What would be worth doing

A list, gathered from the gaps recorded across this site, of things that could be done by one person with a phone and some patience.

Photograph the village gates and memorials of one tehsil and transcribe every name on them. Match those names against the Commonwealth War Graves Commission registers for the two world wars. It is slow work, and one tehsil is a manageable size to begin with.

Record five old people in your village answering four questions: what is the oldest thing here, who left and when, what do people still argue about, what was here that is gone.

Photograph the samadhs and jatheras in the fields around one town and note their condition. Nobody has a list.

Ask the gurdwara whether there are old handwritten volumes in the almirah and, if so, photograph the first and last pages and tell the Panjab Digital Library.

Transliterate one Shahmukhi Punjabi book into Gurmukhi, or the reverse. The tools are free.

Read the settlement report for your own district and write down where it disagrees with what your family says.

Any one of these produces something that does not currently exist anywhere.

Photograph every shopfront on one bazaar street before it is rebuilt: the signboards, the hand-painted names, the old lettering. That record does not exist for a single Punjabi town.

Record an hour with the oldest person in your village on video, with their name and the date, and put it somewhere it will survive. That is an afternoon.

Write the account of one place you know. Not a history, an account: what is there, what is remembered, what has gone and what nobody can explain. That is the whole method of this site.

What we don't know

  • Nothing. This is a list of work, not a claim.

Where to check this

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

  • The gaps recorded on this site's own pages.

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.