The Ghadar generation came back deliberately, in 1914 and 1915, to raise a rising, and were hanged or transported for it.
The generations since have mostly not come back. Return migration to Punjab is small and is concentrated in retirement and in property disputes.
The annual visit is the standard form: a family arrives in the winter, opens the house, holds an event at the gurdwara, attends a wedding, deals with the land, and leaves.
Property litigation between resident and non-resident relatives is a large category of civil case in Punjab, and the NRI police wings and special courts exist because of it.
There is a documented phenomenon of abandoned wives: women married to men from abroad who leave and do not sponsor them, and Punjab has legal machinery specifically for this.
The relationship between a Doaba village and its diaspora is close, constant and asymmetric, and it has been running for four generations.
The retirement return is a distinct pattern: a couple who worked forty years abroad build a house in the village and split the year between it and their children's country.
Those houses stand closed for most of the year and are looked after by a caretaker family. A Doaba village can hold thirty of them and a falling population.
Property disputes with the relatives who stayed are the standing subject of the litigation these returns generate, and the courts in Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur carry a great deal of it.