Anyone who pictures a Punjabi summer as ripe wheat under a hard blue sky has the season slightly out of order. In the Majha the wheat is cut in April, around Vaisakhi, and by the time the real heat arrives most of it has gone: threshed, bagged, carried off to market. What May leaves behind is stubble and dust, a plain stripped back to its own colour, and a sky that seems to have come lower. Summer here is the interval between two harvests, and for a few weeks very little stands between the sun and the ground.
Punjabi poetry has an old way of walking through a year. The barahmaha, the poem of twelve months, takes the calendar one month at a time and asks what each does to a person who is waiting, usually a woman separated from the one she loves. Two such poems stand in the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Nanak’s, in Raag Tukhari, is nature poetry of extraordinary precision. Guru Arjan’s is in Raag Majh, a raga that shares its name with this region. In both, the spiritual subject is the soul’s separation from the Divine, and the months are its outward weather; that meaning belongs to the poems and to the tradition in which they are sung, and I do not want to borrow it for anything smaller. What I borrow is only the order of the months, and the poems’ conviction that a season is not one thing. Jeth is not Harh. A summer described in a single sentence has not been described.
So this essay goes month by month, through the part of the year when the Majha is hottest, and asks at each stage a question that the picture of golden wheat tends to leave out: whose summer is being described, and from where?
Vaisakh: The Plain Laid Bare #
The Majha is the old Bari Doab, the land between the Ravi and the Beas. Amritsar sits in it, and so does Khadur Sahib, nearer the Beas. It is flat in a way that alters the feeling of distance. There is no hill to stand behind and no valley to hold shade; the horizon is simply the place where the eye gives up. In winter the wheat stands green and low across all of it. In the month of Vaisakh, which runs roughly from the middle of April to the middle of May and opens with the harvest festival, the wheat is cut, and the plain changes colour in a matter of weeks.
The harvest is the part of the year that has been painted and photographed most, and with reason; it is the moment when months of work turn into grain, and the festival that marks it is one of the great communal days of the Punjabi calendar. But the harvest’s beauty also does something to how the rest of the summer is remembered. It is so vivid that it tends to stand in for the whole season, as though the year paused at the golden field and resumed in autumn. What actually follows the harvest is a stretch of bare ground, threshing dust, and heat building day by day toward its peak.
The harvest has also changed in who does it. Across much of Punjab the wheat is now cut and threshed largely by combine harvesters, hired by the day and moving from village to village through April. The labour of the year’s first harvest has, to a great extent, been handed to machines. The labour of the next crop has not. Rice is still mostly transplanted by hand, seedling by seedling, into flooded fields, and that work falls in the hottest weeks of the year. The calendar of mechanisation, in other words, has shifted the summer’s hardest physical work toward June, which is exactly where the heat is worst.
I grew up in Amritsar, and my family’s roots are in Khadur Sahib, so this is the plain of my upbringing and my ancestry. I want to be precise about what that entitles me to say. It entitles me to describe the region’s seasons as anyone raised there knows them in general: the heat, the wind, the canals, the turn of the crops. It does not entitle me to the field-level knowledge of the people who farm it and work it, and much of what follows depends on their testimony, where it has been recorded, and on public records where it has not.
Jeth: The Loo #
The month of Jeth, from the middle of May to the middle of June, is the hottest stretch of the Majha’s year. In the India Meteorological Department’s climate tables for Amritsar, the average daily high is 39.4°C in May, about 103°F, and only slightly lower in June. On 23 May 2013 the city recorded 48.0°C, about 118°F. The air is dry as well as hot. In the same tables, average relative humidity at half past five in the afternoon is about a quarter in May.
The afternoon wind has its own name. The loo, ਲੂ, is the hot, dry wind of the north Indian summer before the monsoon, and in Punjabi, as in Hindi, the same word turns up in the everyday phrase for being struck down by heat. As a physician I admire the economy of that. A language that keeps the weather and the illness in one syllable has been paying attention to what weather does to people. Some evenings the wind brings dust ahead of the rains, browning the light for an hour and then leaving the heat exactly where it was.
