The Land Before the Name

1Where is Punjab, actually?

Before we can discuss Punjab's history, we have to solve a problem most people never notice: the word "Punjab" means at least four different places, and arguments about Punjab usually involve people quietly using different ones.

Four Punjabs

Say "Punjab" to five people and you may get five maps.

THEFOURTHINGSPEOPLEMEANBY"PUNJAB"

Notice something uncomfortable. Indian Punjab — the one most people mean when they argue about "Punjab" in India — is less than one-seventh of historical Punjab. It is a fragment of a fragment. Lahore, the great capital of Punjab for a thousand years, is not in it. Neither is Ranjit Singh's tomb. Neither is Nankana Sahib, where Guru Nanak was born. Neither is Harappa, the city that named an entire civilisation.

Why this matters more than it looks

This is not pedantry. Watch how the four definitions get swapped in real arguments:

• Someone says "Punjab was once a great empire, so it can be a country again." The empire

they mean is historical Punjab (Definition 3), which is mostly in Pakistan today. The country they propose is Indian Punjab (Definition 1). These are not the same place, and the argument silently jumps between them.

• Someone says "Punjab is a Sikh-majority land." True of Indian Punjab today (Sikhs are

roughly 57–58%). Not true of historical Punjab at any point in its history — Sikhs were never a majority of undivided Punjab. In 1941, undivided Punjab was about 53% Muslim, 30% Hindu and 15% Sikh.

• Someone says "Punjab gave India its army." True of British Punjab (Definition 3), which

supplied enormous numbers of recruits from areas that are now in Pakistan. Punjabi Muslims from Rawalpindi and Jhelum were a huge share of that army. After 1947 they went to Pakistan's army.

Every one of those slippages is common. Some are honest confusion; some are deliberate. Once you can spot them, half the noise in the Punjab debate falls away.

The definition this book will use

To avoid confusion, I will be explicit every time. When I say "Punjab" without qualification in the ancient and medieval chapters, I mean the historical region — the land of the five rivers, roughly Definition 3. From Part 7 onwards, when partition splits it, I will always say "Indian Punjab" or "Pakistani Punjab." Where a number could apply to either, I will tell you which.

2The five rivers: the machine that made Punjab

Punjab is not a nation, a religion, or a language first. It is a river system. Everything else grew on top of that.

Meet the five

The name says five waters. Here they are, running from west to east — which is also the order an invader coming from Afghanistan would cross them.

THEFIVERIVERSOFPUNJAB,WESTTOEAST

All five eventually pour into a sixth and much larger river, the Indus, which carries their combined water down through Sindh and into the Arabian Sea. Strictly speaking Punjab is five rivers feeding one, and the Indus is the trunk of the tree.

The doabs: the real map of Punjab

Now the single most useful idea in this whole part. When five rivers run roughly parallel across a flat plain, they cut the land into long strips. Each strip is a piece of land with a river on either side.

The Persian word for such a strip is doab — do means two, ab means water. Land between two waters.

Punjab has five of them, and if you learn these five names you will understand more about Punjabi history than most people who have read three books about it.

THEFIVEDOABS—PUNJAB'STRUEINTERNALGEOGRAPHY

Look hard at the Bari Doab row. Lahore and Amritsar are about 50 kilometres apart. They sat in the same strip of land, watered by the same two rivers, for their entire history. They were one economic unit — one market, one canal system, one road. In 1947 a line was drawn between them by a British lawyer who had never been to India before, working from maps and census tables in six weeks.

We will return to that in Part 7. For now, just hold on to the fact that partition did not merely divide a province. It cut a doab down the middle, which is like cutting a body down the middle rather than separating two people.

Why the soil here is extraordinary

Here is the process, in one paragraph. The Himalaya is the youngest and highest mountain range on earth, and it is still rising. Rain, ice and frost grind its rock into fine particles. The rivers pick up those particles and carry them downhill. When the rivers hit the flat plain, they slow down, and slow water cannot carry heavy loads, so it drops what it is carrying. Every year, for millions of years, the rivers have been laying down a fresh coat of ground-up mountain across Punjab.

