The traditional Punjabi village house was built of mud: walls of kacchi brick or of rammed earth, roofed with beams of tahli or kikar, a layer of sarkanda reed, and mud plaster over it, resurfaced each year before the rains.
It was cool in June and warm in January and it cost nothing but labour. It also washed away in a bad monsoon and needed constant maintenance, and it burned.
Fired brick was for the wealthy and for public buildings. The nanakshahi brick, thin and broad, is the historic Punjabi fired brick and is what the older gurdwaras, serais and forts are built of.
Concrete and modern brick replaced mud almost completely between the 1970s and the 1990s, helped by remittance money and by government housing schemes. The new houses are hotter, and air conditioning is now a standard rural expense.
Very few traditional mud houses survive in Punjab in any condition. The knowledge of how to build one is held by a small number of old men and has not been recorded in Punjabi anywhere accessible.
The plaster was mud mixed with dung and chopped straw, which sets hard, resists cracking and takes a burnished finish. The mix and the proportions differ by district and are held entirely in practice.
The courtyard did the work a modern house asks a machine to do. It moved air at night, held shade through the day, and gave the household an outdoor room that a street-facing plan has no place for.
Concrete replaced it inside two generations. The new houses are hotter, cost a great deal more, and are what a returning migrant builds, which is how the change spread.