Manraj's note

This site was built because Punjab is misunderstood outside Punjab and under-recorded inside it, and because the second of those is the fixable one.

It holds accounts of places, subjects out of the wider history, a map that runs from 1469 to now, and a page for every settlement the public records could be made to yield, which came to 10,088. The raw pull from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata returned 15,183 records, but nearly five thousand of them were schools, bank branches, petrol pumps, canal distributaries and assembly constituencies filed as villages, and those have been taken out.

Most of those village pages are empty. That is deliberate and it is the most honest thing on the site.

Everything written here is desk work from published sources. Nobody from this project has stood in most of these places. The pages say so, and each one ends with what is not known, because that is where the next person starts.

If you are from one of these places, the account of it is yours to correct and the empty page is yours to fill.

That is the whole idea and it does not work without you.

Every page here is an invitation to be corrected. That is not modesty. It is the method, because a project built at a distance cannot be finished at a distance.

The people who can finish it are in the villages, and most of them have never been asked for anything except a vote.

If a page about your place is wrong, that is the most useful thing this site can produce. Send the correction and the source, and the page changes.

What we don't know

  • Everything that has not been sent in yet.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • No specific document is named for this page.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 120 accounts in The Village Itself, the chapter of this site covering how a Punjabi village works and what it holds.