Punjabi printing began seriously with the missionaries at Ludhiana in the 1830s, who cut the first Gurmukhi type in order to print Christian tracts. The Singh Sabha took the technology and used it against them.
Khalsa Akhbar from 1886, Khalsa Samachar from 1899, and a stream of tract societies and presses at Lahore and Amritsar built a Punjabi reading public in about thirty years.
Ajit, begun in 1941 as an Urdu weekly at Amritsar and published as a Punjabi daily from Jalandhar since 1955, and Jagbani, founded in 1978, are among the large Punjabi dailies in India today, both from Jalandhar. The Tribune, founded at Lahore in 1881 by Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia and moved to Ambala and then Chandigarh, is the English paper of record for the region.
In Pakistani Punjab the daily press is overwhelmingly Urdu and Punjabi in Shahmukhi holds a very small share of it. There are Punjabi dailies, Bhulekha at Lahore since 1989 and Lokaai since 2006 among them, but nothing on the scale of Ajit or Jagbani. A language with over a hundred million speakers has a mass daily press in one of the two countries it is spoken in and a marginal one in the other.
Punjabi is the eleventh most spoken language in the world and it is not the medium of instruction in the province where most of its speakers live.
The Punjabi press began in the nineteenth century with the reform societies and grew through the Singh Sabha, the Arya Samaj and the Ghadar and Akali movements.
Kirti, Akali, Khalsa Akhbar, Preet Lari and the Ghadar paper were each attached to a movement, and the press was an instrument rather than a business.
The commercial Punjabi daily came later and is now concentrated in a small number of hands. The movement press of the early twentieth century is where the language's modern prose was actually made.
A front page of the Khalsa Akhbar from 15 May 1893 is digitised and can be looked at. Published weekly in Gurmukhi at Lahore, it belonged to a new print environment in which Sikh reformers could address readers beyond the reach of a gurdwara, a debating circle or a manuscript network. The paper turned recurring acts of reading into a social infrastructure.
Lithography was central to this. A written argument could be reproduced across multiple copies while retaining the visual form of the Gurmukhi script, allowing the same editorial position to circulate among readers who might never encounter its author. The technology changed the scale and persistence of communication. An argument printed in Lahore could be carried into another town, read privately, discussed collectively and preserved as an object that could be consulted again.
Print also introduced repetition. An oral argument disappears with the conversation unless someone remembers or records it. A printed argument can return every week, accumulating readers and responses across time. Editorial positions become part of a continuing public conversation in which claims can be challenged, revised, defended and reproduced. The newspaper therefore helped create a form of Sikh public life organised around recurring encounters with text.
The technology had consequences for authority. The editor acquired a new kind of influence because selection, arrangement and repetition determined what readers encountered. The press could amplify particular voices while leaving others outside its circulation. Its technological capacity to reproduce information depended upon a social structure deciding what deserved reproduction. The surviving page is evidence of a moment when Punjabi print culture was becoming capable of sustaining an organised public debate, week after week, among readers who were increasingly connected through print.
