backlogged posts, finally

This was originally written on January 29th, two weeks ago
*********
Another day (or two, since I’ve had internet), another few cold nights in the Punjab, another few stomach gurgles in adjusting to the food. On Sunday, I took a ride outside of Amritsar about an hour (by auto-rickshaw…knows how far it really is?) to a little hamlet called Pritnagar. I went there to stay with a gentleman named Hirdey Pal and his wife Parveen, who are related to my excellent contact in Boston. Among their many generous hospitalities, I passed the entire afternoon in conversation with, or rather as a fascinated audience to, Hirdey Pal Ji. Among his many attributes as scholar, philosopher, and farmer farmer, I was quite struck by the story of his life and this little place called Pritnagar (PREET – nugger). I wish to share some of that story now, just because of how interesting it was.

The story begins with Hirdey Pal’s father, a young man who distinguished himself enough in youth to gain enrollment to an elite school (where the Colonial Brits only granted admittance to 10 Indians a year). After this study, he served in World War I, as part of the empire, and then wound up studying engineering at Michigan during the 20’s. In addition to excelling in his field, he tried to absorb what he saw as the ‘good’ aspects of American culture, and was quite drawn as well to Thoreau and Emerson.

He returned to India in the 1930’s with a vision and philosophy, the philosophy being one, amazingly, of Love at the center of a self-sustaining community. Before he put it into action, he briefly ran a magazine devoted to this idea, and then in the late 30’s moved to spot in the center of the Punjab where he founded the Town of Love (in Punjabi, “pritnagar”). As Hirdey Pal summed up his father’s vision: “Love is not a position, but a recognition.”

The founding of the town attracted a crowd of hearty intellectuals who were devoted to the same idea, and Pritnagar took off. With the engineer/visionary at the lead, there was a boarding school constructed out of mud walls (plastered over) and a thatched roof, and individual homes were made according to plans way ahead of their time – basically today’s “pre-fab” in a place where buildings are still just brick and concrete. Local craftsmen were taught sustainable ways to make furniture from abundant elements, dig responsible wells, and use the sun’s energy for heating. No house of worship was built in town, despite the fact that the town drew from the Punjab’s muslim, sikh, and hindu communities – it was a secular town with no walled-in houses, and they didn’t want any other kind of internal boundaries to spring up.

While this part all sounds pretty amazing, and my host grew up in this paradise-world until he was 14, the rest of its history is marked by soul-crushing turmoil. In 1947, the sub-continent was partitioned into India and Pakistan and, as luck would have it, Pritnagar found itself right on the line of division. “Guillotined” is how my host describes what happened to the idealist experiment of the town. The times became so confusing at Partition – in fact, Pritnagar was initially assigned to Pakistan, and only later re-assigned to India – that the community fractured. Those who remained found themselves at the heart of the Indo-Pak war that followed, wherein the building behind Hirdey Pal’s house was requisitioned for officers, and the adjacent field contained cannons lobbing shells onto Lahore (did I mention that Lahore is only ten miles as the crow flies?).

As if that weren’t enough, in the 1980’s followed a near civil-war escalation as Sikh separatist militants variously tried to rally support in this frontier region, and looted, raped and murdered as common criminals. My host vividly recalled an AK-47 held on his chest, and calmly mentioned neighbors and family members who were killed during the conflict. Neighbor turned against neighbor, and once again this peaceful hamlet was ripped up and left for dead. Since then, he went on, most of the houses were abandoned or sold way below their value, so the tiny community that remains is not at all joined to the founding principles of the Town of Love.

Standing in his garden looking at the quiet, green fields, I could scarcely believe that this land and man belonged to the same history I was hearing. What could easily have been mistaken for a sleepy backwater had seen unbridled idealism uprooted by violence and carelessness over the course of the century. As we watched the sun slowly sink over the Pakistani border (which Tom Brady could probably have hit with a slight tailwind), the wisdom poured forth from my host as he expounded on the virtues of simple thinking, agrarian economics, Indian hospitality, and the history of the world’s oldest secular society.