Before the tubewell there was the khoo, the open well, and the halt, the Persian wheel, turned by bullocks walking a circle.
The switch is dated and measurable. Extraction wells in Punjab went from 192,000 in 1970-71 to 1.38 million in 2011-12. Canal irrigation fell from 58.4 per cent of irrigated area to 28 per cent, while tubewell irrigation rose from 41.1 to 71.3 per cent. About 79 per cent of blocks are now classified over-exploited, and in 18 of 22 districts the water table fell more than a metre a year between 1998 and 2018.
Every abandoned khoo and rusted halt in a Punjabi field is a dated artefact of that transition.
The people who remember whose bullocks turned which wheel, and what the water tasted like, are in their seventies and eighties. Almost nothing about the khoo as material culture exists in English online. It is one of the largest genuinely open fields in this whole project.
The Persian wheel is a chain of pots on a belt turned by a bullock through wooden gearing, lifting water continuously from the well into a channel. It was the irrigation of the Punjab before the tubewell.
A khoo served several families and the turns at it were arranged the way canal turns are. The masonry well was the largest capital asset a village group owned.
Almost all of them are abandoned. The wooden gearing went first and the pots are collected now as decoration.