Punjab (Sikh heartland)

The land of five rivers, the invasion route into India, and the region partitioned more brutally than any other. Every land invasion of the subcontinent came through here, from the Indo-Aryans to Alexander to Mahmud of Ghazni to Babur to Nadir Shah, which made Punjab both wealthy and repeatedly devastated. Sikhism was founded in this landscape by Guru Nanak around 1500, in a setting of Hindu and Muslim coexistence and argument, and took military form under Guru Gobind Singh after Mughal persecution. Ranjit Singh built a Sikh empire from Lahore between 1799 and 1839 that ran from Tibet to the Khyber and employed European officers; it was the last major Indian power the British defeated, in two wars ending in 1849. Under the Raj the region became the canal colonies, an enormous irrigation project that turned semi-desert into wheat country, and the chief recruiting ground of the Indian Army. Partition in 1947 cut Punjab in half, and the violence that followed killed several hundred thousand people and moved perhaps ten million, with Sikhs and Hindus fleeing east and Muslims west in a near-total population exchange. The Indian half was divided again in 1966 into Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh on linguistic lines. The Green Revolution from the 1960s made it India's granary and left it with a groundwater crisis. Militancy in the 1980s ended with Operation Blue Star and Indira Gandhi's assassination. Amritsar's Golden Temple was completed in 1604. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre there in 1919 killed several hundred unarmed people. Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier, serves as capital of both Punjab and Haryana. Lahore, the historic capital, is now in Pakistan.

• Existed: 1500 CE – present
• Type: Entity