Village and city: enriching and impoverishing
Village and city: enriching and impoverishing What do scholars tell us about the history of village in Punjab? Village is older than Harappa, one can assume. It’s in fact older than that. It’s linked with the rise of agriculture. Harappa city didn’t come out of thin air. It owed its existence to an evolutionary transformation of village. City usually stands tall on the top of village it appropriated but keeps it hidden in its innards. Village devoured and digested emerges as a new organism called city. City produces all the things innovative and creative which are taken as hallmarks of civilisation but it doesn’t produce one thing that is an absolute must: food. Cerebral activity makes city what it is. But city’s survival cannot be ensured by cerebral activity alone which consumes calories. Calories are provided by food. And food comes from agricultural lands managed by growers. It was food that Baba Farid, the pioneer of Punjabi lit...