Every village in Punjab has a shajra, a field map, drawn at the first revenue settlement in the 1850s or 1860s and revised at each settlement since, showing every field with its khasra number.
It is the base document of the land administration and it is held by the patwari and now digitised.
It also records what was there when it was drawn: the pond, the well, the common land, the cremation ground, the shrines, the paths, the trees on the bunds, and the boundaries of the abadi, the built-up area.
Comparing an 1860s shajra with the present one shows what a village has lost: the pond filled, the common land encroached, the paths built on.
That comparison has been done for almost no village in Punjab, and the documents to do it with are public and digitised for the modern series.
One village, two maps and an afternoon would produce a history of that village's land that nobody has.
The patwari is the office. One man holds the record for a circle of villages, keeps the jamabandi and the mutation register, walks the fields at girdawari and writes the entry that decides who is compensated for what. Nearly everything a Punjabi villager needs proved about land passes across that one desk.
The musavi is drawn on cloth and the boundaries on it are the ones agreed at the settlement, which means a field dispute today is decided by a line drawn by a surveyor and initialled by men who have been dead for a hundred and forty years.
They are being digitised. What is not being done is anything historical with them, and setting a village's map now beside its survey of the 1880s would show the change of a century in one image.