A Punjabi farming day begins before light. The amrit vela, the hours before dawn, is prescribed for simran and is also when the cattle are fed and milked, and the two coincide because the day was built around both.
The gurdwara loudspeaker carrying kirtan from about four in the morning is the alarm clock of rural Punjab and the subject of a certain amount of complaint.
The working day then runs to midday, breaks through the heat, and resumes until dark. Meals follow it rather than the clock.
The chakki songs and the trinjan songs are dawn and evening songs because those were the times women worked together.
Electricity, television and the mobile phone have loosened this, and paddy irrigation schedules have wrecked it: a farmer whose free power comes on at two in the morning gets up and goes to the field, because the water will not wait.
Amrit vela is the last watch of the night, roughly the three hours before dawn, and the rehat sets it as the time for the morning nitnem.
The village day was set by the animals and by the water turn. Milking before light, the fields before the heat, and the warabandi turn whenever it fell, including at two in the morning.
What replaced it is the school timetable, the factory shift and the mandi's hours. The older pattern survives now mainly in the gurdwara and among the old.