In a landscape this flat, Jeth turns shade from an amenity into a location. It is the near side of a wall, the reach of a single tree, the interior of a room with thick walls and closed shutters. The working day bends around it, starting early, finishing late, and giving up the worst of the afternoon to whoever is able to give it up.
Guru Nanak’s barahmaha reaches Jeth in its seventh stanza, and the image it uses for the month is the one anyone who has stood on that plain would choose. In Sant Singh Khalsa’s English the earth burns like a furnace; the Punjabi word is the one for a kiln. Professor Sahib Singh, in his commentary, glosses the line by saying that in Jeth, when the hot winds blow, the land heats like a kiln, and he names the winds with the same word, the loo. The stanza’s subject is the soul-bride’s prayer in that heat, and its meaning lies there. But it is worth noticing that a poem about the longing of the soul begins its summer with a piece of exact meteorology. The Guru’s furnace is a figure. It is also a description that the Majha’s farmers would recognise in any year.
A Plain Made by Water #
Water is the organising fact of the plain, and it comes in three forms that are easy to run together and important to keep apart: rivers, canals and groundwater. The first is geography. The second is history. The third, increasingly, is arithmetic.
The rivers made the doab. The Ravi to the north-west and the Beas to the south-east bound the Majha, and their silt is the soil it is farmed on. But rivers on their own water only the land near them. What turned the whole interfluve into a farmed plain was the canal.
The Upper Bari Doab Canal has a longer history than its name suggests. Under the emperor Shah Jahan, a channel known as the Hasli canal was dug to carry water from the Ravi at Madhopur to the gardens of Lahore. After the British annexed the Punjab in 1849 they rebuilt and extended the system, and the new canals were opened in 1859 to irrigate the districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Lahore; the headworks at Madhopur were added in the later 1870s. The canal divides as it goes into smaller channels that run between the fields, often with a line of trees along the bank. Partition in 1947 drew a border across the land it watered, and under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 India received the use of the Ravi’s waters; the part of the old network that lies in Pakistan now draws instead on the Chenab. A canal dug to water a Mughal garden in Lahore ends, on its Indian side, at a frontier.
Beneath and between the canals are the tube wells, drawing on the groundwater, and here the arithmetic begins. India’s Central Ground Water Board regularly assesses how much groundwater each state recharges in a year and how much it extracts. In the assessment published at the end of 2024, Punjab’s extraction stood at 156 per cent of the extractable annual resource, the highest proportion of any state in the country. The canal is the old answer to the Majha’s summer and the tube well the newer one. In the hottest weeks the plain leans on both, and the second is being drawn down faster than the rain puts it back.
This matters to the summer in a direct way, because the crop that follows the wheat is the thirstiest of the year.
Harh: Water on the Fields #
The month of Harh, from the middle of June to the middle of July, is the month of rice. For a few weeks the fields that were bare stubble in May stand flooded, and the young plants go in by hand, row after row, into standing water.
The day on which the plain turns to water is set, in part, by law. The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, passed in 2009 to slow the fall of the water table, forbids sowing a rice nursery before the tenth of May and transplanting before a date the state government notifies. The intention was to push the thirstiest weeks of the crop toward the monsoon, so that it would draw more on the rain and less on the ground beneath it. Each year the government sets the dates. In 2025, as The Tribune reported that April, transplanting opened on the first of June in five south-western districts, on the fifth in a second zone that included Amritsar and Tarn Taran, and on the ninth everywhere else; direct sowing of rice, which skips the nursery and the flooded transplanting, was permitted in the second half of May. The state has for some years offered farmers an incentive, reported in 2024 as fifteen hundred rupees an acre, to sow directly instead of transplanting, which uses less water and less labour. Many farmers have hesitated, citing weeds and, in some reports, lower yields.
