Punj /Sharma family Village Lalowal,
Kler Klan, Dhariwal, District Gurdaspur, Punjab
Punjs/Sharmas are Saraswat Brahmins belonging to AANGRAS Gotra. The family surname is PUNJ and the origins of word Punj are not known. However, all Punjs trace their roots to Punjab and generally come from ten odd districts of undevided Punjab and some areas of Jammu & Kashmir – Rawalpindi, Lahore Sailkot, Jammu, Udhampur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiyar Pur, Amritsar, Jallundar and Ludhiana.
While some members of the Lalowal family use PUNJ as a surname, most others add SHARMA to their respective names. SHARMA is an all encompassing term which many Brahmins (irrespective of their surnames) freely use. For the last two generations, one branch of the family has adopted even `MITTER' as a surname.
The Saraswats are a sub group of Brahmins with their origins going to the banks of the erstwhile river Saraswati and they migrated to various parts of northern, western and southern India, after the mighty river dried up a few thousand years back. The community, divided into Kashmiri Pandits, Goud Saraswat, Chitrapur Saraswat, Rajapur Kudaldeshkar Gaud and Kashyap clans, is spread thorugh out the Indian Sub-continent, and neighbouring countries such as Nepal and Burma.
The Saraswat Brahmans are mentioned in the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata and even the Bhavisyottara Purana, deriving their lineage from the great sage Saraswat Muni who lived by the now extinct river Saraswati.
In times of yore, Brahmins worshipped Saraswati, the Goddess of learning. They always chose for their habitat, the fertile banks of the river Saraswati; and the land of their homes was known as Saraswata Desha.
River Saraswati has the reputation of having meandered, not less than five times and the Saraswat Brahmins, followed her until she decided to go underground. This is the reason Saraswats are assigned to several places of origin. Here is a wild guess about the genesis of surname PUNJ. May be it's shortened form of Punjab or corruption of Poonch, one of the remotest districts of Jammu & Kashmir, bounded by the Line of Control (LOC) between Indian and Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
The flow of the Saraswati was in the middle of the Bharatvarsha, comprising present day Haryana, Punjab, present west & south Pakistan, Rajasthsn, Uttar Pradesh & Gujrat. Tragically, the disappearance of the life-giving river led mass migrations in all directions: along the courses of the Ganges and the Yamuna in the east, to Kashmir and Punjab in the north, towards Rajasthan in the west in and, eventually, to Goa, Karnataka and other places in the south.
In the present Uttar Pradesh there are a number of places where we find the Saraswat Brahmins in a big number - right from the Meerut to Allahabad There is an old river called hiee. Now popularly called as Hindon. As per the puranas the Saraswati had its seven branches in all.
One of a branch could be associated to Hiee as it gets the water from the river Song of Dehradun and it is rightly placed in between Yamuna and Ganga. Saraswati origin was above Yamnotri, hence the water of Saraswati could flow right upto Allahabad.At present people don't see the Saraswati there but the fact is that the present Hindon goes right outo Allahabad. Hence the villages of Bulandshehr, Meerut, Aligarh etc have a number of saraswats.
However, the Punjabi Saraswat brahmins had a name in the History on account of their rule called as "The Hindushahi or Brahmanshahi" dynasty. It was laid in the second half of the ninth century by a person called as Kallar. In the late 10 th century,Jayapala became the ruler of the Hindustani Dynasty.
His empire included western Punjab,NWFP,and east Afganistan. Jayapala, Anandpala,Trilochanpala,and Bhim Pala successive rulers of Hindushahi kingdom fought against Muslim rulers of Ghazni. They boldly checked the invasions but failed. Ultimately the Hindustani kingdom was destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in the beginning of 11th century.
It's a settled fact that Punj/Sharma family association with Lalowal village started about 250 years ago when the patriarch of the family, Baba Ratna, moved in there to escape religious persecution at the hands of Muslims.
Baba Ratna was a wrestler, a devi devotee and a man of moderate means who lived happily with his family in a village called Roora, close to Kalanaur in Gurdaspur district. Kalanaur is the place where young Akbar was anointed as the `Badashah' of Hindustan by his tutor Bahram Khan after the sudden demise of his father Humayun in Delhi in 1556 following a fatal accident in the Purana Qila at Delhi.
The village where Baba Ratna lived was dominated by Muslims, the Hindus were in a hopeless minority. On Bakar Eid, the Muslims decided to sacrifice a cow. And to humiliate and hurt the feelings of Hindus, the cow was decorated, and led in a procession followed by beating of drums and provocative slogan shouting by a Muslim mob.
The procession was deliberately stopped outside the modest house of Baba Ratna. This humiliation was too much to bear for the young wrestler who was a devout Hindu. In a frenzy, he picked up a sword and shouting `Jai mata di', pounced upon the Muslim mob, cut free the sacrificial cow from her tether, and killed over half a dozon Muslims.
Besides his strong built, Baba Ratna had an element of surprise in his favour. The panicked mob ran helter skelter. By the time the mob could regroup and plan revenge, Baba Ratna and his close family members had made good their escape. It's said, he first went to Lahore and then relocated his family in Lalowal.
Back in Roora, the family had its Kul Devi called Bua Datti (Punjabi version of Bhoo Devi) and worshiped it in small temple dedicated to it. Years later, when Roora had got over that violent episode, Baba Ratna managed to get some bricks of Kul-Devi temple from there and rebuilt the shrine in his new abode Lalowal using those very bricks. The shrine was rebuilt by the Punj/Sharma family and declared open on November 22, 2004.
The Sharma/Punj clan has since spread all over India and many parts of the world. With the blessing of Bua Datti, they have done well for themselves. Here is a family tree of the family. With the help of family members, we plan to fill in the gaps where they exist in near future.