The result is alluvial soil — soil made of river deposits — and in Punjab it is not a thin layer. In places the alluvium is hundreds of metres deep. If you dug straight down in central Punjab you would go through the height of a skyscraper before you hit rock.

This soil is flat, deep, soft, easy to plough with simple tools, and naturally fertile. It is one of the best agricultural surfaces on the planet. This is not a small detail. It is the reason there were cities here in 2600 BCE, the reason every empire wanted the place, and the reason Punjab could feed India in the 1970s.

The trap: Punjab does not get much rain

Now the part almost everybody misses, and it is the most important sentence in this chapter.

Punjab is semi-arid. That means it is a dry place. Most of Punjab receives somewhere between 300 and 700 millimetres of rain a year, and the south-west — Bathinda, Ferozepur, Muktsar, and across the border into Cholistan — gets far less than that and shades into genuine desert. For comparison, Kerala gets around 3,000 mm and Assam's wettest districts get far more.

So Punjab has magnificent soil and not enough rain to use it.

Which leads to the defining fact of Punjabi history:

Every prosperous period in Punjab's history is a period when somebody was good at moving water. The Harappans dug channels and wells. Medieval rulers cut inundation canals that filled when rivers flooded. The British built the largest canal network in the world in the late 1800s and turned dry western Punjab into the "canal colonies." Independent India built dams — Bhakra, Pong, Ranjit Sagar — and then, from the 1970s, drilled millions of tubewells and pumped water up from underground.

Every poor or desperate period is a period when the water stopped moving, or moved to somebody else.

One more thing the rivers did: they made Punjab open

A river is a barrier. But a river on a flat plain is a weak barrier. In the dry season, before the monsoon, the five rivers of Punjab can be forded — walked across — in many places. There is no gorge, no cliff, no jungle, no swamp.

Compare this with other Indian regions. The Western Ghats protect the Konkan coast. The Vindhya and Satpura ranges and the Narmada shield the Deccan. Bengal has its delta and its forests. Kashmir has a wall of mountains around it. Nepal has the Himalaya itself.

Punjab has none of that. Punjab is a smooth, rich, flat table set immediately behind the only easy land entrance to the subcontinent. It is, in military terms, indefensible — unless you defend it with an army standing in the open.

Hold that thought. It becomes the explanation for almost everything in Chapter 6.

3What Punjab was called before it was called Punjab

The land is roughly five thousand years old as a settled civilisation. The name "Punjab" is roughly seven hundred years old. That gap contains a lesson.

The names, in order

W H AT T H I S R E G I O N H A S B E E N C A L L E D

"It's a Persian name" — what that does and doesn't mean

People sometimes use the Persian origin of "Punjab" as a debating point: either to say the name is foreign and therefore the identity is fake, or to say the region was named by Muslim conquerors. Both are sloppy.

Here is the accurate position. Persian and Sanskrit are not unrelated languages. They are close cousins, both descended from a common ancestor language spoken thousands of years ago. Look at the actual words:

These are not translations. They are the same words, worn down differently by two thousand years in two different mouths. "Panchanada" and "Panj-ab" mean the same thing in two branches of one family. The name did not arrive from outer space with an invading army. It drifted in from next door and slotted into a slot that was already there.

Also worth knowing: the word India comes from exactly the same process, applied to one of these rivers. Sanskrit Sindhu (the river we call the Indus) became Iranian Hindu, which became Greek Indos, which became Latin India. The word "Hindu" and the word "India" are both, originally, the name of a Punjabi-Sindhi river with a Persian accent.

The lesson hidden in the naming

Notice that every single name for this region, across five languages and three thousand years, is a description of its rivers. Not its kings. Not its gods. Not its people. Its rivers.

No other major Indian region is named this way. Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan — these are named after peoples, dynasties or directions. Punjab alone is named after its plumbing.

Outsiders and insiders alike, for three thousand years, looked at this land and said: this is the place where the water is. That is what it was for. That is what it still is for.

