Christians are around one and a half to two per cent of Pakistani Punjab's population, upwards of two million people, and a smaller community in Indian Punjab. Almost all are Punjabi-speaking and almost all descend from conversions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Those conversions were overwhelmingly from the Chuhra community, the sweeper caste, in what missionaries called a mass movement: from the 1870s onward whole villages and extended families converted together, principally in the Sialkot, Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Lahore districts.
The reason was not doctrinal in the first instance. It was that conversion offered schooling, medical care and a route out of a caste position with no exit, and the missions provided all three.
The caste position largely followed them. Punjabi Christians in Pakistan are still concentrated in sanitation work and remain among the poorest and most vulnerable communities there, subject to blasphemy accusations and to episodes of mob violence including the Gojra attacks of 2009 and the Jaranwala attacks of 2023.
In Indian Punjab, Christian numbers have grown recently through a substantial and largely undocumented movement of independent evangelical churches, particularly in the Majha and Doaba.
The largest religious conversion movement in Punjab's modern history involved hundreds of thousands of people and is absent from almost every account of the province.
The Sialkot Convention, held every year from 1904, and the mission presses at Ludhiana and Lahore produced a body of Punjabi Christian hymnody, the Zabur, psalms set to Punjabi metres and sung to the dholak. It is a genuinely Punjabi devotional literature and it is unknown outside the community that sings it.
The Church of Pakistan and the Church of North India each hold property that was mission property and both have spent decades in litigation over it. Schools and hospitals built by the missions have been taken over, returned and disputed again on both sides of the border.
There is no history of this community written from inside it in Punjabi. What exists is the mission record, written by the people doing the converting, and a small academic literature. Two million people have their account of themselves kept by somebody else.