The Punjabi village house changed completely between about 1970 and 2000: from mud walls, wooden beams and a courtyard to brick, concrete and a plan borrowed from the towns.
The new houses are larger, hotter, and built with remittance money to be seen. A great many are locked and maintained by a caretaker.
The courtyard, which was the working space of the household and where the women's day happened, has shrunk or gone, and with it a great deal of the social arrangement that went with it.
The haveli, the separate cattle yard, has emptied as mechanisation removed the draught animals.
Government housing schemes have provided small pucca houses to landless households, which is a real improvement on what preceded them and is the other half of Punjab's rural housing picture.
In one generation the Punjabi village went from an architecture that had developed over centuries to one imported wholesale, and nobody recorded the first one before it went.
The old house was courtyard planned, built in small kiln brick with lime, with a verandah, a cattle shed, a store, and a roof used for sleeping in summer.
The new house is concrete framed, faces the street, has a gate and a boundary wall, and has no courtyard. It is hotter and it needs a fan or a cooler to be usable.
The pattern was set by the returning migrants, whose houses were the first in a village to be built to a town design, and everybody else followed them.