Writing the history of Punjab is an exercise in recovering a country of rivers, languages, fields and people from the competing claims of empires and nation-states. Aamir Riaz’s Punjab di Vel (1799–2025) [earlier review by one of us was titled, ‘A Bold History’, The Scoop, October 31, 2026] deserves attention precisely because it refuses to let Punjab’s story begin and end with the succession of its rulers. Its ambition is considerable: to follow the region across the Lahore Darbar, British conquest, colonial reconstruction, Partition and the troubled decades that followed. The achievement is not simply the breadth of chronology. It is the insistence that the people who inhabited these changing political arrangements possessed memories and histories of their own.
The book’s structural design reveals both the promise and the difficulty of this undertaking. The opening historical movement centres on 1799–1849, the period of Sikh sovereignty and the Lahore Darbar. Subsequent sections move into the annexation and its aftermath, the changing politics of the early twentieth century, the approach to 1947 and the post-Partition world.
A substantial documentary apparatus accompanies the narrative. This is no slight pamphlet masquerading as history; it is an attempt to assemble a large and fractured archive for readers who have too often encountered Punjab through the categories imposed by others. It is undoubtedly a praiseworthy effort.
Such a project is especially necessary in Pakistan. Punjab appears in official memory alternately as a recruiting ground for armies, a granary, the seat of political power or the backdrop to an abbreviated story of Muslim separatism. Across the border, a different national story can make the same territory serve different conclusions.
Both can obscure the Punjabi-speaking peasant, the artisan, the woman displaced by violence, the landless labourer and the communities whose loyalties did not fit neatly into the identities subsequently assigned to them.
Aamir Riaz’s invitation to recover a regional history across these divisions is intellectually and politically significant. Recovering Punjab from colonial history cannot mean replacing one consoling narrative with another. A people’s history is not necessarily a history of harmonious people. The region’s inhabitants were divided by ownership and tenancy, caste and occupation, religious affiliation, gender and unequal access to authority.
Those divisions did not arrive in 1849 with the East India Company, although colonial administration classified, hardened and often exploited them. The most searching question to put to Punjab di Vel is whether its powerful critique of external domination gives sufficient explanatory weight to domination exercised within Punjabi society itself. This matters particularly when we return to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. His kingdom cannot be understood through the communal shorthand that has distorted so much writing about the nineteenth century.
The Lahore Darbar governed a diverse population; its alliances and institutions do not map cleanly onto the religious nationalisms of the twentieth century. Acknowledging that complexity is a corrective to retrospective prejudice. It is not, however, a reason to exempt the Darbar from questions that we rightly ask of British and Pakistani rulers: Who held land? Who collected revenue? Who could enter the corridors of authority? Which languages carried administrative power, and which remained the languages of ordinary life?
The Persian-language question illustrates the value of asking rather than assuming. Punjabi’s cultural vitality did not translate automatically into its elevation as the principal language of state administration. Persian retained an important official position under the Lahore Darbar. That fact complicates any account in which Punjabi’s political marginalisation begins only with British educational and bureaucratic policy. The colonial state unquestionably remade language hierarchies; it did not invent every hierarchy it encountered. A persuasive account of linguistic dispossession must trace continuities as carefully as ruptures.
The same discipline is required in reading 1849. Annexation transformed Punjab’s relationship to sovereignty, revenue, law, military recruitment and imperial markets. It also brought the province into the expanding apparatus of colonial knowledge: settlement reports, district gazetteers, censuses and classifications of communities.
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These records remain indispensable, but their apparent precision must not be confused with neutrality. They tell us a lot about what officials wished to know, measure and control. Riaz is right to push against their monopoly over the historical imagination. Oral traditions, vernacular literature and memories of resistance can expose what administrative reports chose not to see.
Those alternative sources, however, need scrutiny no less than official files. A song remembered generations after an uprising can preserve an ethical truth about injustice without settling every disputed question of chronology or participation. The task of the historian is not to choose between the archive and memory, but to ask what each can establish, where each falls silent and why their accounts diverge. Otherwise, the romantic figure of a uniformly resistant Punjab can become as misleading as the colonial portrait of a uniformly loyal one.
The rebellion of 1857 offers an exacting test. Punjab supplied soldiers, resources and influential collaborators to the British, while resistance also emerged in particular localities and among particular communities. Neither side of that history should be erased. Turab ul Hassan Sargana’s work on collaboration and resistance helps show why district-level evidence matters. The conduct of a chief, a village, a regiment or a kinship network cannot safely be inferred from a single communal identity. A people’s history worthy of the name must recover the resisters without disappearing the collaborators—and must explain the material interests that shaped both.
Land is the thread that can connect these episodes to the present. Colonial canal colonies, agricultural settlement, military recruitment and the allocation of property helped produce new forms of power while modifying older ones. After 1947, displacement and resettlement again redistributed homes, businesses and agricultural holdings, but not according to any uncomplicated principle of social justice. The language of national liberation could coexist with concentrated landownership and the persistence of dependent labour. A regional history that reaches 2025 invites us to ask how much of that structure survived the departure of the colonial state, and who benefited from its survival.
Partition, too, demands more than the familiar narrative of two communities separating. It was a collapse of neighbourly worlds, a remaking of property rights and a violent sorting of people whose everyday lives had been entangled. Its victims were not abstractions called Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. They were particular families, workers, cultivators and women, often dispossessed in ways that official accounts of population exchange could barely register. The recovery of Punjabi memory is most valuable when it resists the temptation to turn shared suffering into competitive innocence.
The scale of Punjab di Vel’s ambition inevitably raises a further problem. A history running from 1799 to 2025 crosses radically different political economies. The methods adequate for reconstructing a nineteenth-century court cannot, without adjustment, explain the development of postcolonial bureaucracies, agricultural capitalism, urban migration or the politics of language in contemporary Pakistan and India. Breadth can establish continuity, but it can also flatten differences. Readers should therefore distinguish the book’s achievement as a work of historical recovery from the still larger task of providing a fully integrated social and economic explanation of two centuries.
These questions are not grounds for dismissing Aamir Riaz’s undertaking. They arise because it is worth taking seriously. His challenge to inherited accounts opens space for a more democratic historiography; the next step is to ensure that the category ‘Punjabi people’ never conceals the unequal relations among Punjabis. An account of the region must be capacious enough to accommodate affection for its languages and landscapes alongside the harsh history of caste, property, patriarchy and coercion. Love of a place should sharpen criticism of its rulers, not suspend it.
Punjab di Vel should thus be read neither as a final verdict nor as an exercise in nostalgia. It is an intervention in a debate that ought to have begun much earlier and travelled much further. The question it leaves with us is also the question that should guide a people’s history of Pakistan: when flags changed, administrations fell and borders moved, what happened to those who worked the land, spoke the language and carried the losses? Until their experience becomes the organising principle rather than an occasional illustration, Punjab’s history will remain only partly reclaimed.