And one honest correction

Because the name is only about seven centuries old, be suspicious of any sentence that begins "Punjab has always…". Punjab as a named thing is younger than the Delhi Sultanate. Punjab as a political unit — a single government ruling the whole five-river country — is younger still, and has existed for only short stretches.

The land is ancient. The soil is ancient. The people have been there continuously for at least five millennia. But "Punjab" as an idea people identify with is a much more recent invention than the arguments about it usually assume. That does not make the identity less real. Identities that are recent can be as strong as any other — Italian and German national identity are younger than the United States. But it does mean that anyone claiming a five-thousand-year-old Punjabi nation is describing something that did not exist.

4The first Punjabis: Harappa

Around 2600 BCE, while the Egyptians were building pyramids, the people of Punjab were building something the Egyptians never thought of: a sewer.

The timeline in one table

T H E I N D U S V A L L E Y ( H A R A P PA N ) C I V I L I S AT I O N

How big was it?

Bigger than people assume. Archaeologists have identified more than a thousand settlements belonging to this civilisation. Population estimates for its peak run to around five million people — an enormous number for the Bronze Age.

In area, the Indus Valley Civilisation covered roughly 1.2 to 1.3 million square kilometres, stretching from north-east Afghanistan through Pakistan and into north-west India. That is larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia put together. It was, on the evidence we have, the largest civilisation in the world at the time.

And its heartland was Punjab and Sindh.

The cities that matter for our story

K E Y H A R A P PA N S I T E S I N O R N E A R T H E P U N J A B R E G I O N

What these people had

The list is genuinely astonishing for 2600 BCE:

• Grid-planned streets. Main roads running north-south and east-west, crossing at right

angles. Cities laid out on paper before they were built in mud.

• Standardised bricks. Baked bricks made to a ratio of roughly 1 : 2 : 4 — thickness to

width to length — used at sites more than a thousand kilometres apart. Somebody was enforcing a standard across an area the size of Western Europe.

• Covered drains and household bathrooms. Waste water ran from houses into brick-

lined sewers under the street, with inspection covers. No other civilisation of that era did sanitation on this scale. Many Indian and Pakistani towns did not match it until the twentieth century.

• Standard weights. Cubes of chert in a fixed binary sequence, accurate enough that

traders a thousand kilometres apart could deal honestly.

• Long-distance trade. Harappan seals have been found in Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian

records mention a trading land called Meluhha, which most scholars identify as the Indus region.

• Granaries, docks and water tanks, including the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro and

the great reservoirs of Dholavira.

• A script — about 400 to 600 distinct signs, found on thousands of seals — that nobody

has been able to read. Every claimed decipherment is disputed. Until it is read, we do not know their language, their gods' names, their kings' names, or their own name for themselves.

And now the awkward part

Here is what the Harappans did not have, and it is the most important paragraph in this chapter.

Archaeologists have dug at Harappan sites for over a hundred years. They have found no palaces. No royal tombs stuffed with gold. No monuments to kings. No carved scenes of a ruler crushing his enemies — the standard artwork of every other Bronze Age state. Almost no swords. Very few weapons of any kind beyond hunting tools. No evidence of a large standing army. Very little sign of city walls built for war, as opposed to embankments built against floods.

Compare this with Egypt, where the pharaoh's face is on everything, or Mesopotamia, whose art is full of bound prisoners and marching soldiers, or later Assyria, which decorated its palaces with flayings.

The first great civilisation of the Punjab plain appears to have been, by the standards of its time, remarkably peaceful and remarkably unhierarchical.

Be careful here, in both directions. "Absence of evidence" is not proof. Wooden weapons rot. Cloth armour rots. Some scholars think Harappan society may have been more stratified and more violent than the romantic picture allows, and there is real skeletal evidence of injury at some sites. The honest statement is this: compared with every contemporary civilisation we can compare it to, Harappan society left behind strikingly little evidence of organised warfare and glorified kingship. That is a real finding, and it is inconvenient for a very popular story.

Why did it end?

