About

What this is, how it is made, and the things it will not pretend to know.

The Satth Project is an atlas of Punjab assembled from what has already been recorded and what people are still willing to say. It takes its name from the ਸੱਥ, the patch of common ground where a village gathers toward evening, and it is organised the way that gathering is organised, which is by place first and by subject afterwards.

How the accounts are made

Almost everything here is compiled from published sources and from recordings that other people made. Punjab has been documented far more than it has been indexed, and the gap between those two things is where this project lives. There are thousands of hours of Punjabi elders on video, describing their villages by name, and none of it is searchable. There are eighty-five million digitised pages at the Panjab Digital Library. There is a Punjabi-language press that has been running village histories for decades. The work is reading it, tying it to a place, and writing down where it came from.

Nothing publishes on a single source. Every factual claim needs two independent ones, and where a second cannot be found the claim is either left out or marked as unresolved in the open.

What is not claimed

This project does not do fieldwork, and it says so on every account rather than implying otherwise. The line at the foot of each story reads compiled from published sources and recorded testimony, and it is meant literally. Where a coordinate is estimated from a district rather than looked up, the map says approximate. Where a boundary is an interpretation, the panel says so.

Three things in particular get a caveat rather than a confident sentence, because they are the places where a project like this would most easily lose its credibility:

• The story of Diwan Todar Mal Ji buying the ground at Sirhind with gold coins laid on edge has a dating problem that scholars have raised. It is presented here as the community's living tradition, which is what it is, and not as a settled fact.
• The link between pesticide use in the Malwa and the cancer rates behind the Bathinda night train is contested rather than established. The train is real, the suffering is real, and the epidemiology is disputed. All three are said together.
• No one died in Malerkotla is the town's civic identity, sustained and retold. It is not an audited count, and saying so is meant as respect rather than doubt.

The map

The modern outlines are measured. Punjab, its neighbouring states, and the national borders come from Natural Earth derived data, and the 1947 line between India and Pakistan is drawn from real 1947 boundaries rather than from an approximation of them.

The historical territories are not measured, because for most of what is shown no survey exists. World-scale historical boundary data was tested against this sheet and rejected for the earlier periods, where it renders as straight-edged slabs covering the whole of Punjab and tells you nothing. Those centuries are drawn by hand, and the panel says as much whenever one is opened. Rivers follow their real courses in outline and are not surveyed.

Who holds this

The people who know these stories are, in the main, farmers and artisans in their seventies and eighties, granthis and dargah khadims, ASI caretakers with a register, and the one obsessive amateur per district who has already spent years on the research and would like somebody to look at it. Where an account rests on such a person's work, they are named.

Who is doing this

Between the two of us this is a desk project, built in the evenings, and it stays that way until the first recordings come in.