Top Highlights

• Half of the land area of Punjab remained pastoral until the 20th century and the same grains (barley, millet, sorghum, oats etc.) were still cultivated there as in the earlier periods. [USER243] For these people, survival depended not just on these grains, but also on wild fruits and edible plants as well as the meat and milk of animals.  Up until ...
• A place to urinate and for women to bathe was created around the same place where earthen pots of fresh water were kept. This mode of life is even older and less developed than what we find in the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. This indicates that the villages and hamlets around the major cities of Harappan civilization probably looked like thi...
• In Punjab, we can see a distinct racial divide in addition to that of class. The ruling elite tended to be fair or whitish in color, while the lower classes had darker skin and coarser features. These lower classes looked more like South Indians or even Africans and had an appearance distinctly different from the ruling elite. By looking at the col...
• The rituals of birth, death and marriage seem to have elements that date from a very ancient time and they can teach us much. Thus, the play that is performed as if the bride is being abducted in a raid may have echoes of our Aryan ancestors descending on local women and abducting brides. The role assigned to dark and coarse featured Mirasis, Doms ...
• We can give many more examples of such little noticed aspects of Punjabi culture. They have gone unnoticed as most of our historians were from Europe and their research focused on the Rig Veda, the Mahabharata, the other Vedas and the Upanishads. But these are not books of history, they are first and foremost religious texts, focused on religious r...