For about seventy years, Indian schoolbooks taught a simple answer: invading Aryans destroyed the cities. That answer is now rejected by almost all specialists. Here is the current picture, which is messier and more interesting.

Climate. Around 2200 BCE the whole belt from Egypt to India experienced a long drying event. The monsoon weakened. In a semi-arid region utterly dependent on water, a few centuries of reduced rainfall and weaker river flow is a slow death sentence for large cities.

Rivers moving. Rivers on flat alluvial plains do not stay put. They wander, they jump their banks, they abandon whole channels. The Ghaggar-Hakra system — a river network east of the Indus, along which an extraordinary number of Harappan sites are clustered — dried up or shifted. Cities on a river that leaves are cities that end.

Trade collapse. Mesopotamia went through its own upheavals. When your export market disappears, your merchant cities lose their reason to exist.

Not invasion. The timing does not work. The cities were already declining from about 1900 BCE. The genetic evidence for the arrival of Central Asian steppe populations points to roughly 2000–1500 BCE and later, and the archaeological record shows no layer of burned cities and battle casualties of the kind an invasion would leave. The famous "massacre" skeletons at Mohenjo-daro, once presented as evidence, have been re-examined and largely explained by other causes.

The people did not vanish. They dispersed — eastward toward the Ganga plain and southward — and village life continued unbroken. Modern South Asians, including modern Punjabis, carry substantial Harappan ancestry. The cities died; the people did not.

5The Rigveda: Punjab's first book

India's oldest surviving text is a collection of hymns composed largely in Punjab, about Punjab's rivers, by people fighting over Punjab's land. Almost nobody thinks of it as a Punjabi book. It is.

What the Rigveda is

The Rigveda is a collection of 1,028 hymns in an archaic form of Sanskrit, arranged in ten books. It was composed orally and transmitted orally, memorised syllable by syllable with an accuracy that scholars find close to miraculous, for many centuries before anyone wrote it down.

Mainstream scholarship dates its composition to roughly 1500–1000 BCE, with the oldest core possibly earlier. A number of Indian scholars argue for substantially earlier dates, some placing it before 2000 BCE and linking it to the Harappan world. I use the mainstream range while telling you the argument exists — that is Rule 2.

Punjab's rivers, in Punjab's oldest book

Read the river hymns and you are reading a map of Punjab.

RIGVEDICRIVERNAMESANDTHEIRMODERNEQUIVALENTS

The region as a whole is called Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers. Whether you count the seven as the five plus the Indus plus the Saraswati, or arrange them some other way, the point is settled: the world of the Rigveda is centred on the Punjab plain and the north-west.

The Battle of the Ten Kings

Now the event, which deserves to be far better known than it is.

Hymns 7.18, 7.33 and 7.83 of the Rigveda describe a war. On one side stood King Sudas of the Bharata tribe, advised by the priest Vasishtha. On the other stood a confederation of ten kings — the Purus, Yadus, Turvashas, Anus, Druhyus, and several smaller peoples with names like Alina, Paktha, Bhalanas, Shiva and Vishanin.

The battle was fought on the banks of the Parushni — the Ravi — the third and central river of Punjab. Water was decisive. The hymns describe the river being manipulated, embankments broken, and large numbers of the enemy drowning as they tried to cross.

Sudas and the Bharatas won.

Three things follow from this, and each of them is large.

First: the earliest named battle in Indian literature was fought in Punjab, on a Punjabi river, and won by controlling the water. Three thousand years before the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal dispute, the decisive weapon on this plain was already a river.

Second: the winning tribe was the Bharatas. The Republic of India's official name in its own Constitution — Bharat — traces back to this tribal name. The word by which India names itself has, in its ancestry, a tribe that won a battle on the banks of the Ravi.

Third: this sets a pattern that will repeat for the next three thousand years. Punjab is where the north's power is decided. Alexander and Porus, Mahmud of Ghazni, the three battles of Panipat on Punjab's eastern edge, the Anglo-Sikh wars, the tank battles of 1965 and 1971 — the same plain, over and over.

The Aryan question, handled honestly

You cannot discuss the Rigveda in India without hitting this, so let us hit it directly and fairly.