The calendar, in other words, has institutions inside it. When a person remembers the rice coming in, he is remembering, without knowing it, a gazette notification, a groundwater assessment, a debate among agricultural scientists, and a set of compromises among farmers, unions and the state. The interaction does not end with the rice. A later transplanting means a later harvest in autumn and less time to clear the fields before the wheat goes in again, and that squeeze has been widely blamed for the burning of crop residue that fills the region’s skies each October and November. The link is contested; the season is a system, and a change at one end of it is felt at the other.
Much of the transplanting is done by labourers who travel from other states for the season. Their work is paid largely by the acre. In June 2026, ETV Bharat reported from the railway junction at Bathinda that fewer migrant workers than usual were arriving, in heat that had delayed transplanting across the state; it recorded that a team might plant up to three acres a day and stay about a month, that the rate had risen from about 4,300 rupees an acre the previous year to between 5,000 and 5,500, with food and lodging extra, and that one labourer, explaining the increase, said that inflation was rising day by day. A year earlier, in June 2025, The Tribune had described the same pattern from Patiala, quoting a farmer who said that in those crucial weeks “these migrant workers are treated like wedding guests.”
That remark is worth reading twice. It is generous, and it is a farmer’s sentence, spoken from the farmer’s side of the arrangement. The guest is welcome because he is scarce and because the season cannot wait for him. The worker’s own account of being a guest of that kind is a different sentence, and it is rarely the one that gets printed.
Guru Nanak’s stanza for this month, Asarh, as the poem names it, opens with the sun blazing in the sky and the earth suffering, parched as if by fire. Then comes the line I find most arresting in the whole poem. Even so, the sun does not give up its task; its chariot keeps on its round. The soul-bride looks for shade, and the cricket calls from the open pasture. In the poem, during the hottest month, every creature seeks shelter, and the only one who goes on working is the sun. Again the meaning is spiritual: the heat of Asarh is an image of the soul’s condition, and the shade it seeks is of another kind. But I cannot read that line without thinking of the transplanting, which happens in exactly those weeks and does not stop for the afternoon.
The Changing Meaning of Heat #
A physician cannot help adding the physiology, and here the physiology changes the meaning of the season.
The body sheds heat in several ways, but in hot weather it depends above all on sweating, and sweat cools only when it evaporates. In the dry heat of Jeth, evaporation is easy, and a person who has water and some shade can stay ahead of the heat for a long time. Then the season turns. In Amritsar’s climate tables, average afternoon humidity rises from about a quarter in May to about two-fifths in June and nearly two-thirds in July. The thermometer may read several degrees lower in July than in May. The air, however, is fuller of water, evaporation slows, and the body’s principal defence begins to fail at temperatures it managed a month earlier. Occupational medicine measures this with indices such as the wet-bulb globe temperature, which combine air temperature with humidity, sunlight and wind precisely because temperature alone does not describe what heat does to a working body.
The body can adapt, within limits, and the limits matter. Over a week or two of working in heat, a person begins to sweat earlier and more freely, loses less salt in the sweat, carries a larger volume of blood, and works at a lower heart rate for the same effort. This is acclimatisation, and it is real protection. It is also slow to build, it fades after time away from the heat, and it does not abolish the physics: when the air is humid enough, an acclimatised body sweats more and still cannot lose the heat, because the sweat no longer evaporates. Adaptation buys a margin. It does not buy immunity, and the margin is narrowest exactly when Harh’s humidity meets Harh’s work.
Now add the posture of the work. A person transplanting rice is bent over standing water, often for hours, under a sun that the water reflects back from below. Exertion produces heat inside the body at the same time as the air outside is making it harder to lose. The work is paid by the acre, so a pause costs money. The combination is very nearly the hardest the season can arrange: high heat, rising humidity, heavy exertion, little shade, and an incentive not to stop.
The people inside it have described it more briefly. In June 2025 The Tribune reported from Amritsar that farm workers were carrying on with transplanting through a heat wave, bending, kneeling and wading through muddy fields, complaining of headaches, tiredness and dehydration, and feeling that they could not take breaks because delays would cut into their earnings. A labourer named in the report, Sarabjit Singh, said: “It’s like working in a furnace.”
