r/PunjabIN

I am proud of who I am, but above all I am a human being. I have a name, she knows nothing about me or my ancestors. The thing that bothered me is her stereotyping, before telling anyone even my name. My in laws are from Bathinda and she is married in Amritsar. Moreover even my husband laughs at me saying “ haha bhua called you bhau haha”. I tried to explain to him that this kind of treatment is wrong. But he thinks I am being too touchy about it, that she is married to “bhaus”. Please help me understand, am I wrong ? When you go to punjab you will see in every village that the families from lahore are always forced to build a home outside the premises of that village. And are called lahoriye for generations, isn’t that totally against what our sikhi religion preaches ?

...The word jugni comes from jugnu, a firefly. A small, self-illuminating thing that travels through darkness. The metaphor is so obvious it embarrasses itself: she carries her own light. But what people forget about fireflies is that the light is not free. Every flash is a metabolic event, a tiny expenditure of the body’s resources. The firefly loses a little of itself with every flicker. And nobody thinks about this when they are praising the fireflies.

Jugni also means an ornament. A necklace. A necklace that does not choose who wears it. The necklace also does not decide when it comes off.

Jugni is the light and she is the decoration and she is not, in either version, the one who gets to rest.

In Punjabi folk music, Jugni is a traveler. She arrives in a city and she looks around and she comments on what she finds. She is funny. She is incisive. She notices everything.

Jugni jaa varhi Kalkatte — Jugni arrived in Kolkata. And then she tells you exactly what is wrong with Kolkata, with precision and wit, and there is a refrain, and you laugh, and then something catches in your throat because buried inside the joke was the truth. The children are hungry. The women are helpless. The lips are sewn but the eyes keep weeping.

She delivers tragedy as comedy. This is her gift and it is also her sentence.

She is the one who makes you laugh about the thing you cannot cry about. She holds the community’s grief in the shape of a punchline so that the community can process it without collapsing. She does this at every stop on her route. She arrives, she observes, she makes the unbearable bearable, and then she leaves. She is always leaving. That is the structure of the Jugni verse.

She arrives, she speaks, she goes.

Where does she go? No verse has ever addressed this...

Full Essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/fateyjoote/p/jugni?r=202jha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I am from a family as per people in Punjab/Chandigarh call “refugee”. Who came to India from Pakistan in 1947. Recently got married and my bhua started introducing me to everyone as bhau. I did not find that respectful.

Jugni: A Comedy Awaiting Tragedy.

Who do you know that has an ironic/misleading name? What is their name? 😂