Punjab

Punjab is named for its five rivers, and its religious weight comes from what was founded on that plain in the sixteenth century. Nanak, born at Talwandi in 1469, taught a path centred on one formless God, on remembrance of the divine name, on honest work and on sharing, and he rejected caste distinction and ritual purity as the basis of religious standing. Nine successors followed him, and under them a devotional teaching became an institution: a scripture compiled from the Gurus' own hymns and from Hindu and Muslim devotional poets, a shared kitchen open to anyone regardless of caste, and central sites at Amritsar, Kartarpur and Anandpur.

The pool and temple at Amritsar became the tradition's principal centre, and Guru Arjan installed the compiled scripture there in 1604. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, founded the Khalsa in 1699 and, at his death in 1708, ended the line of human Gurus by vesting authority in the scripture itself, which is why the Guru Granth Sahib is treated as a living Guru rather than as a book about one.

None of this happened in an empty field. Punjab already carried Nath yogic lineages, a strong Sufi presence, and the devotional poetry of figures such as Kabir and Farid, whose verses are in the Sikh scripture itself. The Gurus wrote both with and against that inheritance, and the region's religious life is best read as an argument conducted in shared language.

Punjab is one of the few regions in this atlas whose modern geography was created by a religious classification, and the classification cut through it.

The 1947 partition of British India drew a boundary through the province on the basis of district religious majorities, with Muslim-majority districts going to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh majority districts to India. The line was published after independence had already taken effect. What followed was one of the largest and fastest forced migrations of the twentieth century: millions crossed in both directions and hundreds of thousands were killed, with massacres, abductions and the destruction of shrines on both sides. Sikhs and Hindus left the west almost entirely, Muslims left the east almost entirely, and a religiously mixed countryside became two religiously homogeneous ones inside a year.

Sites did not move with their communities. Nankana Sahib, where Nanak was born, and Kartarpur, where he died, are in Pakistan, while the Sikh population that venerates them is overwhelmingly in India, so pilgrimage across the border has been a diplomatic question ever since; a visa-free corridor to Kartarpur was opened in 2019.

Indian Punjab then went through a second violent period. The army operation at the Golden Temple complex in 1984, the assassination of the prime minister that followed, and the organised killing of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere are documented in official inquiries, and remain a live grievance rather than a closed chapter.