Doaba means two waters. It is the tract of Punjab held between the Beas and the Sutlej, a wedge of some of the most intensively farmed land in India, and its capital is Jalandhar — an old city with a sports-goods industry, a newspaper trade, a railway junction and, more than any of these, an extraordinary claim on the geography of the Punjabi diaspora. A very large share of the Punjabis of Britain and Canada come from villages you could drive between in an afternoon.
An Old Name
Jalandhar is among the oldest continuously inhabited places in Punjab, and its name is genuinely ancient, appearing in Sanskrit sources as the name of both a region and a legendary figure. In the early medieval period the surrounding territory formed the kingdom of Trigarta, the land of three waters, whose seat moved between the plains and the Kangra hills. From the eleventh century onward the city passed through the usual sequence of Punjab's rulers — the Ghaznavids, the Delhi sultans, the Mughals — and became the administrative centre of the Jalandhar Doab, a revenue division that gave the region the name it still uses.
Under Maharaja Ranjit Singh the Doab was part of the Sikh Empire. It was among the first substantial territories the empire lost: the Treaty of Lahore in 1846, after the First Anglo-Sikh War, ceded the Jullundur Doab to the East India Company three years before the annexation of the rest of Punjab. That head start matters more than it sounds. The Doaba spent an extra three years, and then a full century, inside a British administrative system that surveyed land, fixed revenue, built railways and — decisively — recruited soldiers.
The Refugee City
Jalandhar's modern shape was set in 1947. The city sits east of the line that Cyril Radcliffe drew, and when Partition came it received one of the heaviest inflows of refugees in East Punjab while losing much of its Muslim population westward. Whole neighbourhoods were rebuilt by families from Lahore, Sialkot and Lyallpur, and the city's commercial character today owes a great deal to people who arrived with nothing in the autumn of that year.
For six years afterwards Jalandhar was the capital of Indian Punjab, holding the state government from 1947 until Chandigarh was ready in 1953. Something of that period survives in the civic architecture and in the concentration of institutions — the Punjabi press has a long home here, and All India Radio's Jalandhar station was for decades the voice that reached across the border to listeners in West Punjab who wanted Punjabi music and news.
The sports goods industry has a similar origin story. Sialkot, now in Pakistan, had been the subcontinent's centre for hand-stitched footballs and cricket equipment; after 1947 many of its manufacturers restarted in Jalandhar, and the city has been India's principal producer of sports goods ever since, exporting balls, bats, gloves and gym equipment from thousands of small workshops.
Why the Doaba Left
The question that brings most people to Jalandhar's story is the emigration. Doaba is called the NRI belt of Punjab, and the label is earned: its three districts of Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Kapurthala have sent proportionally more people overseas than any comparable stretch of India, and the pattern has held for well over a century.
Several things stacked up. The first was British military recruitment, which drew heavily from Punjab from the 1850s onward and gave a generation of men passports, ship travel, and postings from Hong Kong to East Africa. Soldiers who had seen Shanghai and Vancouver came home with information, and information is what migration runs on.
The second was land. The Doaba has fertile soil but small holdings, subdivided again with every generation under customary inheritance. Unlike the canal colonies of West Punjab, there was no frontier of new land to move onto. A family with four sons and a few acres had to send some of them somewhere.
The third was the chain itself. Early Punjabi migrants reached British Columbia and California in the first years of the twentieth century — the story that runs through the Komagata Maru and the Ghadar movement — and once a handful of villages had people abroad, the sponsorship of relatives did the rest. When Britain needed labour after the Second World War, the networks were already in place; the same happened with Canada's immigration reforms in the later twentieth century, and again with the student-visa migration of the last two decades. Southall, Smethwick, Slough, Surrey, Brampton and Vancouver are, in a real sense, extensions of a few hundred Doaba villages.
The Partition displacement added its own push. Many Doaba families who lost land in the west and were resettled on smaller plots in the east had every reason to look further afield.
What the Money Built
Drive through the villages between Jalandhar, Phagwara and Nawanshahr and the remittance economy is written on the landscape. There are houses of a scale and style — pillars, mirrored glass, water tanks shaped like aeroplanes and footballs — that no local income explains. There are schools, dispensaries, gurdwaras and sports grounds funded by village committees whose members live in Ontario. There are, less happily, houses standing empty and locked, and elderly parents in villages where the young have gone.
Punjab's state government maintains an NRI department and dedicated police cells for overseas Punjabis' property disputes, which tells you how central the relationship has become. Direct flights from Amritsar to Birmingham and Toronto exist because of the Doaba.
Jalandhar Today
The city itself is a working commercial place rather than a monumental one. It has the shrine of Imam Nasir at Jalandhar's old quarter, the Devi Talab temple, gurdwaras of long standing, and the Wonderland-and-flyover sprawl of a mid-sized Indian city that grew fast. Its universities and colleges are among the largest in Punjab, and its coaching centres and IELTS academies are a visible industry in their own right — the front end of the same migration machine that has been running since the 1900s.
For the diaspora, though, Jalandhar is rarely the destination. It is the place you change at, the district on the address, the last city before the road narrows to the village where the family house still stands. Between two rivers, on a plain no wider than a long day's drive, sits the origin point for a great deal of the Punjabi world.