Purkhian Da Des
(Land of the Ancestors)
Author: Dr. Sukhdev Singh Jhand
Reviewed by
Dr. Devinder Pal Singh
Author: Dr. Sukhdev Singh Jhand
Genre: Safarnama (Travelogue)
Year: 2025, Pages: 164, Price: Rs. 395/-
Publisher: Chetna Parkashan, Punjabi Bhawan, Ludhiana
Reviewer: Dr. Devinder Pal Singh, Director, Canbridge Learning, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
A Journey Through Memory, Longing, and Two Punjabs
There is a particular species of travel writing that does not simply move through space but through time: across decades, across Partitions, and across the silences that governments impose between peoples who share a language, a soil, and a soul. Purkhian Da Des (Land of the Ancestors), the latest offering from Canada-based scholar and writer Dr. Sukhdev Singh Jhand, belongs to this rare and emotionally charged tradition of Punjabi safarnama literature. Covering a fourteen-day journey to West Punjab (Pakistan) in February 2023, this travelogue is a deeply personal, humanist, and occasionally uncomfortable document of what happens when a displaced people finally come home, to a home that no longer belongs to them.
Dr. Jhand's credentials are those of a librarian, a botanist of sorts, a journalist, and a memoirist, all of which converge usefully in a travelogue. The author of nine previous books in Punjabi and English (including three volumes on trees, an autobiography Patte te Parchhavein, and a prose collection Sarokar te Shakhsiyatan), he brings to this journey a practised clarity of prose and a journalist's instinct for the significant detail. His prefatory material generously acknowledges his hosts, his co-travellers (wife Jagdish Kaur, sister Gurcharan Kaur Thind, and brother-in-law Dr. Sukhvinder Singh Thind), and the Lahore-based Punjabi activist and television presenter Ahmad Raza 'Punjabi', whose sponsorship and companionship made the entire journey possible.
The book carries two substantial prefaces: one by the distinguished Punjabi fiction writer Dr. Waryam Singh Sandhu, and another by the celebrated sports writer and educator Principal Sarwan Singh. Both prefaces are themselves literary achievements. Sandhu's foreword frames the travelogue as a narrative of minds meeting minds rather than merely a catalogue of places and buildings. Sandhu's celebrated image, that the current of love between the two Punjabs runs underground like a subterranean stream beneath a thick layer of sand and hatred, and that accounts like Jhand's help pierce that layer, is among the most apt metaphors for this genre of writing. Principal Sarwan Singh, who situates Purkhian Da Des within the wider tradition of Pakistani safarnamas stretching from Balraj Sahni's Mera Pakistani Safarnama to Waryam Singh Sandhu's Vagdi E Ravi, offers a warm, anecdote-rich appreciation that also provides a vivid personal sketch of the author himself.
The travelogue is organised day by day across its fifteen chapters, a format that suits the genre and creates a satisfying sense of temporal progression. The itinerary is impressively wide: Lahore (multiple visits), Kasur and the shrine of Baba Bulleh Shah, the ancestral village of Chak Number 202 'Gatti Talaawan' in the Nili Bar near Faisalabad, Kartarpur Sahib, Nankana Sahib, Gurudwara Panja Sahib at Hassan Abdal, Shalimar Gardens, the Walled City and Anarkali Bazaar, the martyrdom site of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the Faiz Ahmed Faiz literary festival, Shadman Chowk (Bhagat Singh Chowk), the tomb of Princess Bamba (daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh), Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Taxila (ancient university ruins and museum), and the famous Clock Tower of Faisalabad. The author also records a memorable interview with the celebrated poet Baba Najmi and a late-night dinner-and-interview session with popular Punjabi comedians Salim Albela and Goga Pasroori.
At the emotional heart of the travelogue, however, are two episodes that transcend the itinerary: the visit to Chak Number 202, where Jhand's ancestors lived before the Partition of 1947, and the tearful farewell at the Wagah border on the final day. Both are rendered with considerable feeling.
The book's most striking quality is its prose style. Dr. Jhand writes in what Principal Sarwan Singh aptly calls a flowing and spontaneous style: short, energetic sentences that move the reader swiftly without the impediment of self-conscious flourish. The narrative never stalls. As Sarwan Singh notes, a reader can cover the entire travelogue in two or three sittings and feel as though they have themselves visited the Wagah border, Lahore, Kasur, Nankana Sahib, Gurdwara Saccha Sauda, Panja Sahib, and the ruins of Taxila University. This is the highest compliment one can pay a travel writer.
Jhand's sense of humour is another asset. The book opens with the famous latifa (joke) about two Lahori friends who, having died and been admitted to heaven, petition the Dharamraj to send them back to Lahore, because "your heaven is fine enough, but Lahore is Lahore." This anecdote sets the tone perfectly: affectionate, gently comic, and deeply respectful of a city whose hold on the imagination of Punjabis across borders has never loosened.
The descriptions of people are particularly alive. The encounter with Sanna Ram Chandra: a young Hindu civil officer from Sindh, posted as Assistant Commissioner of Hassan Abdal, who visits Gurdwara Panja Sahib daily, is a quietly eloquent vignette about Pakistan's religious plurality. The midday visit to Taxila with its archaeology director Sayed Gull, who spotted the party's turbans from a distance and came rushing across the hilltop to offer her services as a guide, is similarly memorable.
