The hookah was the object at the centre of the village gathering: passed round, shared, and the sharing of it was the marker of who belonged.
Hukka pani band, the stopping of the hookah and the water, was the formula for social boycott, which tells you what the hookah was for.
Sikhs who keep the rehat do not smoke, and tobacco is one of the four prohibitions taken at amrit. That created a clear division in Punjabi villages between the amritdhari households and the rest, and it is one of the oldest visible markers of that division.
The hookah has largely gone from Punjab villages, faster than in Haryana or western Uttar Pradesh where it persists, and the reason is the Sikh prohibition.
What replaced it in the gathering was tea, then the television, then the phone.
An object that was the physical instrument of village belonging and village exclusion for centuries has disappeared almost completely within living memory.
The hookah was the fixture of the men's sitting place. It was passed round, and who was offered it and who was not was a caste statement made without words.
Sikh practice prohibits tobacco, which put the hookah in a particular position in a Sikh village and produced a long argument that the reform movement settled by removing it.
It went in the middle of the twentieth century, replaced by the bidi and the cigarette. What remains is the word in the language and the object in a few houses.