The Invasion Highway

1Mahmud of Ghazni

Seventeen invasions in twenty-seven years. Not one of them was an attempt to rule India. All of them were a business — and Punjab was the one thing he decided to keep.

The business model

Mahmud ruled from Ghazni, in what is now eastern Afghanistan. Between roughly 1000 and 1027 CE he raided India about seventeen times.

Understand what these raids were. They were not conquests. Mahmud almost never tried to hold Indian territory east of Punjab. The pattern was:

1. Assemble an army after the harvest, when there is fodder and the rivers are low. 2. Come down through the passes into Punjab. 3. Strike fast at a wealthy target — a rich city, a great temple with a treasury. 4. Take gold, jewels, and thousands of captives to be sold as slaves. 5. Be back in Ghazni before the monsoon makes the rivers impassable.

Mahmud used this money to build Ghazni into a magnificent capital, to pay a large standing army, and to fund a court that included the scholar Al-Biruni and the poet Firdausi. India paid for the Afghan golden age.

The targets

S O M E O F M A H M U D ' S P R I N C I PA L I N D I A N C A M PA I G N S

Somnath, and how to think about it

The 1025 raid on Somnath is the single most politically charged event in this chapter, so let us handle it carefully.

What is not in dispute: Mahmud attacked the temple at Somnath, killed a great many defenders, looted an enormous treasure, and destroyed the idol. His own court chroniclers describe it, and they describe it as a boast. They were proud of it. There is no serious case for denying that it happened.

What is disputed: what it meant, and how it was remembered. The historian Romila Thapar's study Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History shows something that surprises most readers: the raid does not loom large in most contemporary Indian sources. Jain and Sanskrit records from Gujarat carry on discussing trade and temple endowments; some record the temple being rebuilt and functioning again. The idea of Somnath as the defining wound of Hindu India took its modern shape much later — substantially in the nineteenth century, in British parliamentary debate and colonial historiography, and then in twentieth-century Indian politics.

Both of these are true. A terrible thing happened, and the way it is remembered today was shaped by people with much later purposes.

The part that actually matters for this book

Forget Somnath for a moment. The most consequential thing Mahmud did was much quieter.

He did not keep Kannauj. He did not keep Mathura. He did not keep Gujarat. He kept Punjab.

Lahore was annexed and made a Ghaznavid provincial capital. And when the Ghaznavids later lost their western territories to the Seljuk Turks, Lahore became the effective capital of what was left of their empire.

Which produces this fact, and it is one of the most important facts in the entire book:

Sit with that number. From about 1030 until the rise of the Sikh misls in the mid-1700s — seven hundred years — Punjab was ruled by Muslim states almost without interruption. Under the British it was ruled by Christians. A Punjabi in 1700 would have to go back twenty-five generations to find an ancestor who lived under a ruler of the local religion.

This single fact explains an extraordinary amount of what follows:

• Why Punjab's Muslim population became so large, especially in the west.
• Why Punjabi absorbed so much Persian vocabulary that a Punjabi speaker today uses

Persian words constantly without noticing.

• Why Punjabi culture is so thoroughly blended. • Why undivided Punjab was Muslim-majority in 1941 — and therefore why it had to be

partitioned in 1947.

• And why, when a Punjabi religious movement finally did take political power in 1799, it

felt to its participants like something that had not happened in seven centuries. Because it had not.

2Ghor and Tarain

In 1192, on a plain in what is now Haryana, a battle was fought that set the political shape of north India for the next six hundred years. It was fought in historical Punjab.

The Ghurids replace the Ghaznavids

By the later 1100s the Ghaznavids were finished as a great power, clinging to Lahore. A rival Afghan dynasty, the Ghurids — from Ghor, in central Afghanistan — pushed them out. Muhammad of Ghor (Muizz-ud-din Muhammad) took Lahore in 1186.

