Images of the two Punjabs, partitioned yet forever alike

In 2011, my mother-in-law passed away. I accompanied my sister-in-law and my husband to immerse her ashes in a holy river in Punjab, in India. It was my first trip there. My second trip to Punjab was in 2014, to immerse the ashes of my father-in-law in the very same river.

In 1947, the Punjab was divided between the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. An estimated million people were killed and more than fifteen million were displaced. 

Countless Muslims in the eastern part of the Punjab crossed into Pakistan, and countless Sikhs and Hindus in the western part crossed into India. In most cases, those who left and those who stayed were separated forever. Before Partition, the Punjab was a religiously syncretic place, with a Muslim majority and significant Hindu and Sikh populations living side by side for hundreds of years. Now it was torn in two: the state of Punjab in India and the province of Punjab in Pakistan, with a militarised border like a gash between them.

I got pulled into the story of the Punjab, of the drastic separation of people who had lived together, of the idea of a homeland – or "watan" – broken apart. Slowly, I started to feel that photographs could tell this story in a candid, simple way.

I started to go back, camera in hand as always. I visited hundreds of villages over six years in Punjab on the Indian side. I heard many personal stories relating to Partition. I found people with huge cultural pride as Punjabis, a reluctant acceptance of the separation, and a longing to connect with the other side. Many villagers told me that if the border ever opened and they were allowed to cross, they would run to their original village. 

The more I photographed Punjabi villages in India, the more I felt like visiting the Punjab on the Pakistani side. I wanted to see it for myself. Finally, in February 2019, I got a visa to visit Pakistan. I wanted to go from India by train, to see the border close up and experience the act of crossing over. It was an emotional journey, seven hours long, with a 9 am departure from Attari and a 4 pm arrival at Lahore, only 30 kilometres away.

In Lahore, I visited my father-in-law's old house and beloved Government College, which he had left behind more than seventy years ago. For 10 days, I photographed rural villages, and found here the same hospitality and warmth I had felt on the Indian side. To be on the "other side" felt like an undeserved privilege.

When I came back, I realised there were striking similarities between the images I had taken on the Pakistani and Indian sides. Just from looking at the images, it was often impossible to tell which side was which. This is when the idea for a book started taking shape – Watan: Homeland Punjab, which I published in 2021.

As soon as India opened its borders after the Covid-19 pandemic, I travelled to Indian Punjab again. From village to village, from morning till night over a full week, I went looking for the people I had photographed to give them copies of the book. I went there with 100 copies of it, and came back with none. It was one of the best weeks of my life as a photographer. 

Near the border, where many villages are not on Google Maps for security reasons, there was a village I had visited earlier that now I could not find – it was as if it had vanished from the map! Finally, I went into a school thinking the teachers might know some of the children in my pictures. One teacher recognised them, and asked a father who was picking up his daughter on a motorbike to guide me to the village, a few kilometres away. I followed him – a very simple and gentle man – and when we arrived I offered to pay him for his trouble. "I don't want money," he said, "but I would like a book." He got a dedicated copy.

I hope the images here, selected from the book, convey the visual poetry that bridges the two sides of the Punjab. I hope they can reconnect people to their ancestral homes, erasing religious lines and national borders. Amrinder Singh, in the village of Kokri Kalan on the Indian side, told me, "In reality, it was not India that was partitioned, Punjab was partitioned." Maybe, someday, it can be one again.

I have not been able to go back to the "other" Punjab across the border to share copies of the book with people there too. But I dream that one day soon I will.

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Text adapted from the preface to Watan: Homeland Punjab.