Jalandhar

In the 1880s, a British officer in Sialkot asked a local craftsman to repair a punctured football. The cobbler figured out the stitching, and by the 1940s Sialkot was manufacturing sports equipment for the British Empire. Then Partition split Punjab in two. In August 1947, Hindu and Sikh craftsmen from Sialkot crossed the new border carrying their trade knowledge to Jalandhar, a city whose district went from 45 percent Muslim to nearly zero in a matter of weeks. This was horizontal gene transfer at civilizational scale: an entire industrial genome—leather cutting, rubber moulding, hand-stitching techniques perfected over six decades—was transplanted from one city to another overnight. The founder effects still shape the economy. Jalandhar and nearby Meerut now produce roughly 75 to 80 percent of India's sports goods, an industry built almost entirely by refugee entrepreneurs and their descendants.

The transplanted cluster operates like a weaver bird colony—over 3,000 manufacturing units packed into a single city, each specializing in a niche but collectively producing everything from footballs to cricket bats. About 60 percent of output is inflatable balls stitched by hand, the same technique the Sialkot craftsman reverse-engineered from a British football. India's sports goods exports exceed $500 million annually, with Punjab accounting for roughly 38 percent. Meanwhile, Sialkot produces up to 70 percent of the world's hand-stitched soccer balls, including official FIFA World Cup match balls. The two cities are a textbook case of speciation: a single ancestral craft population separated by a geographic barrier, each evolving along parallel but independent lines. Jalandhar makes India's sports equipment. Sialkot makes the world's.

But Jalandhar's defining resource flow runs in a different direction entirely. The city sits in the Doaba—Persian for 'land between two waters'—the fertile strip between the Beas and Sutlej rivers. The Doaba is also India's most prolific emigration corridor, with over two million Punjabis from this region living in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The source-sink dynamics are stark: people flow out, remittances flow back in. India receives over $125 billion in annual remittances—the highest of any country—and Punjab is among the top receiving states. Entire villages in the Doaba function as remittance economies where overseas relatives are the primary income source. The city that manufactures sports goods for the world also exports its people to the world, and the people send back more money than the goods earn.

Jalandhar's phase transition in 1947 was not just demographic but institutional. It served as the administrative capital of East Punjab from 1947 to 1953, before Chandigarh was purpose-built to replace it. It became Punjab's media capital—the headquarters of Punjab Kesari, Daily Ajit, and Jag Bani. Punjab Kesari's founder Lala Jagat Narain and his son Romesh Chander were both assassinated during the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s. The city named after a Puranic demon king, mentioned in the Mahabharata as the Trigarta kingdom, has been continuously inhabited since at least the second century. Its modern identity, though, is entirely a product of 1947: a city rebuilt by refugees who brought their tools, their techniques, and their ambition across a line drawn by a British lawyer who had never visited India.