There, across five centuries, are two furnaces. One is in a poem about the longing of the soul, where the burning earth is a figure for separation. The other is in a newspaper, in the mouth of a man describing his working day. They should not be merged; the first is not a prophecy of the second, and the second is not a gloss on the first. But they agree on the image, and the agreement is a small reminder that a region’s poetry and its labour have been looking at the same sky.
Who Can Stop Working #
A weather report assigns one temperature to a town. A day in that town distributes it very unevenly.
Consider, as an imagined illustration and not as a remembered day, a single afternoon in Harh on the edge of a Majha town. Someone walks from a building to a vehicle and is in the full heat for perhaps two minutes. Someone else sits in a room where the fan stops each time the power fails, and the room grows slowly hotter through the afternoon. Someone stands at a stove making the evening meal for a household, in a kitchen that is the hottest room in the house. And someone is bent over a flooded field, paid by the acre, with three acres still to go before evening. The thermometer records one number for all of them. It does not record the most important difference, which is not in the heat at all but in the freedom to leave it.
That is the question a remembered summer tends to skip. A memory of a Punjabi afternoon may be accurate in every sensory detail, the glare, the wind, the relief of a cold drink, and still be incomplete as an account of the afternoon itself, because the person remembering was seeing it from somewhere. Summer seen from a verandah and summer spent in a field are different seasons that happen to share a calendar, and the word beautiful can be true of the first while saying almost nothing about the second. The correction is not to distrust every pleasant memory. It is to locate it. From where was the season being seen? What shelter made the view possible? Who controlled the hour at which work could stop?
English literature contains an exact instance of this problem, and of its correction, and it is instructive because the correction came from below. In 1730 Stephen Duck, an English agricultural labourer, wrote “The Thresher’s Labour,” a poem about harvest and threshing written by a man who did the work: its sweat, its dust, its suffocating smoke, its tedium. It was a rebuke to the pastoral convention in which country labour is a song. Yet Duck’s poem has its own blind spot. It pictures the men coming home so black with dust that they frighten their wives, who have spent the day at home, and it implies that the women’s part in the harvest was slight. In 1739 Mary Collier, a washerwoman from Petersfield in Hampshire, answered him in “The Woman’s Labour,” an epistle to Mr Stephen Duck, insisting that women worked in the fields beside the men and then worked again at home after the men had stopped. The labourer-poet had left someone out. The one who corrected him was the person he had omitted.
The story is a warning to an essay like this one. I have tried to put the workers back into the picture of the Majha’s summer, and in doing so I have necessarily spoken for them, from a distance, using reports in which their own words are scarce. The voices I have been able to quote are few, they reach me filtered through reporters’ notebooks, and one of the most vivid belongs to a farmer, not a labourer; none belongs to the women who do the cooking and carrying through the same heat. The honest response is not to stop describing the work. It is to say plainly whose testimony one has and whose one lacks, to quote the workers where they have been quoted, and to avoid turning their hardship into the whole of their identity, or the whole of Punjab’s. The people who transplant rice in the Majha in June have lives, skills, plans and opinions that the heat does not exhaust, and a distant essayist does them no service by seeing them only as sufferers.
Sawan: The Rains #
Then, usually some time in late June or early July, the monsoon reaches the Majha, and the month of Sawan belongs to it. In Amritsar the rains come in earnest in July and August, each of which brings, on the long-term average, something like 170 to 180 millimetres. The dust settles. The canals run high. The relief is real, and it is felt in the body before it is understood: the first heavy rain after Jeth is one of the great physical pleasures of a Punjabi year, and Sawan is the month of swings hung from trees and of Teeyan, the festival of women’s songs and gatherings.
