For every district of British Punjab there is a gazetteer, revised several times, and a series of settlement reports made at each revision of the land revenue, usually every twenty to thirty years.
The settlement reports are extraordinary documents. They record, village by village, who held what land on what tenure, what was grown, what the wells were like, what the customary law of inheritance was, which castes were present, what the rents were and what the officer thought of the state of cultivation.
They were written by colonial officers for revenue purposes, with all the assumptions that implies, and they are also the only systematic account of nineteenth-century Punjabi village life in existence.
Most are out of copyright and many are digitised. Almost nobody uses them. A Punjabi researcher looking for what their own village was like in 1880 can very often find it in three pages of a settlement report and does not know the document exists.
This project uses them and recommends them. They are the closest thing Punjab has to a written memory of its villages before living memory begins.
The Punjab series began under the administration set up after 1849 and the first full district gazetteers appeared in the 1880s, with revisions running into the 1930s. Each was compiled by an officer of that district out of his own records, so the quality varies with whoever happened to be posted where.
Alongside them are Denzil Ibbetson's volume on Punjab castes, written out of the 1881 census, and Rose's Glossary of the Tribes and Castes, which run to thousands of pages on who lived where and how. They are colonial ethnography with everything that implies, and they record customs nobody else wrote down at all.
They were written to tax people and they are the most detailed description of the Punjabi countryside that exists. Almost all of them are free online and almost nobody in Punjab reads them.