The question: did the people who composed the Rigveda come into India from outside, or were they always here?

What was taught for a long time (and is now discarded): the "Aryan Invasion Theory" — that fair-skinned Aryans rode in on chariots, destroyed the Harappan cities and enslaved the locals. This version was heavily shaped by nineteenth-century European racial thinking, and the archaeology does not support it. It is dead.

What most international genetics and linguistics now supports: a slower migration, not an invasion. The large 2019 study by Narasimhan, Patterson and colleagues, using ancient DNA from across Central and South Asia, found that ancestry from Central Asian steppe pastoralists spread into South Asia in roughly the first half of the second millennium BCE — around 2000 to 1500 BCE — after the Harappan cities were already declining, and that it contributes up to around 30% of the ancestry of some modern South Asian groups. On this reading, Indo-European languages, including the ancestor of Sanskrit and eventually of Punjabi and Hindi, spread into South Asia in that period.

What the Rakhigarhi study found: in 2019, Shinde, Narasimhan and colleagues published the genome of a single individual from Rakhigarhi. The paper's title is blunt: the genome lacks ancestry from steppe pastoralists. In other words, the Harappan person tested had no steppe ancestry at all. The authors themselves caution, in print, that one individual cannot settle the question for a whole civilisation.

What Indian scholars who dispute the migration model argue: that the genetic sampling is thin and heavily weighted toward Central Asia; that the Rigveda contains no memory of a foreign homeland; that the river geography in it is purely Indian; that the Saraswati evidence points to a Vedic culture already present in the Harappan period; and that "steppe ancestry" arriving does not automatically prove the language arrived with it.

Why this argument matters less than people think — for our purposes

Here is something worth saying plainly. For the questions this book is really about — Khalistan, 1984, water, Chandigarh, Punjab's future — the Aryan debate changes almost nothing.

Whichever version is true, the outcome is identical: by 1000 BCE there is a settled population on the Punjab plain, speaking an Indo-European language, with a religious literature centred on these rivers, already fighting large organised wars over this land. That population is continuous with the population there today. Nobody in the Punjab of 2026 can claim descent from only one ancient stream, and nobody can be told they do not belong. The genetics, on every reading, show mixture.

People fight about the Aryan question because it is a proxy for a modern political fight about who is "originally" Indian. It is worth understanding, which is why it is here. But it is not load-bearing for anything in Parts 7 to 13.

6Why geography is destiny here

This is the analytical heart of Part 1. Four permanent facts about the ground itself. They have not changed in five thousand years, and they explain more of Punjab's history than any king, religion or ideology.

Fact One: Punjab is the door

The Indian subcontinent is one of the most naturally sealed regions on earth. Ocean on three sides. The Himalaya to the north — the highest wall on the planet. Dense forest and hill country to the east.

There is one practical land entrance: the north-west, through the passes of the Hindu Kush and Sulaiman ranges — the Khyber, the Bolan, the Gomal, the Kurram.

Walk through any of them and you come down onto a plain. That plain is Punjab.

Not Delhi. Not Uttar Pradesh. Not Rajasthan. Punjab is what an invader sees first, and there is nothing between the mouth of the passes and the Punjabi wheat fields.

Now list who came through: Persians under Darius. Alexander of Macedon. Central Asian Scythians and Parthians. The Kushans. The Hunas. Mahmud of Ghazni, seventeen times. Muhammad of Ghor. Timur. Babur. Nadir Shah. Ahmad Shah Abdali, repeatedly. Every one of them entered India by walking into Punjab.

Punjab was not unlucky. Punjab was positioned.

Fact Two: Punjab cannot hide

Some regions absorb invasion by being difficult. The Deccan swallowed armies in its distances and hills. Rajasthan had its desert and its fortress-hills. Assam broke Mughal armies on rivers and jungle. Kashmir sat behind a wall of mountains. Nepal was never conquered by anyone.

Punjab has no such gift. It is flat. Its only obstacles are its five rivers, and rivers on a flat plain can be forded in the dry season. There is no defensible line, no natural fortress, no place to retreat and regroup.