Unlike Mahmud, Ghori wanted territory, not just loot. And beyond Punjab lay the Chauhan kingdom of Ajmer and Delhi, ruled by Prithviraj Chauhan.

The two battles of Tarain

They met at Tarain — modern Taraori, near Karnal — on the flat country between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. In our terms: the eastern edge of historical Punjab.

First Battle of Tarain, 1191. Prithviraj won.

This is worth stating plainly because it is often skipped. The Indian side won. Ghori's centre was broken by a massed Rajput charge, Ghori himself was wounded and had to be carried from the field, and his army fled.

Prithviraj then did not pursue him back to Afghanistan.

Second Battle of Tarain, 1192. Ghori won, decisively.

He came back the following year with a reorganised army, and he had thought hard about the first defeat. The Ghurid force relied on large numbers of mounted archers — light cavalry who could shoot from horseback, harass, retreat, and never close with the enemy. Against them, the Rajput system of heavy cavalry and elephants charging in a mass was close to useless. You cannot charge something that will not stand still.

The standard account has Ghori using feigned retreats to draw out and exhaust the Rajput cavalry through the day, then committing a fresh reserve of heavy cavalry at the decisive moment. The Chauhan army broke. Prithviraj was captured and killed.

What followed

Ghori returned to Afghanistan and left his slave-general Qutb-ud-din Aibak in charge of the Indian territories. When Ghori was assassinated in 1206, Aibak declared himself sultan at Lahore, and the Delhi Sultanate began.

Five dynasties would follow over the next three centuries — Mamluk (Slave), Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid, Lodi — until Babur ended the last of them at Panipat in 1526.

Punjab's new job description

Under the Sultanate, Punjab's role became fixed, and it is a role Punjab has occupied ever since in one form or another.

Punjab was a province. It was governed from Delhi. It paid revenue to Delhi. And its function was to be the shield — to absorb whatever came through the passes, so that Delhi did not have to.

This is the arrangement that Chapter 3 shows in its most brutal form.

3The Mongols

For roughly eighty years, large parts of Punjab were not really governed by anybody. They were a raiding ground. This is where Punjab learns the habit of arming itself.

Genghis Khan looks at India and turns around

In 1221, Genghis Khan reached the Indus, chasing the last prince of the Khwarezmian empire, Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu, whom he had already destroyed. Jalal ad-Din swam his horse across the Indus and escaped into Punjab.

Genghis stood on the bank, considered marching through India, and decided against it — the heat, the disease, the distance, and reports of what lay ahead. He went back west.

India got lucky. It would not stay lucky.

Eighty years of raiding

From the 1240s, the Mongols of the Chagatai Khanate — based in Central Asia — turned Punjab into a regular target. Major incursions came in 1241, 1245, 1257 and 1285, and then, under Alauddin Khalji, in a much heavier series through the 1290s and 1300s.

In 1241 they sacked Lahore. The city that had been an imperial capital for two centuries was taken and devastated.

For long stretches, the Delhi Sultanate's real frontier was not the Indus at all. It was the Beas or the Sutlej. Everything west of that — much of central and western Punjab — was a contested zone where Delhi's writ was thin and Mongol raiding parties came and went.

How Delhi responded

Balban (reigned 1266–1287) understood the problem and built for it. He established a chain of forts between Multan and Lahore and along the line of the Beas, garrisoned them, and pursued a forward-defensive policy rather than pulling back to Delhi. He also devastated some frontier areas deliberately, to deny raiders supplies.

Alauddin Khalji (reigned 1296–1316) faced the worst of it. In 1303 a Mongol force under Taraghai besieged Delhi itself for more than two months and looted its suburbs while Alauddin sat inside his own capital, unable to fight them off.

He responded by rebuilding the entire frontier system: repairing and building forts, stockpiling weapons and supplies in them, and posting his best generals to the Punjab frontier commands at Dipalpur and Samana. His famous economic measures — price controls, market regulation — were largely designed to let him maintain an enormous standing army cheaply, precisely because of this threat.