The two barahmahas in the Guru Granth Sahib treat the month differently, and the difference is instructive. In Guru Nanak’s poem, Sawan brings the rain, the clouds bursting into showers, and with them lightning that frightens and a bed that remains lonely, because the beloved has not come home; the season’s abundance sharpens the absence. In Guru Arjan’s, Sawan is a month of happiness for the soul that has fallen in love with the Lord. Within the tradition both are statements about the soul. Read as a record of how people experience a season, they say something that a picture of monsoon greenery does not: that the same weather arrives differently depending on the condition of the one it falls on.
For the rice, Sawan is a month of tending, not rest. The water has to be managed, the weeds kept down, the bunds repaired when the rain breaks them. For the body, the monsoon changes the texture of the heat without removing it, from the dry blast of May to a damp, close warmth that hangs over the fields for weeks. And in some years the rivers that made the plain rise over it. By the end of the monsoon, the plain that was bare stubble in May is green to the horizon. That green, too, is somebody’s work.
Two Irrigated Plains #
I now practise in another flat, irrigated plain whose summers are no gentler. Fresno sits in the San Joaquin Valley, where canals carry water from distant rivers to orchards and vineyards. The National Weather Service’s records for the city, going back to the late nineteenth century, show no year with fewer than fifteen days at or above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and as many as sixty-nine in 2021.
The two plains share more than heat and canals. Both have, within the last two decades, legislated against the depletion of their groundwater: Punjab with its 2009 Act, California with its Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, which requires local agencies to bring their basins into balance over the following decades. And the connection between them is older than any comparison of statutes. In 1912 Punjabi immigrants, many of them farmers, founded the first Sikh gurdwara in the United States at Stockton, at the northern end of the same great valley; one of its founders, Jawala Singh, was known as the Potato King for his success with that crop. Punjabi knowledge of irrigated farming crossed the Pacific more than a century ago and has been at work in the Central Valley ever since.
The rules about heat are where the comparison has to be made most carefully. California adopted the country’s first standard for preventing heat illness among outdoor workers, in emergency form in 2005 and permanently in 2006. As it now stands in Title 8, section 3395 of the state’s regulations, it requires shade to be present whenever the temperature exceeds 80°F, enough drinking water for one quart per employee per hour, close observation of newly assigned workers for their first fourteen days in high heat, and, at 95°F and above, high-heat procedures; for agricultural employers it adds a preventive cool-down rest of at least ten minutes every two hours. Each of those provisions encodes a piece of physiology: that acclimatisation takes days, that water must be replaced as it is lost, that rest is a medical measure and not a favour.
It would be easy to turn this into a lesson, and wrong. The climates differ: Fresno’s summer is dry, with almost no rain, while the Majha’s turns humid when the monsoon arrives, which changes what heat does to the body. Dry heat has its own deceptions. Because sweat evaporates almost as fast as it forms, a person working in a Central Valley August may not feel especially wet, and may not notice how much water is leaving the body until thirst, fatigue or a headache announces it. Humid heat is harder on the body’s cooling; dry heat is quieter about the cost. Neither is gentle. The crops differ, the systems of employment differ, and so do the institutions that write and enforce rules. A standard on paper is not the same thing as conditions in a field, in either country, and I have no evidence from which to say how either standard is observed on any particular afternoon. Nor would it be fair to measure one region’s agriculture by another’s regulations without understanding the economics each farmer faces. What the comparison can honestly do is smaller. It shows that the hazards of heat to working bodies can be named precisely, that a society can decide to write some of that precision into rules, and that the decision is a choice, not a fact of nature. Each plain makes the other a little easier to see.
Nostalgia’s Missing Person #
There is a reason the labourer drops out of the remembered landscape, and English poetry supplies the most beautiful example I know of how it happens.
On 21 September 1819, John Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds from Winchester. “I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now,” he said, “Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.” What he composed was “To Autumn,” and it is one of the most perfect poems in the language. Its second stanza personifies the season as a figure seen about the farm: “sitting careless on a granary floor,” or “on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, / Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook / Spares the next swath.” The reaping is half done. The reaper is asleep.
