Tea in Punjab is boiled with milk, sugar, and often cardamom or ginger, and is offered to anyone who enters a house within about ninety seconds of their arrival. Refusing it is not really available as an option.
It arrived late. Tea was pushed into north Indian domestic consumption by the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in the 1920s and 1930s with an advertising campaign, free samples and demonstrations at railway stations, because the industry needed a domestic market. It became universal within a generation.
Before that the drinks were lassi, sharbat, and in the north-west green tea with salt, which is still drunk in the Pothohar tradition and survives in some families in Indian Punjab.
The tea stall is the male social institution of the Punjabi town, as the well and the shared oven were the female institutions of the village.
A drink introduced by an advertising campaign a hundred years ago is now the thing a Punjabi household does first when anyone arrives.
Punjabi chah is boiled: leaves, milk, water and sugar together in one pan, boiled hard, sometimes with cardamom or ginger, and strained into glasses.
The Punjabi cup is small and is drunk hot and often, five or six times a day in a working household, which is a different pattern from anywhere the leaf is grown.
What it replaced was lassi and milk in the morning. The change is one of the clearest cases of a marketing campaign altering the diet of a whole region.