Five rivers cross Punjab before they become one. The Sutlej meets the Beas. The Beas feeds the Ravi. The Ravi meets the Chenab, the Chenab meets the Jhelum, and in the south of it all, one river forms from the sungum of these five, born from five separate mountains.
Nobody standing on the banks of the Indus can point to a single current and say, “This part is the Chenab, that part is the Sutlej.” And that is the literal meaning of the word. Punjab. Panj-āb. Five waters.
The land of Punjab does this to everything that flows into it. It doesn’t let anything stay separate.
I grew up on a handful of names and their stories, but I didn’t know there were many we were never told about. Our childhood stories talked about kings and princes of far-off lands: Alexander the Great, Taimur Lang, Sher Shah Suri, the great Mughals. We were told to take pride in their conquests as if they were our true ancestors.
And what about Raja Porus, Dulla Bhatti, Sultan Sarang Khan, and many more? Most Punjabi kids, even adults, wouldn’t recognize the names or know their legends.
Why is that? Why don’t, or rather, why can’t we celebrate these men?
The popular explanation, given to anyone who bothers to ask, is religion. The land was Hindu and Buddhist; the invaders brought Islam (remember the tale of Muhammad Bin Qasim), so of course we side with the invaders. Imagine, we’re told, if they hadn’t come, we’d still be ringing bells in a temple.
I believed some version of that for a long time without thinking twice. There were already enough names and dates to learn by heart in school for me to bother with more stories.
But when history stopped being something to learn by heart, and I yearned to find my roots, I could see the BS of it all.
Alexander wasn’t even a Muslim. He was a Macedonian pagan who worshipped a mountain full of Greek gods, and Porus was no more Muslim than he was. Meanwhile, Dulla Bhatti and Akbar were both Muslim. Sultan Sarang Khan and Sher Shah Suri were both Muslim. There’s no fight in this list where religion cleanly separates the hero from the villain.
So what decided who gets to be a legend and who gets to be a rebel? I was utterly confused.
Dulla Bhatti or Akbar. How do you decide who the villain is?
Let’s strip the folk-song version and look at the bigger picture.
Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, moved to weaken the local zamindars’ hold on the land and revenue they controlled, which ruffled quite a few feathers, understandably. Many quietly conceded to the empire’s might. The Bhattis of Sandal Bar didn’t.
The resistance cost three generations of Bhattis their lives, but their refusal to fold in the face of a much bigger, stronger foe immortalized their name, especially Dulla’s, who put up such a fight that Akbar had to lure him to his death.
However, Dulla wasn’t fighting a selfless fight for “the people” the way the songs would have you believe, any more than Akbar was building an empire out of love for his subjects. Then why did Akbar get to be ‘Great’ while Dulla is degraded to a ‘bandit’?
Porus vs Alexander: why does only one of the two titans get a movie?
If Dulla Bhatti’s story shows the religion excuse falling apart, Porus and Alexander show that even without religion as an alibi, the loser still loses the argument about how he’s remembered.
At the Battle of the Hydaspes, Porus fought Alexander’s army on his own ground and didn’t go down easily. When it was over, Alexander asked Porus how he wished to be treated. Porus answered: like a king treats another king. Alexander respected the answer enough to hand back his kingdom. That’s not the ending you write for a man you think of as beneath you.
But the story doesn’t end here. Alexander pushed on toward the Beas, but his own men, who’d followed him across two continents without flinching, refused to go any further. A few months later, near what is now Multan, Alexander took an arrow to the chest that nearly killed him on the spot. Some historians think that wound is part of what finally killed him in Babylon, two years later.
This is the land, our land, where the undefeated conqueror’s winning streak actually ran out.
And yet Alexander is a name every schoolchild knows. Porus, the man who made him earn every inch of it, barely survives outside a paragraph in a South Asian classroom. Ask anyone outside this subcontinent who Porus was, and watch the silence. Do you see the people of this land hail their ancestors for being the ones who broke Alexander’s morale?
Sarang Khan and Kharal. What do we make of this pair?
This is where it gets genuinely interesting: not every resister on our land was erased.
Sultan Sarang Khan was the Gakhar chief of the Pothohar plateau, a Mughal ally, who refused to submit to Suri’s expanding empire and died for it at Rawat Fort, defending tribal land against a centralizing Afghan state. Most Punjabis today don’t know his name. We hail both Mughals and Suris, but dismiss Sarang Khan. Why?
Compare that to Ahmad Khan Kharal, who led a tribal uprising against the British East India Company in 1857, broke open a jail to free his people, and was shot dead in his 80s while praying. Kharal, without any hedging, became the symbol of resistance.
Sarang and Kharal were both Muslim. Both local leaders, both courageous. Both lost and died fighting outsiders. So why treat them differently?
Celebrating Kharal costs Pakistan nothing, because the British are safely, permanently other: foreign, colonial, non-Muslim, and don’t risk the myth.
But celebrating Sultan Sarang Khan the way we celebrate Kharal means admitting that Sher Shah Suri, an empire-builder we’re generally taught to admire, was also a man who crushed a Punjabi Muslim chief defending his own land, and that he was fighting Mughals, so what did his conquest have to do with religion anyway?