Keats had trained at Guy’s Hospital; he knew the body as a medical student comes to know it. The poem is not careless about labour. It does something subtler: it transfers the labour to a goddess, who can be drowsy without consequence, and who leaves the next swath standing out of something like mercy. In the third stanza the clouds of the dying day touch the stubble-plains “with rosy hue.” And the letter tells us how the poem saw it. The stubble looks warm, the way some pictures look warm. The pastoral is a way of seeing a field as a picture.
A Majha stubble plain in May does not look warm. It is hot, and the difference between looking and being is the difference between the person who walks past on a Sunday and the person who threshed the grain. I do not hold this against Keats, whose poem asks nothing of anyone except attention and repays it endlessly. I hold it against a habit of mind that the pastoral makes easy, in any language: the habit of letting a landscape’s beauty stand in for the experience of those who make it.
Here the Punjabi barahmaha offers a useful contrast, and I offer it as a literary observation only. Guru Nanak’s poem does not prettify the rains. When it reaches Bhadon, the last month of the monsoon, the lakes and fields are overflowing, the frogs and peacocks call through the night, snakes move about biting, and mosquitoes sting. Within the poem those discomforts are the outward weather of a soul’s distress, and the stanza ends in a resolve to go and ask the Guru. But the details are there. The poem keeps the mosquitoes. Whatever else it is doing, it does not let the season become a picture.
A Place Beyond the Essay #
What a plain does best, for someone who lives far from it, is restore proportion. A professional day narrows the field of vision to the next room, the next decision, the next piece of work that appears to depend entirely on me. A region has another scale. It was not organised around anyone’s ambitions. The Majha in summer goes about its business, wheat sold, rice planted, canals running, monsoon awaited, with perfect indifference to anyone’s career, and there is real relief in remembering that.
But proportion has a second meaning that the first can hide. The plain is larger than my use of it, and it is also larger than my memory of it. It contains the farmer reading the gazette notification to see when his zone may transplant, the labourer counting acres against the hours of daylight, the woman at the stove in the hottest room of the house, the agricultural scientist arguing for direct sowing, the hydrologist entering another year’s figures in a groundwater table that keeps falling. None of them needs an essayist in California to make sense of their summer. If an essay can do anything for them, it is to refuse to make their season into scenery.
What, then, does affection for a landscape owe? I have come to think it owes something like what a careful history owes a patient. It owes accuracy about the calendar: the wheat gone by May, the rice in by June, the date set by a gazette, the rain arriving late or early. It owes attention to mechanism, to the canals and the aquifer and the physiology of a body bent over water, because sentiment without mechanism cannot tell a hardship from a picture. And it owes a statement of its own vantage point. A remembered summer is a view from somewhere, and the honest memoirist says where he was standing, what shelter made the view possible, and whose afternoon he was not able to see. That is not a diminished kind of love for a place. It is the kind that gives affection a physical address.
There is a standing temptation, once a landscape enters a personal essay, to make it teach something. The canal must become a metaphor and the shade a lesson. I have tried to let some of it remain itself. A canal carries water before it carries symbolism. A field requires labour before it becomes evidence of abundance. The Upper Bari Doab Canal has been carrying the Ravi’s water toward Amritsar since 1859, and it will be doing so next June, when the gazette has named the day, the fields flood again, and the transplanting begins, whether or not anybody is writing about it.
