A Language Carried in Suitcases, Kitchens and Songs

Punjabi travelled to Australia in the mouths of people who were busy doing other things. This is a magazine about what survived the journey, what changed on the way, and what is worth holding onto now.

Punjab means, quite literally, five waters: panj is five and aab is water, from the rivers that braid across the plain. The name is a piece of geography that became a culture. It describes a wheat country of flat horizons and long light, of villages laid out around a pond, of a farming year that runs on two great harvests rather than four gentle seasons. Almost everything in these pages grows out of that fact. The food, the calendar, the songs sung at weddings, even the shape of the language itself carry the fingerprints of an agricultural life that most readers of this magazine no longer live.

The people of that plain are not one community. Punjab is home to Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and others, and it always has been. The language they share does not belong to any single tradition, which is one of the more remarkable things about it. A wedding song can be sung by families who pray in entirely different ways and mean entirely different things by the word blessing, and the song will still be the same song. We take that seriously here. Where we describe a religious practice, we say plainly whose practice it is, and we leave the theology to those who hold it.

The twentieth century divided the region, and the movement of people that followed reshaped families across generations. Later periods of conflict prompted further migration. Those are historical facts that help explain why Punjabi is spoken in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, and we mention them for that reason only. This magazine takes no position on any contemporary political question, and it will not relitigate the past. What it will do is pay close attention to how a culture reassembles itself somewhere new, in rented houses and hired halls, with substitute ingredients and a borrowed calendar.

Australia is a strange and useful place to think about Punjab from. The seasons are inverted. The harvest festival that belongs to spring in the north arrives here in autumn. Mustard flowers, that famous yellow that fills so many songs, bloom on a different schedule if they bloom at all. Sugarcane grows in Queensland but not in the paddock down the road. A community that has always tied its celebrations to a crop cycle now celebrates on a date instead, and that quiet substitution is one of the most interesting things happening in diaspora life. It is not loss. It is translation.

The other translation is linguistic, and it is happening in kitchens and cars on the school run. Children answer in English the questions their grandparents ask in Punjabi. Vocabulary narrows to the domestic: the words for food, family and affection last longest, while the words for tools, weather and fieldwork go first. This is not a scolding. It is simply what happens to a language that loses the daily work it was built to describe. But it is reversible, more easily than people think, and several pieces in this issue are about exactly how.

So: four sections. The language itself, including the two scripts it is written in and the sounds that give English speakers trouble. The food, which is a discipline before it is a pleasure. The music, from the barrel drum to the devotional forms to what happened when Punjabi songs met a recording studio abroad. And the year, that agricultural calendar and its awkward, inventive adaptation to a southern hemisphere. Warm, precise, respectful. Read it in any order. Read it out loud if you can, because most of what is in here started as speech.