What this could become

As it stands this is a thousand written pages and ten thousand empty ones, built from published sources by one person's desk research.

What it could become depends entirely on whether people in Punjab put things into it.

The obvious next steps are a way to submit an account and a photograph from a phone; a way to record and attach audio, so that an old person's answer is preserved in their own voice rather than in somebody's summary; a version in Gurmukhi rather than English, which is a translation problem and a font problem and nothing harder; and a Shahmukhi version, which is a transliteration away.

The village pages should carry whatever the public record already holds: the hadbast number, the census figures, the settlement report reference, the distance to the tehsil headquarters, so that a person arriving at their own village's page finds something rather than nothing.

None of that is difficult. All of it takes time.

The part that cannot be done by anyone building the site is the part that matters, which is somebody in a village deciding that what they know is worth writing down.

Fifteen thousand village pages with one photograph and one paragraph each, written by people who live in them, would be a better record of Punjab than anything that exists.

A transliterated cross-script index would let a reader in Ludhiana read what is published in Lahore, and the software for that already exists.

Neither needs money. Both need somebody to organise the asking, and that is the part nobody has done.

What we don't know

  • Whether it will happen.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • This project's own plan.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 120 accounts in The Village Itself, the chapter of this site covering how a Punjabi village works and what it holds.