The Farming Calendar Underneath the Festivals
Most Punjabi celebrations mark a moment in the crop cycle before they mark anything else.
The Punjabi agricultural year turns on two harvests rather than one. The rabi crop, sown after the monsoon and cut in spring, is the wheat harvest, the one the culture is built around. The kharif crop is sown with the monsoon rains and gathered in autumn, and includes rice, maize, cotton and sugarcane depending on the district. Between them sit the anxious intervals: the wait for rain, the wait for the grain to fill, the wait to see whether a late storm flattens a field that was ready to cut.
Festivals cluster at the ends of those intervals for the obvious reason that this is when there is both food and time. A spring festival celebrating the wheat harvest, a midwinter festival built around bonfires and the shortest nights, an autumn festival of lights observed by several traditions with different meanings: each sits at a hinge in the working year. Religious observances attach themselves to these moments too, and different communities of the region mark the same period in their own distinct ways.
This is why so much of the seasonal vocabulary is agricultural and so many songs mention specific crops. The famous fields of yellow mustard flower are not a poetic invention. Mustard is grown for oil and greens, it flowers in the cool months, and it happens to be spectacular. When a song places two lovers in a mustard field, it is also telling you the time of year, the temperature and roughly what the singer would have been eating that week. The landscape is doing narrative work.