Celebrating Dulla Bhatti properly means admitting Akbar crushed his opponents regardless of their faith, in the same unaccountable way any king would do to establish his empire.
Yet we remember the invaders with reverence. We’ve absorbed them into our stories and made them “us” instead of “them.” And once we accepted the invaders as ancestors, the men who fought them became an inconvenience.
So who gets to be the hero then?
Dulla was defending his own head, his hold on his land, and his own family’s unfinished score. Akbar was defending his hold on his crown and a subcontinent. You can read my full account of their affair here.
Porus fought to keep his own throne, Sarang Khan died holding onto his family’s grip on Pothohar, and Kharal had his own tribal leadership at stake. Every one of them was a man protecting what was his.
That’s not a knock against any of them. Just the truth that gets lost when we want to turn them into either monsters or martyrs.
It’s our Stockholm syndrome that we speak more warmly of the empires that took from this land than of the men who bled trying to stop them. Now, centuries later, the least we can do is stop acting like the grass owes either elephant its loyalty, and stop dressing one elephant up as a hero and the other as a nobody.
None of them are, as we say in Punjabi, doodh da dhulaya. It was politics, a struggle for power and survival in an age of expansionism.
Incidentally, this syndrome is more apparent in Pakistani Punjabis
Many people blame our infatuation with foreign invaders on politics, systemic suppression, and so on. That’s not wrong. But I suspect it’s not the complete picture either.
If we look closely, the identity problem manifests more acutely in the parts of Punjab that sit closest to the old invasion corridor than almost anywhere else on the subcontinent.
Trace the route on a map, and it explains itself: down through the Khyber Pass, into Peshawar, across the Indus at Attock, through Taxila and on to Rawalpindi and Lahore, and from Lahore the plains open up, all the way to Delhi, or down to Multan.
Every army that came overland into South Asia for two thousand years had to pass through it because the mountains on either side didn’t leave much of an alternative. And unlike a raid that comes and leaves, most of what passed through here stayed.
Greeks stayed long enough to leave behind Gandhara. Turks stayed. Afghans stayed. The Mughals stayed for three hundred years, and by the end of it weren’t really “Mughal” in a foreign sense anymore.
The history here isn’t stacked neatly on top of itself, like sediment you could dig through and date. Everything got folded into everything else until the seams disappeared. You cannot hold up a thread from this cloth and say, with a straight face, this part is original, and this part is invader. There’s no answer to that question anymore.
What we can do is to decide whether we see that as a symbol of a rich past or a fractured ancestry.
Five rivers of the Punjab falling into each other and becoming inseparable
Nobody mourns the Sutlej or the Beas for losing its identity in the confluence, and what it becomes downstream is bigger and more fertile than what either was alone.
The same is true of a people descended from both halves of every fight on this land. I am, whether I like it or not, descended from men who came here as conquerors and never left, and from the tenacious, stubborn men of the land who bled trying to stop them — and so is nearly everyone else standing on this soil.
You can’t ask a river to separate back into its five sources. A belief that you have to choose your ancestry, that you have to pick Akbar or Dulla, Alexander or Porus, will always be standing on water.
Choice is impossible, and after all these centuries, it’s pointless. What happened, happened, a long, long time ago.
The men on both sides of each one of these fights gave everything they had, and the outcome was settled centuries before any of us showed up to have an opinion about it. The only real choice left is what you do with a result you can’t change: accept it, or spend another thousand years mourning a war that ended before your grandfather’s grandfather was born.
We can’t undo any of it, and I don’t think we need to. Nobody’s asking Akbar’s descendants to apologize. We’ve been an independent people for decades now; the ledger closed a long time before that.
What matters is that we stop needing a side. Stop laundering the conquerors into heroes and burying the defenders as bandits just to keep an old, tidy story intact.
Hold both. Akbar built an empire, and it cost Dulla Bhatti and men like him more than their lives. Alexander was great, and Porus made him earn every inch of it. None of them were innocent or righteous, and none of them need to be, for us to finally stop needing only one of them to have been right.
When a conqueror invades a land, some people survive by laying down their arms, and who am I to call them cowards? It’s one honest way through an impossible situation that requires courage and gets no praise. Others survive by fighting until there’s nothing left of them to fight with, and that is indeed a heroic feat, but also another honest way through the same impossible situation. Both are people doing what they could with what they had.
The only ones who ever actually deserve contempt are the treacherous ‘asteen dey sap’, the ones who turned on their own from within for whatever the conqueror would give them in return. That’s the only line I’d draw. Not resistance versus surrender but loyalty versus betrayal.
We’ve been in this Stockholm syndrome for ages. But there’s no rescue coming because there’s no one left outside this to send it. The captor and the one who tried to save us are the same blood, running in the same body, five rivers deep.
It’s nothing but an old, unfinished argument between two halves of the same family now. And it’s long past time somebody in the family said: enough. We’re both. We have long been both. Let the river keep the water it already has.
