Limits of hospitality

Though I come from a Kashmiri family, I was born in Lahore, and have spent much of my life among Punjabis, at home and across the diaspora, in Lahore’s drawing rooms and in the Gulf and Western cities where the community has rebuilt itself far from the soil that shaped it.

Wherever I have gone, one phrase has followed me more faithfully than any other – ‘Jee Aaya Noon’. It is usually translated simply as ‘Welcome’, but that hardly conveys its warmth. The phrase does not merely acknowledge that someone has arrived; it celebrates the arrival, telling the guest that their presence matters and that they are received almost as family.

‘Jee Aaya Noon’ is more than a greeting; it represents an entire social code built around generosity, food, and human connection. Yet the history behind this welcoming instinct also carries a more complicated lesson. Punjab’s openness has produced extraordinary hospitality, but centuries of absorbing travellers, invaders and changing rulers may also have encouraged a tendency to accommodate power rather than challenge it.

Punjab has long been a meeting point of civilisations, sitting between Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and the Subcontinent. Its roads, rivers and fertile plains made it prosperous and exposed. In such a landscape, welcoming the stranger was not mere politeness; it was bound up with survival, religion and social honour. A visitor was expected to be seated, given water and food before being asked the purpose of their visit.

This tradition was reinforced by spiritual and cultural forces. Sufi shrines welcomed pilgrims, wanderers and the poor without discrimination, and Punjabi Sufi poetry emphasised love, humility, and the breaking down of social barriers. The Sikh institution of langar carried this further, turning hospitality into a civic duty. Rural life reinforced the same values: joint families, open courtyards, and communal wells meant there was usually room for one more.

‘Jee Aaya Noon’ grew naturally out of this environment. No record identifies who first used it; like most folk expressions, it developed through everyday speech in homes, fields and marketplaces, which is precisely why its emotional strength never belonged to a court, ruler or poet. It belonged to ordinary Punjabis. Over time it crossed social and religious lines, spoken at weddings and gatherings, and later carried into films, songs, tourism campaigns and welcome signs.

Partition divided Punjab politically in 1947 but could not divide its cultural memory. In Pakistani Punjab, the phrase remained just as familiar, carried forward by its Muslim majority and by the Sikh, Hindu and Christian communities who remained. Today it is heard not only in Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and Sialkot, but in London, Toronto, Vancouver and Dubai, where it serves migrants as a compact declaration of identity, a reminder of home, family and shared meals.

That said, the deeper history of Punjab invites a more critical question. The same region that repeatedly welcomed travellers also repeatedly absorbed invading armies and new ruling orders: ancient incursions, Turkic and Afghan invasions, Mughal rule, Sikh power and British colonialism. Punjabis resisted many of these forces with real courage: the Anglo-Sikh wars, the struggles of Guru Gobind Singh and Banda Singh Bahadur, the Ghadar movement, Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary politics, and later farmers’ movements all show that Punjabis have never been naturally passive.

Still, resistance was often followed by accommodation once a new power became established, a pattern shaped less by weakness than by geography and economic necessity. Punjab’s flat plains offered little cover for prolonged guerrilla resistance, and its farmers could not simply disappear into mountains when rulers changed. Accommodation, in these circumstances, was often a practical survival strategy rather than a moral failing.

Over generations, though, this pattern may have shaped wider political behaviour: the strength of patronage networks, biradari politics, and reliance on sifarish rather than institutions. It may also explain why frustration over inflation, unemployment or poor governance rarely translates into sustained collective action; people more often respond through private coping: family support, migration or quiet adjustment.

This likely reflects a learned caution that confronting concentrated power carries real risk, from job loss to family instability, pushing people toward endurance rather than open confrontation. Yet this reticence has limits: when threats become existential, mobilisation follows swiftly. The Pagri Sambhal Jatta movement of 1907 remains the clearest case, when farmers in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) resisted colonial land and water laws until they were withdrawn.

What is striking is how rarely that pattern has repeated since. Partition in 1947 was, in many ways, the last event of truly existential scale that Punjab faced as a mobilised community. In the decades after, Punjab absorbed one shock after another: wars, floods, economic crises, political instability, yet none produced anything resembling organised resistance. Why a province so capable of collective action in defence of its land has since been so consistent in absorbing rather than resisting hardship is a question worth closer reflection.

The challenge for modern Punjab, and Pakistan more broadly, is to preserve the warmth of its welcome without letting hospitality become submission, or accommodation replace civic courage. ‘Jee Aaya Noon’ should keep standing for generosity and dignity, but a people who have built langars, sheltered strangers and sustained a year-long land movement clearly possess civic courage. What is needed now is the confidence to carry that same courage from moments of crisis into everyday accountability.

This responsibility rests on Punjab with particular weight. As Pakistan’s largest and most powerful province, by population, political representation and economic weight, Punjab does not simply reflect the country’s habits; it sets them. Because of this influence, Punjabis must show what it looks like to welcome guests wholeheartedly while still insisting that power, wherever it resides, knows its limits.

The writer is a former global corporate executive (Unilever, PepsiCo, Yum! Brands), a mental health advocate and a founding board member of Taskeen, a pioneering organisation focused on emotional well-being in Pakistan.