It worked. At the Battle of Amroha in 1305, Delhi's forces destroyed a major Mongol army, and Alauddin had thousands of Mongol prisoners trampled to death by elephants outside Delhi as a public demonstration. The raids tapered off through the 1300s.

What eighty years of that does to a society

This is the analytical point of the chapter, and it matters enormously for Part 5.

If you live in a place where:

• a raiding army may arrive in any given year, • the government's army is stationed 400 km away and exists to protect the capital, not

you,

• the nearest fort is a garrison for the state's troops, not a refuge for your village, and • anyone who is captured is sold as a slave —

then you do one of three things. You leave. You die. Or you arm yourself and organise your own defence around the people you actually trust: your extended family, your clan, your village.

That third option is what happened, over and over, and it produced a specific kind of society:

THEFRONTIERSOCIETYPUNJABBECAME

4Timur, 1398

Of everything in this part, this is the worst. It is also, in its details, a useful corrective to anyone who thinks these invasions were simply religion against religion.

The invasion

Timur — Tamerlane — ruled from Samarkand and had already conquered Persia, Central Asia and much of the Middle East. In August 1398 he marched on India with a force reported at around 92,000 cavalry.

On 30 September 1398 he crossed the Indus. His route ran straight through Punjab: Tulamba, which he sacked and whose inhabitants he massacred; then Multan; then east across the doabs toward Delhi, taking and destroying towns as he went.

The pretext, and why it does not survive examination

Timur's stated justification was that the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir-ud-din Mahmud Tughlaq, was being too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, and that a properly Islamic ruler was needed.

Most historians regard this as a transparent excuse, and it is worth understanding why, because it teaches you how to read this whole period.

• Delhi in 1398 was a Muslim sultanate. Timur was a Muslim ruler attacking a Muslim

state, sacking a Muslim capital, and killing a great many Muslims in the process.

His route through Punjab destroyed Muslim and Hindu towns without much discrimination.

• Timur had spent his career attacking Muslim powers — the Ottomans, the Mamluks of

Egypt, the Golden Horde. India was not a special religious project. It was the richest available target that had just become weak.

The Tughlaq dynasty had been falling apart for a decade. Timur attacked because Delhi was rich and Delhi was weak. The religious framing was, as it usually was, the wrapper.

Loni: the order

By the time Timur's army reached the outskirts of Delhi in December 1398, it had accumulated an enormous number of captives — perhaps 100,000 people, taken across Punjab and marched along with the army to be sold as slaves.

Timur was about to fight the Sultan's army, which included war elephants. He calculated that during the battle his captives might break loose and attack his rear.

So at Loni, before the battle, he gave an order: kill them all. His army did.

This is recorded in Timur's own memoirs and by his court chronicler. It was not hidden or denied. It was written down as a sensible military precaution.

It is one of the largest single mass killings in premodern history, and the overwhelming majority of the victims were Punjabis who had been rounded up on the road east.

Delhi

On 17 December 1398, Timur destroyed the Tughlaq army outside Delhi. The Sultan's war elephants — armoured, with poisoned tusks — were countered by driving loaded camels at them and setting the loads alight; the elephants panicked and turned on their own lines.

Delhi was then sacked for roughly fifteen days. The killing was on a scale that contemporaries struggled to describe. Timur's chroniclers record towers built of the heads of the dead. Accounts suggest the city was so thoroughly destroyed and depopulated that it took the better part of a century to recover.

Timur left after about a fortnight, carrying loot and, notably, skilled craftsmen — masons and artisans taken back to Samarkand, where they worked on his great buildings.

The Punjab footnote that became a dynasty

On his way out, Timur appointed a local governor over Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur:a man named Khizr Khan.

The Delhi Sultanate was in ruins. Over the following years Khizr Khan built up his power base in Punjab, and in 1414 he took Delhi and founded the Sayyid dynasty, which ruled for about thirty-seven years.

