At the ongoing Shaheen Bagh protest in Delhi, a Sikh farmer was asked why he had come all the way from Jalandhar, Panjab, to lend his suppo...
At the ongoing Shaheen Bagh protest in Delhi, a Sikh farmer was asked why he had come all the way from Jalandhar, Panjab, to lend his support. His answer: mitti da karz utaran aaste. Because I owe a debt to the soil.
Soil, earth, land, and the tenuous yet abiding relationship that man has with it are the central concern of the CAA agitation as well as of Amandeep Sandhu’s excellent book, Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines. Panjabi by blood, but someone who has grown up outside the state, Sandhu said he felt an “emptiness about matters Panjab”.
To “resolve the hole in his heart,” he began a three-year-long peregrination through Punjab in 2015, getting drawn into the farmer agitations over white fly infestation, followed swiftly by the sacrilege of the Granth Sahib, the holy book of Sikhs. These two developments were to have a ripple effect on state elections three years down the line.
Keep walking
From Pathankot on the border with Jammu, through Ferozepur on the Indo-Pak border, to the capital city of Chandigarh, Sandhu traversed the soil of his birth state extensively. In a battered car, riding pillion, and roadways buses, he sought out friends and farmers, students and saints, doctors and drug-addicts, leaders and...