This produces a brutal binary. A society on such ground has exactly two options when an army appears: submit, or meet it in the open field. There is no third choice, because there is nowhere to hide.

Now think about what a thousand years of that does to a culture. Communities that could not fight were repeatedly plundered and enslaved. Communities that could fight survived and passed on their institutions, their weapons, their songs and their memory of resistance.

This is not a mystical racial quality. It is straightforward selection pressure applied to a society over an extremely long time.

Fact Three: Punjab is worth taking

Being at the door is only dangerous if the room is worth entering.

Poor, dry, empty land at a frontier gets ignored — nobody has repeatedly invaded the Thar desert. Punjab, by contrast, offered the deepest, flattest, most fertile soil in northern India, watered by five rivers, capable of producing a large food surplus. A large food surplus means a large population, tax revenue, horses, grain to feed an army, and a road onward to Delhi and the riches of the Ganga plain.

So Punjab combined the three worst possible attributes for a piece of real estate: easy to enter, impossible to defend, extremely valuable.

That combination is the entire explanation for the next four thousand years.

Fact Four: Punjab does not control its own water

This is the fact that will decide Parts 8, 12 and 13, so read it twice.

Punjab's wealth is its rivers. But look at where those rivers begin and end.

• They are born outside Punjab. The Jhelum rises in Kashmir. The Chenab, Ravi and

Beas rise in Himachal Pradesh and the Lahaul hills. The Sutlej rises in Tibet, which means it enters the region from territory controlled by China. Not one of the five rivers has its source inside the Punjab plain.

• They must leave through somebody else's land. All five drain into the Indus, and

the Indus reaches the sea through Sindh. Punjab has no coastline. It never has had one. There is no port, no harbour, no salt water anywhere in it.

So Punjab is a place whose entire prosperity depends on a resource it does not create and cannot deliver to the sea on its own. It sits in the middle of the pipe, holding neither the tap nor the drain.

For most of history this did not matter much, because the same empire usually held the mountains, the plain and the coast together. It matters enormously the moment borders are drawn across the system. And in the twentieth century, borders were drawn across it twice — once in 1947 between India and Pakistan, and once in 1966 between Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

W H O H O L D S W H AT, T O D AY

Putting the four together

Four facts, one sentence each:

1. Punjab is the only easy land door into India. 2. Punjab cannot be defended by terrain, only by people standing and fighting. 3. Punjab is rich enough that everyone wants it. 4. Punjab depends on water it does not own, and has no sea of its own.

Facts 1, 2 and 3 together explain the warrior culture, the martyrdom tradition, the constant invasion, the militarisation, and why Punjab has been fought over more than any other part of South Asia.

Fact 4 explains 1947, 1960, 1966, the Chandigarh dispute, the SYL canal, the groundwater crisis, and the hard limit on any independence project.

The rest of this thirteen-part book is, in a sense, just those four facts colliding with human beings for five thousand years.

7Scorecard: what Part 1 proves

At the end of every part, I test the popular claims against what the evidence in that part actually showed. Here is the first scorecard.

What Part 1 could not answer

Honesty requires listing what remains open after this part:

• We cannot read the Harappan script, so we do not know what those people called

themselves, what language they spoke, or how they governed.

• The exact date and origin of the Rigveda remain contested. • The Saraswati / Ghaggar-Hakra identification is unresolved. • The precise mechanism by which Indo-European language arrived is still being argued,

with the genetic data still thin.

None of these gaps affects the four geographic facts in Chapter 6, which is why I lean on those rather than on the contested prehistory.

Timeline of Part 1 What happens in Part 2

Part 2, Porus to the Huns, covers roughly 500 BCE to 1000 CE. Alexander of Macedon crosses the Jhelum in 326 BCE and meets a Punjabi king the Greeks called Porus in one of the most famous battles in world history — and then his army mutinies on the banks of the Beas and refuses to go further. We will look at what actually happened there, and at what the Greek sources say about Punjabi resistance.

