There is something curious about discovering a language you have known all your life.
I have spoken Punjabi for as long as I can remember hearing it. I understood it. I knew its expressions, its humour, its warmth, the particular way a Punjabi sentence can carry affection without having to say much. Yet for much of my life, I did not speak it with the confidence or consistency with which I speak it today.
Somewhere along the way, something changed.
Today, when I find myself among people who speak and understand Punjabi, I instinctively choose Punjabi. I do not switch to English simply because it is easier or more convenient. I encourage the other person to stay with Punjabi too. There is a small pleasure in hearing two people who could easily conduct a conversation in English choose instead to speak the language that connects them to something older than either of them.
It has made me think about what we inherit, what we preserve, and what we quietly allow to disappear.
A language does not usually disappear in one dramatic moment. It recedes through thousands of small decisions. We choose another language because it is more convenient. We stop teaching our children because we assume they will learn later. We understand our mother tongue but become hesitant to speak it.
Eventually, the next generation can recognize the sound of the language without being able to participate fully in it.
That is why a simple invitation I recently came across stayed with me.
Dr. Harjinder Singh, one of the people whose thinking and example have influenced me over the years, shared a post from Melbourne encouraging Punjabis, whether from India or Pakistan, to identify Punjabi as their mother tongue and language of choice in the Australian Census.
On the surface, it was a small request.
To me, it was much larger.
It took me back to an idea I had explored years ago and called “Punjabi First.” At the time, I imagined it as a way of bringing Punjabis together across religious and geographical differences around the things we share: our language, culture, arts, traditions, humour, hospitality and a particular way of seeing life.
Looking back, I think the idea was less about putting Punjabi above anything else and more about putting it back at the centre of something we too easily take for granted.
Punjabi First was never meant to ask a Sikh to become less Sikh, a Hindu less Hindu, a Muslim less Muslim, a Christian less Christian, or an Indian or Pakistani less connected to their country. It was about recognizing that these identities do not have to cancel one another out.
A person can carry several identities with dignity.
And perhaps one of the most beautiful of them can simply be Punjabi.
That thought takes us inevitably to 1947.
The Partition of Punjab was not merely a political rearrangement on a map. It divided a people who had shared villages, rivers, fields, marketplaces, poetry, music, food, stories and ways of life for generations. Families were uprooted. Millions were displaced. More than a million people are believed to have lost their lives across the broader violence of Partition.
A line was drawn across Punjab, and the eastern and western parts eventually came to be described as Charda Punjab and Lehnda Punjab.
The geography changed. The political identities changed. The borders became real.
But culture is rarely so obedient.
The Punjabi language continued to cross the border. So did poetry. So did music. So did memories of places that had become inaccessible. A song could travel where a person could not. A poem could preserve a village that no longer belonged to the family who remembered it. A voice could make Lahore feel familiar in Amritsar and Amritsar feel familiar in Lahore.
Perhaps that is why the idea of Sanjha Punjab continues to resonate.
I do not understand Sanjha Punjab as a political project. I understand it as a cultural memory and, perhaps more importantly, as a cultural possibility.
It is the recognition that Punjab existed in the hearts and habits of its people long before political borders defined how we were expected to understand one another.
And it still exists there.
Listen to Punjabi music on either side of the border and the political boundary becomes strangely irrelevant. Read Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah or Waris Shah and it becomes difficult to place their poetry neatly inside modern national categories. Hear Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Reshma, Gurdas Maan, Karan Aujla or Sidhu Moosewala and you are reminded that cultural affection rarely checks a passport before entering the heart.
Even our scripts tell an interesting story.
Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi are different writing traditions, shaped by different histories and communities. Yet when two Punjabis meet and speak, the spoken language can dissolve that distinction almost immediately.
That matters.
Because language is more than a tool for transmitting information. It carries humour that does not always translate. It preserves ways of showing respect. It contains memories embedded in particular words. It tells us how earlier generations understood relationships, community, suffering, celebration and belonging.
When we lose a language, we do not simply lose vocabulary. We lose access to some of the ways our ancestors made sense of the world.
This is particularly important for those of us in the diaspora.
I came to North America in 2000. Like many immigrants, I learned to live across worlds. Canada became home, while the cultural inheritance I arrived with continued to shape who I was becoming. Over time, English became the language of my education, professional life and much of my public identity.
That is not something I regret.
Quite the opposite. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities and experiences that Canada has given me.
But perhaps maturity gives us a different relationship with where we came from. We become less interested in choosing between worlds and more interested in understanding what each has given us.
For me, Punjabi has gradually moved from something I understood to something I consciously choose.