In Guru Nanak’s poem, through the worst of Asarh, the sun does not give up its task. Neither, next June, will the people bent over the water. The least that someone who grew up on that plain can do, from the far side of the world, is to remember that they are there, and to describe the season in a way that leaves room for them.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography: family roots in Khadur Sahib, upbringing in Amritsar, practice in California since 2010 with Fresno as home base. The Majha as the Bari Doab between the Ravi and the Beas; the wheat harvest in April around Vaisakhi and its wide mechanisation by combine harvesters; the largely manual transplanting of rice; the approximate spans of the Punjabi months; Teeyan in Sawan; the barahmaha as a poetic form of the twelve months: standard reference sources and general knowledge of the region. Guru Nanak’s barahmaha in Raag Tukhari (Ang 1107–1110), including the stanzas for Jeth (the earth burning like a furnace), Asarh (the blazing sun that does not give up its task, the search for shade, the cricket in the open pasture), Sawan (rain, lightning, the lonely bed) and Bhadon (overflowing lakes and fields, frogs, peacocks, snakes, mosquitoes, the resolve to ask the Guru), and Guru Arjan’s barahmaha in Raag Majh (Ang 133–136), including its Sawan stanza: SriGranth.org with the translations of Sant Singh Khalsa and Manmohan Singh and Professor Sahib Singh’s commentary, which glosses the Jeth image as a kiln and refers to the loo (described, not quoted). Amritsar’s average daily high of 39.4°C in May, July and August rainfall (181.6 and 168.9 millimetres) and afternoon relative humidity (26, 40 and 65 per cent in May, June and July): India Meteorological Department climatological tables as compiled in standard reference sources; the record of 48.0°C on 23 May 2013: India Meteorological Department records as given in standard reference sources. The Hasli canal under Shah Jahan, the opening of the Upper Bari Doab Canal in 1859 for Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Lahore districts, the Madhopur headworks of 1875–1879, and the post-Partition position under the Indus Waters Treaty: standard reference sources on the Madhopur Headworks, and The Tribune, 31 March 2023, on the canal’s Mughal origin. Punjab’s groundwater extraction at 156 per cent in the Central Ground Water Board’s 2024 assessment, the highest in India: ThePrint, 24 January 2025. The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 (nursery not before 10 May; transplanting not before a notified date; penalties): the Act as published on India Code, and ThePrint, 9 November 2023, which also describes the contested link to residue burning. The 2025 zone-wise transplanting dates and the window for direct sowing: The Tribune, 24 April 2025. The direct-seeding incentive of Rs 1,500 per acre and farmers’ hesitations: The Tribune, 7 June 2024. Migrant labour, acreage rates and arrivals in June 2026: ETV Bharat, 11 June 2026. The farmer’s remark about “wedding guests”: The Tribune, “Heatwave slows down paddy sowing,” 14 June 2025. Workers in Amritsar during the June 2025 heat wave and Sarabjit Singh’s words: The Tribune, 12 June 2025. Evaporative cooling, the effect of humidity on heat loss, acclimatisation, and the wet-bulb globe temperature: standard physiology and occupational health. Fresno’s minimum of fifteen days at or above 100°F (1956) and maximum of sixty-nine (2021): National Weather Service, Hanford office, “Number of Days at Fresno.” California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014: the Legislative Analyst’s Office overview (2017). The Stockton Gurdwara of 1912, the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society and Jawala Singh: the University of California, Davis, Punjabi diaspora collection. California’s heat illness standard as the first in the country (emergency rules 2005, permanent standard 2006): Cal/OSHA statements reported by Insurance Journal, June 2006; its present requirements: Title 8, California Code of Regulations, section 3395, as published by the Legal Information Institute. Stephen Duck, “The Thresher’s Labour” (1730), and Mary Collier’s reply: standard reference sources; Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck (London, 1739): the Women’s Print History Project. Keats’s letter to J. H. Reynolds of 21 September 1819: the University of Victoria’s Keats letters edition; “To Autumn”: Keats: Poems Published in 1820 (Project Gutenberg). Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s roots in Khadur Sahib and upbringing in Amritsar are his published biography. No specific remembered summer, route, harvest, family ritual, conversation or trip is described, and the author claims no first-hand observation of the workers discussed; their circumstances are taken from the published reports named above. The afternoon in Harh in the section “Who Can Stop Working” is explicitly imagined and illustrative; it does not describe a real day or real people. The barahmaha poems are described within their meaning in Sikh tradition, and the essay’s use of their seasonal imagery is distinguished from that meaning.
Analysis and forecast. The month-by-month frame, the readings of the barahmaha, Duck, Collier and Keats, the remarks on mechanisation shifting summer labour toward transplanting, the comparison between the Majha and the San Joaquin Valley, and the remarks on unequal exposure to heat are personal interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.