Of Wheat, Worship, and Warmth

It is a sweltering afternoon in Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, and the streets are alive with the sights and sounds of Baisakhi mela, the state’s great spring harvest festival. Loudspeakers call out announcements, asking people to stop and eat — jalebis and pakode at some stalls, and wholesome sit-down meals of dal, matar paneer, kheer and rotis at others. My steel bowl has been refilled with nectar-like lassi before I can say a word.

Community kitchens line every street. Tractors from neighbouring districts rumble in, carrying not produce for sale but provisions for seva — bags of flour, tins of desi ghee, cans of milk, crates of sugar. Families unload and get to work without ceremony. No one is turned away. No one is asked who they are.

This is Punjab in its truest form — of village melas, of harvest festivals, and of ubiquitous langars (community meals) that serve without prejudice. Rooted in the teachings of the Sikh Gurus, equality is not merely an ideal here — it is practised daily, ladle by ladle.

More Than a Stereotype
It is also a Punjab that is routinely misread; and as someone who grew up here, I feel that gap keenly.

“You’re a Punjabi and a vegetarian?” It is a question I encounter regularly, and one that reveals just how narrow the popular imagination of this state tends to be. Punjab, at its core, has always been agrarian and therefore largely vegetarian. Meat dishes gained prominence only after Partition, when migrants from the North-West Frontier brought their culinary traditions with them. The stereotype — paneer cooked in the same gravy, the famed makki di roti and sarson da saag — tells only a fraction of the story. The real feast lies in village kitchens and unpretentious sweet shops: seasonal, local, and built from very few ingredients.

I was reminded of this on a journey through Punjab’s hinterlands one spring, travelling through the districts of Sangrur, Fazilka, Malerkotla, and the royal city of Patiala. The mustard had faded by then, and the wheat — locally called kanak — was beginning to turn golden in the heat. What struck me most was how closely the food mirrored the land: uncomplicated, unshowy, and deeply rooted in the rhythms of the harvest.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the trio of gud (jaggery), ghee, and wheat. During Baisakhi, these three ingredients form the backbone of the celebration. From the rich atte ki pinni (a roasted, flour-based traditional sweet) rolled in pure ghee to the simplest comfort of roti with ghee and shakkar (sugar), these combinations carry generations of nostalgia. Ask any Punjabi about a childhood favourite and chances are they will mention churi — leftover rotis crumbled into hot ghee and jaggery. The most sacred expression of this minimalism is the kadha prasad — a traditional Sikh offering — found in every gurdwara: equal parts wheat flour, ghee, and sugar, transformed into something divine, quite literally.

While wheat is the undisputed hero of the harvest, rice-based sweets hold their own — roh di kheer, made with sugarcane juice, and gud wale meethe chawal (jaggery rice) turned golden with generous amounts of saffron.

Fields, Frontiers and Forgotten Sweets
That agrarian simplicity — that same trinity of grain, ghee and sweetness — follows you all the way to Punjab’s western edge.

In the border town of Fazilka, I arrived at Jyani Natural Farm just as the winter harvest was winding down. Pallavi Redhu Jyani and her husband Vishavjeet Singh Jyani were overseeing the last of the kinnow harvest — plump oranges being plucked and packed — while roses were being distilled into rose water. By April, even millets would be ready. It was here that Pallavi mentioned dhokliya, a traditional harvest sweet made from jaggery, ghee, and freshly harvested wheat.

Fazilka rewards the curious traveller in other ways too. Each evening at the Sadqi border post, just 14 kilometres from town, the BSF and Pakistan Rangers perform the Beating Retreat — a daily ceremony in which both sides march in formation and lower their national flags in synchrony at sunset. It is one of three such ceremonies along Punjab’s border with Pakistan, the other two being at Attari near Amritsar and Hussainiwala near Ferozepur. But where Attari draws busloads of tourists and a carnival atmosphere, Sadqi is quieter, more intimate, marked by patriotism that is felt rather than performed.

The town has its own quieter distinctions on the food and craft front as well. Tille wali juttis — hand-embroidered leather shoes in which women apply the decorative threadwork using stencils while men cut and shape the soles — are a local speciality. And no visit is complete without sampling tosha, a dense, syrup-free sweet with the soft texture of a gulab jamun, whose origins trace back across the border to what is now Pakistan. The decades-old Pakpattnian Di Hatti is the place to try it.

An hour’s drive north, the district of Malerkotla, a Muslim-majority town, has a remarkable history of communal harmony stretching back centuries, which lives on in mawa jalebis — plate-sized and thick, served with dollops of rabdi pooled generously on top.

The town is equally known for its intricate hand embroidery of army badges, a tradition kept alive by elderly Muslim artisans who have practised and refined the craft over decades. And at the sweet shops of Patiala and Sangrur, another distinctive snack appears: pithe wale paneer ke pakode — paneer stuffed with spiced filling, fried and served with mooli (radish) and tamarind chutney. It is the kind of thing you do not find on any restaurant menu, and that is precisely the point. This entire trail — from farm to border post to sweet shop — is an argument made in food: that Punjab’s truest flavours have always lived away from the spotlight.

The Spirit of the Harvest
Just outside Amritsar, where wheat fields stretch to the horizon, Jagroop Singh — who runs Heart of Punjab, a farm experience that opens his family’s land and table to visitors — describes a Baisakhi that fewer people remember. “Earlier, harvest was done entirely by hand,” he says. “Neighbours helped each other. Women sang boliyan (folk song) and danced giddha (a traditional Punjabi folk dance performed by women) to the dhol as the wheat came in.”

Mechanisation has made farming faster and more efficient, but it has also quietly shrunk the communal theatre around it. The collective harvest is largely gone. What remains are the rituals that grew around it — and those, it turns out, are more stubborn. Women still gather to prepare laddoos and panjiri studded with dry fruits and ginger. The chulha (stove) still burns. Gud wali chai (jaggery tea), makki ki roti, saag, and fresh vegetables pulled from the soil that morning — these are not performances for visitors. They are simply how things are still done. The scale has changed. The spirit, quietly and determinedly, has not.

Travel through Punjab’s quieter districts long enough and a single truth keeps surfacing: the state’s real character was never in its most boradcasted stories. For too long, the state has been reduced to a shorthand: its most exported dishes, its loudest festivals, the version of itself that travels well. The real Punjab has always required a little more effort to find.

It lives in the langars of Anandpur Sahib, where steel bowls are refilled before you think to ask. In the quiet border ceremony at Fazilka, where the flag comes down each evening without fanfare. In the tosha at a decades-old sweet shop, the mawa jalebis of Malerkotla, the dhokliya made from freshly harvested wheat at a farm, and in the boliyan that women still sing.

Spring here is not merely a season. It is the annual reminder that this land has been feeding people — generously, without ceremony, and with deep conviction — for a very long time. To travel through Punjab at Baisakhi is to understand that some harvests are about wheat, and some are about something older and harder to name: the quiet, unshakeable knowledge of how to nourish each other.