Potohari Punjabi of Pakistan

Below are resources related to Stephen M. Lyon's “Potohari Punjabi of Pakistan” chapter of Native Nations: The Survival of Indigenous Peoples, 4th Edition, edited by Sharlotte Neely and Douglas W. Hume.

Agencies & Organizations

Discussion Questions

  • Explain the cultural changes that have occurred among the Punjabi due to external forces on them.
  • Describe the threats to Punjabi cultural survival by outsiders in their recent history.
  • Language is often important in an Indigenous People’s identity. What effect will likely result from the declining use of the Punjabi Potohari dialect?
  • Speculate on what could be done to reverse the decline.

Documentary Films

  • Final Assault
  • Indus Blues
  • It Happens Only in Pakistan
  • Like Children’s Eyes – “A short video about Bhaloti children. This has no dialogue or voice over. It’s a compilation of footage I took in the late 1990s that was put together by a former student of mine (Maria Kastrinou). Maria gets full directing and producing credit—all I did was take video of little kids on demand in the village. She worked as an intern for me over a summer and I have her access to all my video footage to code. Her ‘reward’ (apart from the internship funding) was that she could make short films out of any of the video.” — Stephen Lyon
  • Pakistani Wedding in the Mountains

Further Reading

Contemporary Potohari Punjabi

Potohari Punjabi Preparing Food
Chapati or Roti (known in pothwari asمنڈے) preparation during wedding ceremony in Potohar District Village (Noman1985 [CC BY-SA])

Ethnic Groups of Pakistan

Ethnic Groups of Pakistan Map
Ethnic map of Pakistan (1973) (ArnoldPlaton, .svg based on this map (from UTexas under Public Domain "Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.") [CC0])

Potohari Punjabi Ethno-historical Photograph

Potohari Punjabi Landowner Portrait
Photograph of a Potohari Punjabi landowner in Bhalot village, in the Fateh Jang sub-district of Attock District (then Campbellpur) with his young male relatives. The photo was taken around 1927. (Stephen Lyon, All Rights Reserved)

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