Bulleya! Kee jaana mein kaun!
Punjab is my home, but I was never at home in Punjab.
I grew up in an era when English was the language worth learning, Urdu was tolerated, and Punjabi had been quietly exiled as the language of the unlettered. Like most things we take for granted, neither Punjabi nor Punjabiness was ever really a topic of discussion in the world around us.
My mother loved history, so we grew up hearing it as stories rather than just learning it as a subject. My father was sensitive to the need to preserve and promote Punjabi, though for a long time, his was a voice in the wilderness.
We grew up in the shadow of English regardless, but thanks to his dedication, Punjabi and Punjabiyat remained a real part of our lives, even when the world outside didn’t make space for it.
My intellectual journey stayed mostly in English. I read my way through stories, novels, translations, until English became as much mine as anything I’d grown up speaking.
A language, any language, is a window that opens up a world you couldn’t otherwise reach, and English, being the international language it is, opened doors that the local language couldn’t.
Writing and storytelling were already in my genes, so when the opportunity came, becoming a content writer felt natural. Nearly a decade later, I’m still at it — writing and editing across formats and niches, these days for an internet increasingly read by AI as much as by people.
Finding The Way Home
It took a trip abroad, the first time in my life I’d met people from entirely different backgrounds and cultures, to make me feel, really feel, the disconnect from my own roots. And looking around since, I’ve noticed the same thirst in other people too.
I think it’s a symptom of globalization. The more we meet people who carry their identity with them wherever they go, the more conscious we become of what we don’t have, or rather, what we had but never fully received, because we gave more importance to a foreign language and foreign cultures than to our own. That’s part of why we get influenced so quickly by whoever’s culture is loudest at the time: first Indian, then Turkish, now Korean.
What we’re really trying to fill is a gap that can only be filled by finding our own roots.
That realization sent me looking for punjabiyat. It’s a strange kind of irony: I live in Punjab, and I was still rootless, because our collective Punjabiness was shunned and diminished for reasons I won’t repeat here. I’d rather spend my time, energy, and resources moving forward than making a case for the past.
The search for my Punjabi roots is what led me to dedicate my creative work to Punjab and Punjabiness. My fiction, my essays, and in the worldbuilding research that grew out of both, I dedicate it all to my Punjab.
Sonia: The Writer
I write fiction, personal essays, and cultural criticism, most of it circling back to Punjab in one way or another. My work has appeared in Penslips Magazine, The Aleph Review, HumSub, and elsewhere, alongside pieces I publish independently.
Co-Founder
Penslips Magazine
Penslips Magazine was born a decade ago to honor my father’s lifelong legacy of writing fiction, poetry, and criticism. I co-founded it alongside him, and today I handle site management and curation, and contribute my own work as well.
Content and AI-Visibility Strategist
For nearly a decade, I’ve helped brands write and edit content that actually works. These days, that increasingly means making sure it’s legible to AI as well as to people. If that’s what you need, this is where to start.
Punjab and Punjabiness
While researching my own novels and stories set in Punjab, I kept hitting the same wall: there’s no single, reliable place to find the details that make a world set in Punjab feel real. What people ate, what a bazaar looked like, the customs and hierarchies they lived by. AI research couldn’t fill that gap either because Punjab’s history is too layered, too fused across cultures and centuries, to summarize easily.
So I started building the resource I couldn’t find elsewhere. I hope my Punjab worldbuilding series will serve as a reference guide for creators, writers and designers who want their fiction to feel authentically Punjabi, without having to spell it out. I’m still starting, but it’s already the project I care about most.