Muslims are under two per cent of Indian Punjab's population. Before 1947 they were the majority of the undivided province and about a third of the districts that became Indian Punjab.
The community that remains is concentrated at Malerkotla, which is Muslim-majority and became a district in 2021, and in scattered populations in the cities, together with a substantial migrant Muslim population from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar working in Punjab's industry.
Malerkotla's position is specific: a princely state whose nawab protested against the killing of the younger Sahibzade in 1704, which is remembered in Sikh tradition, and which took in refugees rather than emptying in 1947.
The Waqf Board holds a large amount of property in Punjab, much of it occupied or in dispute.
Muslim shrines across the state are maintained in a substantial number of villages by Sikh and Hindu families whose own community left.
Indian Punjab is the only Indian state where a religious majority became a two per cent minority in a single year, and there is no adequate account anywhere of what that has meant for the people who stayed.
The Muslim population of Indian Punjab is small and is concentrated in Malerkotla, with communities in the towns and a scatter of families elsewhere.
There are also migrant Muslim workers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal in the industrial towns, who are a different population with different institutions.
Malerkotla is a functioning Muslim town in a Sikh majority state and its ordinariness is the fact worth stating. It is the exception that shows what the rest of the province lost.