American Presbyterian missionaries established a station at Ludhiana in 1834, fifteen years before the annexation, because Ludhiana was the frontier post of British territory facing the Sikh state across the Sutlej.
They set up a printing press in order to produce Christian tracts and a Punjabi translation of the Bible. The Gurmukhi type it began with was not its own: the first Gurmukhi movable type was cut at the Serampore mission press in Bengal, which printed a Punjabi Bible in 1811 and a Punjabi grammar in 1812, and Ludhiana imported it from there.
What Ludhiana became was the centre of the trade rather than its inventor. It cut its own improved type after a fire destroyed most of its equipment in 1845, and from then on it was the press that Punjab actually read. The Singh Sabha's whole publishing programme sixty years later, the tract societies, the newspapers and the schoolbooks, ran on a technology brought here by people trying to convert them.
The mission also produced the first Punjabi grammars and dictionaries in the modern sense, again as translation tools.
Very few Punjabi books acknowledge any of it. The letterforms Punjab read for most of a century were designed by foreigners for a purpose Punjabis did not share, and the improvement that made them handsome came from Dhani Ram Chatrik at Amritsar in the twentieth century.
Technology travels regardless of the intentions of the people who bring it.
The press was working from the mid 1830s and it is the technical beginning of Punjabi publishing as an industry, whatever the origin of the letterforms it used.
It printed scripture, grammars, primers and tracts, and its output was distributed across the province. The type it cut was used by other presses afterward.
The mission's schools and its medical work at Ludhiana grew from the same establishment, and the medical college there is its direct descendant.