Then: Chandragupta Maurya and Chanakya building India's first great empire from Punjab's edge; Ashoka; the Indo-Greek kingdoms and the strange, brilliant Greco-Buddhist world of Taxila and Gandhara; the Kushans; and finally the Hunas, whose invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries CE shattered north India and set the pattern for everything that came after.

Above all, Part 2 answers a question Part 1 only raised: how does a land of peaceful city-planners turn into a land famous for producing soldiers? The answer starts with Alexander.

8Sources and further reading — Part 1

I cite my sources so you can check me. Where a claim is contested, I give the competing sources together.

On the Indus Valley Civilisation

• Shinde, V., Narasimhan, V. M., et al., "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," Cell, 2019. The Rakhigarhi genome paper, including the authors' own caution about a single-individual sample.
• Narasimhan, V. M., Patterson, N., et al., "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia," Science, 2019. The large ancient-DNA study covering steppe ancestry and its timing.
• Wikipedia, Indus Valley Civilisation, Harappa, Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwal, List of Indus Valley Civilisation sites — used for site sizes, population estimates and the count of settlements; these entries are heavily sourced to Kenoyer, Possehl, Wright and the Archaeological Survey of India.
• Recommended books: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization; Gregory Possehl, The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective; Rita Wright, The Ancient Indus; Andrew Robinson, The Indus: Lost Civilizations.

On the Rigveda and the Battle of the Ten Kings

• Rigveda, Mandala 7, hymns 18, 33 and 83 — the primary text for the Dasarajna. Jamison and Brereton's 2014 translation is the current scholarly standard in English.
• Wikipedia, Battle of the Ten Kings — for the tribal coalition, the location on the Parushni, and the link to the formation of the Kuru polity.
• Michael Witzel's work on Rigvedic geography and river names, and on the location of Vedic tribes.
• For the alternative Indian dating and the Saraswati identification: B. B. Lal, The Saraswati Flows On; and the writings of Shrikant Talageri and Michel Danino (The Lost River), which set out the indigenous-origin case at its strongest.

On the name, the rivers and the doabs

• Ibn Battuta, Rihla (14th century); Wassaf, Tarikh-i-Wassaf; Ayn al-Mulk Mahru, Insha-i-Mahru — the earliest usages of "Punjab" as a regional name.
• Jahangir, Tuzk-i-Jahangiri — Mughal-era usage.
• Wikipedia, Punjab, Pakistan and Punjabis; Etymonline, Punjab; Government of Punjab (India), "Know Punjab — History"; Wikipedia, Bari Doab — for etymology, doab boundaries and river data.

On geography, climate and water

• India Meteorological Department rainfall normals for Punjab districts.
• Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 — full text available from the World Bank, which brokered it.
• Recommended for the long view: Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus; Daniel Haines, Rivers Divided.

9About the author

Lovepreet Singh is a researcher and writer working toward doctoral research. He writes long-form work on Indian history, society, religion, public policy and technology — from the record, in plain language, with competing views left standing.

Background

He is the founder of Lovelace, an independent design and engineering studio building websites, brand systems, 3D and WebGL experiences and digital products, and is Founder and Managing Director of Five Rivers Inc.

He has studied at Panjab University and Chandigarh University, and is in the second year of an MBA in Business Strategy and Analysis. He is a Certified Ethical Hacker and a self-taught developer working in the MERN stack.

His interests run across history, epistemology, belief and public life — and the common thread, in the security work as much as the research, is a preference for testing a claim to destruction rather than defending it.

The Living Archive

Punjab: The Whole Truth is the first major work of The Living Archive, a long-form research project examining subjects that are argued about constantly and read about rarely. The method is fixed across everything published there: plain language, named sources, disputed figures shown as ranges, and every opposing argument stated at full strength before it is answered.

What comes next

He is working toward doctoral research, with Punjab — its history, its politics and the contested decades between 1966 and 1995 — as the intended field. These thirteen parts are the groundwork for it.

If you find an error of fact in this work, please write. Sources are listed at the end of every part so that any claim here can be checked against the record. A corrected edition is better than a confident one.