Punjabi settlement in Britain began seriously in the 1950s, into the foundries of the west midlands, the mills of Yorkshire and the factories around west London, on labour vouchers and then on family reunion.
The first British gurdwara was at Putney in 1911, founded by the Khalsa Jatha with support from Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. There are now several hundred.
British Sikhs won a series of public arguments in the 1960s and 1970s about turbans: bus conductors at Manchester and Wolverhampton, motorcycle helmets, which produced a statutory exemption in 1976, and construction hard hats, exempted in 1989.
Wolverhampton's transport dispute ran for two years and ended after a Sikh in Britain threatened self-immolation and the council conceded. That episode is not much remembered and it set the pattern for everything after.
The 1991 census was the first to ask about ethnicity. Sikhs have never been counted as a separate ethnic category in the British census, and the campaign for a Sikh ethnic tick box has been running since.
The Punjabi communities of Britain are now in their fourth generation and the language is thinning with each one.
The migration was to the mill and foundry towns from the 1950s: Southall, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Bradford, Coventry and Glasgow.
A second wave came from East Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s, urban, English speaking and often better off, and the two groups' institutions did not always merge.
Punjabi is among the more spoken languages in Britain and the community is now four generations deep. Its literature, its politics and its own history are barely studied in Punjab.