This project began from a straightforward observation: that the things people in Punjab know about their own places are almost entirely unwritten, and that the things written about Punjab are almost entirely about six subjects.
Everything on this site is an attempt at the gap between those two facts. It is desk research, done from published sources, and it says so on every page.
The most useful part of any page here is the section headed what we don't know. That is where the work is.
The map is an argument as much as a tool: that a place is understood better in the company of the places around it and of the years before it than on its own.
The village pages are mostly empty. That is not a failure of the project. The census counts about twelve and a half thousand villages in Punjab and almost none of them has an account anywhere that a person can read, and putting up ten thousand empty pages is a way of stating the size of the problem precisely.
Anyone can fill one. That was the point of building it.
Everything here was written from a distance, from published sources, by somebody who has not stood in most of these places.
That is stated on the pages that need it and it is the limitation of the whole thing. It is also the reason the site is built to be corrected rather than to be finished.
The next version of any of this should be written by somebody who lives there. Until it is, this is what there is.