Punjab was photographed early. The Survey of India, the Archaeological Survey, the army and commercial studios at Lahore, Amritsar, Simla and Rawalpindi produced a very large body of images from the 1860s onward.
Those photographs record the Golden Temple before its renovations, the bungas before they were demolished, the walled cities before they were rebuilt, the canal works under construction, and the villages before the tractor.
Most of the collections are in Britain: the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, regimental museums and private hands.
Family photographs are the other archive. A Punjabi household of any standing has studio portraits going back to the 1920s or earlier, and a great many were carried across in 1947 in bundles.
None of this has been systematically collected. The Punjab family photograph archive that could be assembled from a hundred households in one town does not exist anywhere.
A photograph of a village in 1930 answers questions that no document does, and there are thousands of them in drawers.
The photographic record of the Punjab from the 1850s onward is in the India Office collection, in museums, in the archives of the surveys, and in family albums.
The studio portraits are the largest body and the least studied. Every district town had a studio and the negatives from those studios are mostly gone.
What almost nobody has done is photograph systematically now: the memorials, the samadhs, the gates, the shrines, the tattooed hands. The record of the present is being made no better than the record of the past.