Amar Singh Chamkila was born at Dugri near Ludhiana on 21 July 1960, into a poor Dalit Sikh family.
His shrine in the village is a small arrangement of laminated newspaper cuttings and photographs beside a rubbish dump. An annual mela on 8 March, the date of his killing, draws hundreds of singers.
Dugri is now inside Ludhiana. The village name survives as the name of an urban colony, which is the ordinary fate of villages absorbed by Punjab's cities.
Between Ludhiana and Mohali, several hundred villages have been taken into urban areas in the last forty years. Their names are on the sector boards and their histories are not recorded anywhere.
A village absorbed into a city keeps its got, its gurdwara and its cremation ground for about a generation, and then keeps only its name.
Chamkila and Amarjot were shot dead at Mehsampur in Jalandhar district on 8 March 1988. He was twenty-seven. Nobody has been convicted.
He came from a Dalit family and worked in a Ludhiana mill before he sang. The class position is part of why the establishment disliked the work and part of why the audience was as large as it was.
The village shrine is kept by his family and by people who come for it. There is no museum, no archive of his recordings held anywhere official, and no complete discography.