punjabi language. Three and a half centuries later Guru Arjan gathers them into the Adi Granth, where they are still sung: a Muslim saint becomes one of the founding voices of Punjabi literature, and of Sikh scripture.

1469 – 1708Guru Nanak · the Ten Gurus

A storekeeper at Sultanpur walks into the Kali Bein and, the tradition says, comes back three days later saying there is no Hindu and no Musalman. What began there took forty years, a Muslim musician and a disciple named Lehna, and its first chapter closed in 1708, when the Guruship passed to a book.

c. 1520 – 1539Guru Nanak · Lehna · the first sangat

After some twenty years on the road, Guru Nanak put off the traveller’s robe and settled among farmers on the Ravi. At Kartarpur the first settled Sikh community sang, worked and ate together, and there he chose a disciple, Lehna, over his own sons as his successor.

21 April 1526Babur · Sultan Ibrahim Lodi

After years of raids across the five rivers, Babur defeats Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat. Punjab passes into the new Mughal Empire — and Lahore will grow into one of its greatest cities.

1585 – 1673 CEAkbar · Shah Jahan · Aurangzeb

From 1586 to 1598 the emperor Akbar governs the empire from Lahore, and the city enters the greatest building period in its history. The Lahore Fort is rebuilt; the Wazir Khan Mosque is tiled; the Shalimar Gardens are laid out in 1641 as a terraced water-garden, fed — characteristically for Punjab — by canal. Aurangzeb's Badshahi Mosque completes the skyline in 1673.

1604Guru Arjan · Bhai Gurdas

At Ramdaspur, now Amritsar, Guru Arjan and the scribe Bhai Gurdas finish one volume of the Gurus’ hymns, with verses by Hindu and Muslim saints, arranged by musical mode. The manuscript, dated in its own pages to the summer of 1604, survives at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar.

Vaisakhi 1699Guru Gobind Singh · the Panj Pyare

At Anandpur, at Vaisakhi 1699 by the main line of tradition, Guru Gobind Singh initiates the first Sikhs of the Khalsa: drawn from every caste, bound by one rite and one code, and answering to the Guru with no masand in between.

1747 – 1799Ahmad Shah Durrani · Jassa Singh Ahluwalia · the Dal Khalsa

Ahmad Shah Durrani invades the subcontinent repeatedly from his new Afghan state, and Punjab is the road he takes every time. Mughal authority in Lahore collapses; the province stops functioning as an administrative unit in 1758. Into that vacuum come the misls — twelve Sikh fighting confederacies, loosely federated as the Dal Khalsa, who hold the countryside, take Lahore in 1765, and strike coin in the name of the Gurus rather than of any king. In 1799 an eighteen-year-old sardar of the Sukerchakia misl takes the city and does not give it back. His name is Ranjit Singh.

1801 – 1839Maharaja Ranjit Singh

A one-eyed teenager unites the misls and is crowned at Lahore — Punjab's first sovereign empire in centuries, reaching from the Sutlej to the Khyber.

30 April 1837Hari Singh Nalwa

Ranjit Singh's frontier general dies at Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber. The fort holds, and his name passes into Punjabi ballads and Pashtun warnings.

29 March 1849Maharaja Duleep Singh · the East India Company

After two wars with the East India Company, the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh signs away his kingdom, and the Koh-i-Noor, in the fort at Lahore on 29 March 1849. It is the last major kingdom on the subcontinent that the Company takes by war. Punjab is ruled as a British province until it is divided in 1947.

c. 1885 – 1940The British administration · the settlers of the bars

The British administration builds what was then the largest irrigation network on earth, diverting the five rivers through headworks and canals into the bars — the dry scrub plains between the rivers. Nine canal colonies are settled; millions of acres of grazing land become wheat and cotton. New towns are laid out on a grid where there had been nothing — Lyallpur, Sargodha, Montgomery. This is the century in which Punjab becomes “the breadbasket”, and the century in which who owned the land was decided.

12 September 1897Havildar Ishar Singh · the 36th Sikhs

Twenty-one soldiers hold a signalling post on the Samana Range against thousands of Orakzai and Afridi tribesmen, fighting to the last man — commemorated every 12 September as Saragarhi Day.

1913 – 1914 CEGurdit Singh · the Ghadar Party · 376 passengers

Punjabi migrants on the Pacific coast of North America found the Ghadar (“revolt” or “mutiny”) Party in 1913, printing a paper that calls openly for the end of British rule. In 1914 Gurdit Singh charters a steamship, the Komagata Maru, to carry 376 passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, nearly all from Punjab, mostly Sikhs with Muslims and a few Hindus, every one a British subject. The voyage tests a Canadian law written to keep them out without naming race. The ship is held in the harbour for two months and turned away, and for three decades more the doors of the West stay mostly shut.

Vaisakhi, 13 April 1919Brigadier-General Dyer · the people of Amritsar

Vaisakhi, 13 April 1919: troops under Brigadier-General Dyer fire without warning into a crowd in Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh for about ten minutes. The government counted 379 dead; the Congress inquiry put it at about 1,000. The massacre ends Gandhi's co-operation with British rule.

August 1947Cyril Radcliffe · millions displaced

The province is cut in two along the Radcliffe Line, published two days after independence. Between eight and ten million people cross the new border in Punjab, in both directions, and estimates of the dead run from about two hundred thousand to a million and more.

c. 1950 – 1980The Doaba · the Jhelum–Gujrat belt · Mirpur

Within a generation of Partition, Punjabis from both sides of the new border are leaving for Britain, Canada, the United States and the Gulf, and chain migration turns a few pioneers into what scholars call a third Punjab.

1949 or 1951 to 2011Kuldeep Manak

A village singer's son, born Latif Mohammad, sings Punjab's great legends as kaliyan with the writer Dev Tharike Wala, and Tere Tille Ton, his song of Ranjha at the jogis' hill, makes him Kaliyan da Badshah.