ABSTRACT
The name Punjab is derived from the terms for "five" and "water," referring to the five tributaries which flow out of the Himalayan Mountains and combine to form the Indus River. Settled agriculture based on the cultivation of wheat, barley, chickpeas, and cotton and the domestication of cows, buffalos, and camels evolved in the Indus valley in the third millennium B.C. and provided the agricultural surplus for the development of the urbanized Harappan civilization. In Punjab-Haryana the "dominant agricultural caste" is the Jat jati. The origins of the Jats are obscure, although several nineteenth-century ethnographers speculated that they were originally brought to India in the wake of the Scythian invasions around the beginning of the Christian era. Economic change has brought a steady shift from "custom bound" to "market-related" labor relationships. The effect within the Akali Dal has been to make economic issues "distinctly more salient than considerations of religion.