The farewell scene at Wagah is genuinely moving. Ahmad Raza, Suhail Mamunka, and cameraman Faisal Ali wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs while Dr. Jhand recites verses from Parkash Sathi's ghazal: "How much joy there was in meeting you / how much sadness in leaving" encapsulates the essential pathos of this entire genre: the Partition-severed ties that stubbornly refuse to die.
Purkhian Da Des participates in what one might call the literature of return, a significant tributary of post-Partition Punjabi writing that includes Balraj Sahni's account, Amrita Pritam's verse, and Waryam Singh Sandhu's Vagdi E Ravi. Its particular contribution is the perspective of the diaspora returnee: Dr. Jhand comes not from Indian Punjab but from Canada, holding a Canadian passport, which paradoxically made his Pakistani visa far easier to obtain than it would have been on an Indian document. This irony, that a Punjabi from Canada can visit Lahore more freely than a Punjabi from Amritsar, runs quietly through the text and surfaces explicitly in the penultimate chapter.
The book's political message is stated clearly in its final pages: the author calls for dismantling the "wall of hatred" between India and Pakistan as Germany dismantled the Berlin Wall, for visa-free or simplified travel between the two countries on the Canada-USA model, for increased trade and cultural exchange, and for an end to the aggressive theatrics of the Wagah border Retreat Ceremony. These are not new arguments, but they are made with the credibility of first-hand experience and the moral authority of one whose ancestors lost everything in 1947.
The travelogue is not without its limitations, and both preface writers, with characteristic candour, note some of them. Principal Sarwan Singh observes that Jhand's prose, though fluid and readable, lacks the tadka (the sharp seasoning) that distinguishes masters of the form like Balraj Sahni or the late Balwant Gargi, whose travelogues are spiced with sensory extravagance and social provocation. Jhand makes no pretence of reaching into the darker or more complex corners of Pakistani urban life, and his account of Anarkali Bazaar, for instance, is confined to the modest fact that his family bought some cloth and artificial jewellery. Sarwan Singh wryly notes that a writer of Gargi's temperament would never have passed through Anarkali without considerably more colourful observation. This is not a criticism so much as an accurate description: Jhand is a saau (gentle, decent) writer, and his travelogue reflects that character consistently.
The book is also, by design, concise, a quality Sarwan Singh identifies as an economic as well as aesthetic choice, given the cost of large-format publications. Some readers may wish for greater depth in certain episodes: the Faiz Ahmad Faiz literary festival, for example, receives relatively brief treatment, as does the meeting with the celebrated poet Baba Najmi, which could have been developed into a richer portrait. The interviews conducted for television by sister Gurcharan Kaur Thind, with Sanna Ram Chandra, with archaeologist Sayed Gull, with Salim Albela and Goga Pasroori, are duly reported but not always fully rendered on the page, since they were originally filmed rather than written.
One structural peculiarity is that significant portions of the book were previously published as newspaper columns in the Canadian Punjabi Post and Punjab Star in Brampton, Ontario during 2023, a fact the author discloses honestly. The travelogue thus carries, in places, the episodic quality of serialised journalism rather than the unified architecture of a fully conceived literary work. This is not unusual in the safarnama tradition, but it is worth noting for readers who expect a tighter compositional unity.
Among the growing body of safarnamas from and about Pakistani Punjab, which includes, as Sarwan Singh catalogues, Balraj Sahni's pioneering account, Waryam Singh Sandhu's Vagdi E Ravi, and a dozen others; Purkhian Da Des holds a distinctive position. It is not the work of someone who was himself born in Pakistan, but of someone whose purkhian (ancestors) were. This generational remove gives the narrative a slightly different emotional register: less raw grief, more deliberate pilgrimage. The author knows the stories; he is going to verify them, to touch the earth that holds them, and to bring back testimony.
Dr. Waryam Singh Sandhu is right that this is not a conventional travelogue of names and buildings. It is, as he writes, a narrative of minds meeting minds, a record of the discovery that on both sides of a border maintained by governments and armies, ordinary Punjabi people still yearn for each other with an intensity that no amount of political hostility has been able to extinguish.
Purkhian Da Des is a warm, accessible, and quietly courageous book. It will not unsettle or disturb the reader; that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to bear witness: to the hospitality of Pakistani Punjabis, to the tears of parting at Wagah, to the school in Chak 202 where Dr. Jhand's father studied a lifetime ago, to the soil of an ancestral village that strangers now call home but welcomed a descendant as though he had never been gone.
For readers of Punjabi literature, for those interested in the human dimensions of the India-Pakistan relationship, and for the large Punjabi diaspora in Canada and beyond whose roots lie in the fields and towns that now constitute Pakistan, this travelogue will be both a recognition and a solace. It reminds us that the Ravi, as Sandhu's metaphor suggests, flows unseen, but it flows still.
Dr. Sukhdev Singh Jhand's tenth book is a worthy addition to a literature that has always understood that the truest journey is the one that leads you back to yourself.