And I am grateful to the people around me who kept it alive.
There are people in Canada who continued speaking Punjabi at home, with friends, with parents, with grandparents and with one another. They preserved something simply by using it. They did not need a strategy document or a cultural campaign. They just kept speaking.
There is something profound in that.
We sometimes think preservation requires institutions, funding, programs and formal structures. Those things matter, especially when a language is under pressure. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that languages and cultures have a meaningful place in education and public life.
But culture is ultimately kept alive through ordinary human behaviour. Someone chooses Punjabi at the dinner table. A parent teaches a child a Punjabi expression instead of translating it. Two friends continue speaking Punjabi even though they could both speak English perfectly well. A young person learns a song and then becomes curious about the poetry behind it. A family tells its children where their grandparents came from and what those places meant to them.
That is how culture survives.
In my experience, the most durable change is often created this way. It begins with a choice that seems almost too small to matter, repeated consistently enough that eventually it becomes part of who we are.
This is why I think “Punjabi First” still has relevance to me.
Not as a slogan. Certainly not as a demand for cultural uniformity.
As an invitation.
An invitation to Punjabi Hindus, Punjabi Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Punjabis of every faith and no faith to recognize the cultural inheritance we share without diminishing the identities that make each of us who we are.
An invitation to Indians and Pakistanis to recognize that political history can explain our differences without having to erase our common cultural memory.
An invitation to Punjabis in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere to understand that diaspora does not have to mean cultural distance.
And perhaps most importantly, an invitation to speak Punjabi.
Because I wonder whether we sometimes confuse loving a culture with preserving it.
We celebrate Punjabi music. We attend Punjabi weddings. We enjoy Punjabi food. We quote Punjabi poetry. We share Punjabi videos. We take pride in Punjabi hospitality and humour.
All of that matters.
But if we want Punjabi to remain a living culture, we have to use the language itself.
A culture cannot be preserved entirely in museums, festivals and memories. It has to remain part of ordinary life.
That is where I think the idea of Punjabi First becomes both personal and practical.
If I am sitting with someone who speaks Punjabi, I can choose Punjabi. If a child asks what a Punjabi word means, I can explain it rather than immediately translating it away. If I have the opportunity to teach someone the language, I can. If someone is hesitant to speak Punjabi because they are afraid of making mistakes, I can make the conversation safe enough for them to try.
These are small acts. But identity is often built from small acts. There is also something else worth remembering.
Punjabiyat has never been confined to one religious tradition.
Some of the greatest expressions of Punjabi thought emerged through a remarkable interweaving of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim intellectual and spiritual traditions. The poetry of Punjab repeatedly crossed the boundaries that later generations tried to make more rigid. Love, longing, devotion, separation, humility, injustice, human dignity and the search for the divine were expressed in a language that belonged to the people before it belonged to any modern political category.
That is part of what makes Punjabiyat so compelling.
It has always had room.
Perhaps that is the lesson worth carrying forward.
The answer to division does not always have to be another argument about who is right. Sometimes it is remembering what existed before the argument.
For me, Sanjha Punjab is that remembrance.
It is not a call to redraw a border. It is a reminder that borders do not have the final word on culture.
Charda Punjab is real. Lehnda Punjab is real. India is real. Pakistan is real. The histories, politics and experiences on either side are real, and they should be understood in their own contexts.
But so is the Punjabi cultural inheritance that predates all of them.
That inheritance belongs to us.
What we do with it is up to us.
I think this is why the idea has returned to me now, years after I first thought about Punjabi First. Perhaps I needed to experience something personally before I could fully appreciate what I had been advocating intellectually.
I knew Punjabi. I simply had not been choosing it enough. And somewhere in that small personal shift, I have come to understand something much larger. Sometimes reclaiming a culture does not begin with looking backward. It begins with deciding what we will do today.
So when I am with someone who speaks Punjabi, I will continue to speak Punjabi.
When I hear someone encouraging Punjabis to identify Punjabi as their mother tongue, I will continue to listen.
And when I think about Sanjha Punjab, I will think less about the Punjab that Partition took from us and more about the Punjab that remains available to us.
A Punjab that lives in a language.
In a poem. In a song. In a story told by a grandparent.
In the laughter of two Punjabis who have never met before but somehow begin speaking as though they have known each other for years.
Perhaps that is our shared Punjab. Perhaps Punjabiyat does not need a border to define it. Perhaps it only needs us to keep choosing it.
And perhaps, after everything history has done to divide us, one of the simplest ways we can begin bringing it together again is to speak Punjabi first.
