Pakistan’s breadbasket province holds over 127 million people
Punjab is Pakistan’s most populous province and the world’s second-most-populous subnational polity, with more than 127 million residents. Lahore is its capital; the province leads national GDP and is called the country’s industrial and agricultural heartland.
It borders Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Sindh, Islamabad Capital Territory, Azad Kashmir, and India’s Punjab across the 1947 partition line that split the wider five-river region. Persian panj + āb—“five waters”—calques Sanskrit pañca-áp for the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum system. Stone and flint tools of the Soanian culture, found in the Pothohar’s Soan Valley between the Indus and Jhelum, span roughly 774,000 to 11,700 BCE. Harappan cities flourished from about 3000 BCE, and Indo-Aryan migrants who came afterward composed the Rigveda here.
Porus fought Alexander at the Hydaspes and, captured, asked to be treated as one king treats another; Alexander restored him. Seleucus ceded the land to the Mauryas in 302 BCE, and the Indo-Greek king Menander later ruled from Sagala, now Sialkot, and embraced Buddhism. Kushans held the region for some three centuries until Hun invasions, and in the seventh century Xuanzang described a kingdom called Takka with its capital at Sialkot.
Umayyad armies brought Islam early in the eighth century, and Mahmud of Ghazni absorbed Punjab after 1001, with Lahore becoming sole Ghaznavid capital after 1163. Qutb ud-Din Aibak, first sultan of Delhi, died in a polo accident at Lahore in 1210, after which the capital moved to Delhi as Mongol raids began in 1221. Fourteenth-century writers including Ayn al-Mulk Mahru already used “Punjab” as a wilayat; Ibn Battuta and Wassaf also named the realm.
Punjabi Muslims form the majority; Sufi shrines and UNESCO sites such as Lahore Fort and Shalimar Gardens mark the cultural map. Its fertile plains still earn the province the title of Pakistan’s breadbasket.
Source: Punjab, Pakistan
