Heads of Punjab

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

Grand Occident of Punjab

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)

Religion - None (official); Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Buddhism (recognized)

Population - 145,121,000

Density -

National festivals

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

-Constitution Day (March 29) - commemorating the ratification of the modern Constitution (1883)

Anthem -

Motto - دیگ و تیغ و فتح

-it's officially declared to be the Constitution

-in mimicry of Sikhism being headed by Guru Granth Sahib

-and in reference to Paine's dictum that in a free country, the law is king

-with it coronated every year in replicate of old royal customs

-vested in a Sadr-e-Hukumat

-who heads the executive branch entirely

-heads a series of ministries with the Parishad-e-Hukumat when they are united

-as with French Republic, divided into three on model of a trial

-elected direct from the people

-decides what is law

-selected section of National Representatives

-Parishad is council of state

-opposition body

-consists of non-selected section of National Representatives

-vested in Majlis-e-Qanun

Grand Mufti of Punjab: idk

-disproportionately rural

Grand Mahant of Punjab: idk

-disproportionately urban

Jathedar of the Akal Takht: idk

-disproportionately rural

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

Grand Rabbi of Punjab: idk

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

-creating a minority concentrated largely in Lahore and Karachi

-state policy under Anti-Caste Law forces it to abandon Levite status

-even though it's largely withered away

Grand Babi Imam of Punjab: idk

-following revolt of Heads of Persia > 1851-1856 The Bab there's a mass flight of Babis

-Punjab freely admits them because they're viewed as Persian equivalent of Sikhs

-successfully evangelizes among Muslims to some degree

-deeply associated with revolutionary sentiments of the revolution

-ethnically Tibetan minorities near the edges

-Dalai Lama resided in Punjab for a bit after the Tibetan Revolution

-largely Armenians

-descendants of trading diaspora

-largely in Karachi

-an absolutely dominant language

-almost omnipresent in all the cities of the country

-spoken in west of country

-especially near Peshawar

-spoken in Kashmir

-but has been whittled away in major cities esp. Srinagar

-spoken in Sindh but less so in Karachi

-spoken among Hazara communities as well as Babi people

-as well as a second language in some areas

-many Hindustani migrants come

-but due to heavy social stigma around Hindustani language they often claim their language is Punjabi

-because very hard to tell difference

-highly prestigious language

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.