So the dynasty that governed north India for the first half of the fifteenth century came out of Punjab — installed by a Central Asian conqueror as a provincial appointment.

5How Punjab became Muslim

This chapter answers a question that decided the fate of fifteen million people in 1947. It is handled here carefully, because both of the popular answers are wrong.

The fact to be explained

By the 1941 census, undivided Punjab was roughly 53% Muslim, 30% Hindu and 15% Sikh.

That Muslim majority is why Punjab had to be partitioned in 1947 — and the geography of that majority is why the line fell where it did. So the question of how it came about is not an academic one. It is the direct cause of the largest forced migration in human history.

The two popular answers, and why both fail

Popular answer 1: "Punjab was converted by the sword." Force alone cannot explain it. If conversion were simply a function of Muslim political rule, then Uttar Pradesh — ruled from Delhi and Agra by Muslim states for just as long, sitting under the seat of imperial power — would be Muslim-majority. It is not; it was around 15% Muslim. Bihar was ruled just as long and remained overwhelmingly Hindu. Meanwhile Bengal, at the far end of the empire and the least directly governed, became Muslim-majority. Political rule and conversion do not line up.

Popular answer 2: "It was all peaceful and voluntary." Also false. Forced conversion happened. It is documented in Muslim court chronicles that boast of it, in Sikh tradition and history, and in accounts of specific campaigns. The execution of Guru Arjan in 1606 and of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675 — Part 4 — are not folklore; they are historical events with an identifiable political and religious context. Jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, was real, was on-and-off enforced, and was a real material pressure.

What actually happened: five mechanisms at once

WHYPEOPLECONVERTED,INROUGHORDEROFSCALE

The geography — and this is the crucial bit

Now look at where Punjab became Muslim, because the pattern is extremely informative.

• Western Punjab — Multan, Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Lahore division, the Sindh Sagar and

Chaj and Rechna doabs — became heavily Muslim, in many districts over 80%.

• Eastern Punjab — the Bist Jalandhar Doab, Ambala, Ludhiana, the Malwa country

south of the Sutlej — stayed largely Hindu and Sikh.

Why the split? Three reinforcing reasons. The west was under Muslim rule longest and most continuously — from 1030, versus 1192 for the east. The great Sufi centres were in the west: Pakpattan, Multan, Uch Sharif. And Brahminical institutional infrastructure — temples, endowments, established priestly networks — was thinner in the west and denser in the east, closer to the Gangetic heartland.

So Punjab in 1900 was not a Muslim province with Hindu minorities. It was a Muslim west and a Hindu-Sikh east, joined together in one administrative unit by the British.

6What Punjab built: Baba Farid

While the armies came through, a man in a small town on the Sutlej did something quietly enormous: he started writing poetry in the language ordinary people spoke.

Who he was

Fariduddin Masud Ganjshakar — universally known as Baba Farid — lived from 1179 to 1266. The name Ganjshakar means "treasury of sugar," or of sweetness.

He was a Sufi of the Chishti order, and one of its founding figures in South Asia. When his master Khwaja Bakhtiyar Kaki died in 1235, Farid became his spiritual successor. And here he did something significant: instead of taking up residence in Delhi, at the centre of power and patronage, he went home to Punjab and settled at Ajodhan — today Pakpattan, in Pakistani Punjab.

He lived, by all accounts, in extreme simplicity, and his shrine at Pakpattan remains one of the most visited in South Asia.

The thing he did that changed everything

Baba Farid is generally recognised as the first major poet of the Punjabi language.

Understand what that means. Before Farid, the languages of writing in Punjab were Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic — the languages of priests, of government and of scholarship. Punjabi was what people spoke at home, in the fields, to their children. Nobody wrote serious literature in it.

Farid did. He wrote about God, death, longing, the shortness of life and the vanity of the world, in the language a farmer in Ajodhan actually used.

