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The popular perception of Punjab is of a land of endless fields located on flat plains formed by the rivers that give it its name. But this was not always the case.
The province, today divided into the independent countries of India and Pakistan, was once home to forests and woodland. These areas sheltered outlaws and were inspiration for Sufis, Sikh Gurus and poets.
As the description of author David Gilmartin’s 2020 book Blood and Water: The Indus river basin in modern history notes, “The Indus basin was once an arid pastoral watershed, but by the second half of the twentieth century, it had become one of the world’s most heavily irrigated and populated river basins.”
This was especially true for the tracts of land between the rivers in what is now the Pakistani province of Punjab. These were called ‘Bar’ in Punjabi (Baran in plural).
Mushtaq Soofi described the ‘Bar’ region of Punjab in a 2014 article in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper as “a threshold, an outer space, an area away from the human settlement, a barrier between populated area and wild forest, a natural jungle etc”.
There were a number of these Bars. For instance, the Kirana Bar was located between the Jhelum and the Chenab. The storied Sandal Bar was situated between the Chenab and Ravi. The Neeli Bar lay between the old bed of the Beas and the Sutlej River. And the Ganji Bar was between the Ravi and the old bed of the Beas River.
These tracts of land and their unique landscape gave inspiration to the popular romances of the Punjab such as Heer-Ranjha and Mirza-Sahiba, both of which are set in the bars.
The landscape of the bars features in the kafis, qissas and other compositions of poets, Sikh Gurus, figures in Sikh history, and Sufis like Baba Farid, Waris Shah, Guru Nanak, Shah Hussain, Bhai Gurdas and others.
The Sandal Bar was also the hideout of the famous ‘Robin Hood of Punjab’, Rai Abdullah Khan Bhatti or Dulla Bhatti, a Muslim Rajput landlord or Zamindar who waged a guerilla war against the Mughal forces of Akbar. He is commemorated in the annual Punjabi festival of Lohri that falls on January 13.
In 1849, the British conquered the Sikh Empire that had ruled the Punjab since 1799. In the later part of that century, the British set about building an extensive network of canals after clearing the forested tracts of the bars. The colonial administration brought settlers from other parts of the province to live and farm these newly cleared lands. These became known as the ‘Punjab Canal Colonies’.
The Bars were, by no means, the only forests in Punjab. In what is now Punjab state in India, there was the ‘Lakhi’ jungle between the towns of Bhatinda and Kotkapura. Khushwant Singh refers to the name as meaning the ‘forest of a hundred thousand trees’ in his History of the Sikhs – Volume 1.
Louis E Fenech and W.H. McLeod’s 2014 work, Historical Dictionary of Sikhism describes the Lakhi jungle as “a wasteland south of Firozpur where the Khalsa sheltered during periods of persecution in the 18th century. The sheltering likely had to do with the fact that the area was a well-known ground of horse traders.”
Also, in the Indian state of Punjab is the Mattewara or Machhiwara forest near Ludhiana. It is the place where the 10th Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, took shelter in as he was pursued by Mughal forces after the Battle of Chamkaur Sahib in 1704.
The wounded Guru composed the famous shabad (hymn) Mittar Piare nu haal Mureedan da kehna (Tell the beloved friend the plight of his disciples) in this very forest.
