Heads of Punjab

Data from punjabi republic.xlsx (Spreadsheets/Full list)

Name - (Punjabi) / (Pashtun) / (Sindhi) / (Kashmiri) / (Sindhi) / (Persian) / (Bhoti)

Capital - Lahore

Head of state - Constitution of Punjab (inanimate)

Head of government - Sadr-e-Hukumat Setare Musaputri

Legislature - Parishad-e-Hukumat & Sangh-e-Jana (initiative), Majlis-e-Qaum (decision)

President of the Parishad-e-Hukumat - Setare Musaputri

President of the Sangh-e-Jana - Yusuf Nizami Ibrahminputtar

President of the Majlis-e-Qaum - Hanuman Ramputtar

Judiciary -Majlis-e-Qanun

President of the Majlis-e-Qanun - Navjot Kaur Jatinderputtar

Form of government - Unitary government under a democratic confidential constitution

Area -

Largest cities

-Lahore - 32,700,000 (city), 38,408,000 (metro)

-Karachi - 11,500,000 (city), 15,615,000 (metro)

-Rawalpindi - 7,200,000 (city), 9,900,000 (metro)

Time zone - TMP+05:00

Currency - Punjabi mohur

Language - Punjabi, Pashtun (recognized), Sindhi (recognized), Kashmiri (recognized), Sindhi (recognized), Persian (recognized), Bhoti (recognized)

Population - 145,121,000

Density -

National festival - Republic Day (March 15) - commemorating the declaration of the Punjabi Republic (1883)

Anthem -

Motto - دیگ و تیغ و فتح

-there have been a lot of conversions to Sikhism under the Sikh Empire

-Sikhs and Muslims disproportionately rural, Hindus disp urban

-Hindustani migrant workers Hindu, Muslim, few Sikh, and mostly in urban cores

-a lot of Jews have come in from Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan fleeing persecution

Coffee is today a staple in the nation of Punjab. It can be found drunk by Punjabis in virtually every social clime aside from certain ultra-conservative religious sects, and shops and stalls selling it abound nearly everywhere. It may come to a surprise, then, that it is a quite recent import and that even only 150 years ago the average Punjabi would have barely known of its existence.

Coffee in India as a whole was introduced in 1670 when, in a time in which Yemen had a controlled coffee monopoly that forbade the export of raw beans, the Sufi saint Baba Budan returned from hajj with seven coffee beans taped to his stomach. Returning to his native Karnataka, he planted them on a hill now named in his honor. It is from this that Karnataka's modern reputation as India's coffee country first developed, and it was only burnished further when in the 1840s the British established coffee plantations in it and in nearby Tamil Nadu and Malabar. This coffee was produced primarily for export across the oceans and, to a lesser extent, for domestic production; little of it went to any part of North India. If Punjab had any drink of choice, it was tea, a drink symbolic of the Persianate culture of its elite, and if the Punjabi knew of coffee it was as a faraway South Indian drink.

There were a couple of reasons this changed. First, the Punjabi Empire sent students to France to learn modern science and technology over the 1850s-70s and, like any Frenchman, they drank coffee regularly. When they came back to Punjab, they took their addiction with them and they made sure to import coffee from Java, South India, or elsewhere to continue it. This elite consumption enlargened greatly due to a surge of coffee overproduction. With the Dutch conquering the whole of the island of Lanka, they made sure to introduce Java coffee into the highlands which they found to be prime coffee country, resulting in massive coffee yields in the 1870s. Simultaneously, Meridia devalued its currency, and as imports came in the form of foreign currency and payouts to locals came in the form of local currency, this greatly incentivized coffee planters in the Sao Paulo region to plant crops. The result of both of these events was a massive supply of coffee in the global market, resulting in its value plummeting. With planters and exporters eager to increase demand to account for the supply, they looked to new markets - inevitably, Punjab was one of those markets. Dutch and French traders, long a presence up the Indus, promoted coffee for low prices, and they sold a great volume, and this cheap price allowed it to spread among all classes in the cities. In the years that followed, due to the cheap prices driving some coffee sellers out of business for a time, coffee prices climbed upwards - but this change was permanent and coffee was far more common than before - even if these low prices resulted in the old Persianate elites sneering at the coffee in favour of their tea.

In addition, in 1883 came the Punjabi Revolution, and with the rise of the new order came a program of cultural reform. The old Persianate elites were not broken but they were weakened, and Francophiles came to compete with them. This poised tea, a symbol of Punjab's ancient cultural ties with the decaying empire Persia, against coffee, a symbol of Punjab's new ties with the modern republic of France. When the Revolution came to an end in 1890 with Prem Nath Kaul's coup d'etat, he forever destroyed the Persianate elite in favour of French-inspired modernity. Out came tea and in came coffee, and Kaul discarded his own samovar in favour of a coffee plunger. Over his decade-long dictatorship, he enshrined coffee as a symbol of the modern republic and, when some Hindu and Sikh religious leaders condemned coffee as an addictive substance, he promoted it as a symbol of sobriety that diminished alcohol consumption. Ultimately, upon his death in 1903, coffee was forever secured as a national drink of the Punjabi people.

Coffee was and is almost entirely imported into Punjab, and the arid environment of its west makes growing it utterly unthinkable. But this would begin to change in the 1920s, when census-makers, noticing the similarity of parts of the Pahari country to the coffee country of Karnataka, designated them for coffee growing. With plants introduced from Aceh, this achieved its fruition, and today Punjab does have a coffee country. However, attempts to increase its size failed due to the extremes of Pahari winters, and today this industry almost exclusively exist for internal use.

Though coffee has spread far and wide across the Punjabi nation, there is one region which views it with suspicion - Kashmir. With it having long been tea country famous for its distinctive pink tea, coffee failed to make any headway in the 1880s and, come the great migration of coffee-drinking Punjabi-speaking migrants in the early 1900s, tea became even more heavily identified with Kashmiri culture. In 1922, Kashmiri language activists dumped coffee into the Jhelum in protest of Punjabi dominance, and the organization of Kashmiri Shaiva Hindus in the same period made sure to use tea as an emblem of their difference with Punjabi-speaking Hindus with whom they feared assimilation. This politicization exists today, and Kashmiri cultural conferences are today marked by anti-coffee sentiments. But despite it, an industry for coffee consumption exists in modern Kashmir.

Today, Punjab is a land of coffee. This is not the product of any old Punjabi culture; instead, it is the product of a cultural shift directed by both market forces and the arm of the state. But it is a cultural shift that is immovable.