Before the telegraph, news moved in Punjab by runner and by rider along the serai road, by the harkara system of the Mughal administration, and by the traders' own networks, which were faster than the state's.
The Sikh state ran its own intelligence and news-writer system, and the akhbarat, court newsletters, from Lahore and from the British Residency are a substantial documentary source for the period.
The telegraph reached Punjab in the 1850s and was decisive in 1857: the Punjab administration disarmed the Bengal regiments in days because it knew what had happened at Meerut before the news travelled any other way. A telegraph line is one reason Punjab did not rise.
The Namdharis refused to use the government post and ran their own arrangement, which is one of the earliest examples of parallel institution-building as political refusal.
The Ghadar Party's method was the post: a newspaper printed at San Francisco and mailed to Punjab, Shanghai, Manila and East Africa. The empire's own communications carried the movement against it.
The telegraph reached Punjab in the 1850s and was in place before the 1857 rising, which is a large part of why the province stayed under control during it.
The post office reached the villages later, and the money order became the instrument that carried soldiers' pay and then emigrants' remittance home for a century.
The village postman was the person who read and wrote letters for households that could not, which made him one of the few outsiders with access to everybody's business.