Punjab's documentary record has specific and consistent holes, and they are not random.
Almost nothing survives from before 1849 that was written by anyone other than a court, a chronicler or a European. There are no ordinary Punjabi diaries, letters or accounts from the eighteenth century in any quantity.
Almost nothing survives about women's lives except what men recorded, which is very little, and the largest body of women's own expression, the songs, was collected by men who cleaned it up.
Almost nothing survives about the labouring and artisan castes except colonial ethnography written to classify them.
Almost nothing survives from the Muslim majority of the province after 1947, because they left and their records went with them or were destroyed.
Almost nothing survives about the pastoral communities of the bars, because their society ended when the canals arrived and nobody asked them anything first.
Those five holes are most of the population of historic Punjab, and every general history of the province is written from the sources that are left.
The things nobody kept: the panchayat minute books, the school registers, the mandi ledgers, the gurdwara accounts, the hospital records, the letters home from abroad.
Each of them is an institutional record of ordinary life and each was thrown away when a cupboard was cleared. Almost no Punjabi institution has a retention policy.
What survives from the twentieth century is what the government kept for revenue and policing. That is a very particular view of a society and it is most of what there is.