By doing that, he made Punjabi a literary language. Everything afterwards — Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah's Heer, Shah Hussain, the Punjabi of the Sikh Gurus, and Punjabi literature down to the present day — stands on ground he cleared.

And now the fact that should stop you

In 1604, Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth — the scripture that became the Guru Granth Sahib, which Sikhs today revere as their living Guru.

Into it, he included the compositions of Baba Farid: four hymns and a large body of couplets — the commonly cited figure is 112 saloks, though counts vary slightly between traditions.

So: the verses of a Muslim Sufi saint who died in 1266 are sung as sacred scripture in Sikh gurdwaras, every day, all over the world, in 2026.

Farid is not alone in there. The Guru Granth Sahib contains the work of fifteen bhagats — saints from outside the line of Sikh Gurus — including:

• Kabir, a weaver from Banaras, born Muslim, claimed by Hindus and Muslims both, who

spent his life mocking the certainties of each.

• Namdev, a calico-printer from Maharashtra. • Ravidas, a leather-worker from Banaras — an untouchable by the rules of his time —

whose hymns sit in the scripture alongside those of the Gurus.

• Sheikh Farid, a Muslim Sufi from Punjab.

A Muslim mystic, a Hindu weaver, a Dalit cobbler and a Maharashtrian printer, gathered by a Punjabi Guru into one book, in the sixteenth century.

The shrine culture

Farid was one node in a network. Medieval Punjab was covered in Sufi shrines — dargahs — and they were the real religious geography of the region:

• Pakpattan — Baba Farid. • Multan — Bahauddin Zakariya and Shah Rukn-e-Alam, of the Suhrawardi order, whose

tombs are among the finest medieval buildings in South Asia.

• Uch Sharif — a whole complex of shrines. • Lahore — Data Ganj Bakhsh (Ali Hujwiri), whose shrine is still the busiest in the city.

And crucially: Hindus went to these shrines too. Not as a curiosity — as a normal part of religious life. People of all communities came for healing, for children, for justice, for the annual festivals. The shrine was where you went when you had a problem, regardless of what you called God.

That is what Punjabi religion actually looked like on the ground for most of these five centuries, whatever the court chronicles and the theologians were saying.

7The soil in which Nanak grew

Part 4 is about the Sikh Gurus. This chapter explains why they appeared where and when they did — because Guru Nanak was not born into a vacuum. He was born into a very specific set of conditions, and every one of them shows up in what he said.

Punjab in 1469, in six facts

1. The state was foreign, and had been for four hundred years. No Punjabi in 1469 had a living memory, or a grandparent's memory, or a great-great-grandparent's memory, of Punjab being ruled by Punjabis. Government meant Persian-speaking officials, Turkish and Afghan soldiers, and a revenue demand.

2. Violence was normal and periodic. Timur had come through seventy years earlier. The Mongol raids were within cultural memory. Nobody expected safety, and nobody expected the state to provide it.

3. Two religious establishments had hardened. On one side, a Brahminical order preoccupied with ritual purity, caste rules, pilgrimage and sacred thread. On the other, an Islamic establishment of qazis and mullahs attached to state power. Nanak would attack both, in almost identical terms, for the same fault: mistaking the outward form for the thing itself.

4. Caste had become brutal. Untouchability, exclusion from wells and temples, occupational imprisonment. A large fraction of the population was told, by their own religion, that they were polluting.

5. Women were near-invisible in religious life. Excluded from scripture, from ritual authority, and in elite practice from public life.

6. But there was already a language of protest, and it was in Punjabi. The Sufi tradition of Farid and the Bhakti tradition of Kabir and Ravidas had been saying, for two hundred years, in the local tongue, to ordinary people: God is not in the temple or the mosque, God does not check your caste, and your ritual is worth nothing without an honest heart.

The bridge into Part 4

Here is the connection between this part and the next, and it is a direct one.

Guru Nanak lived from 1469 to 1539. In 1520–21, Babur invaded Punjab on his way to founding the Mughal Empire, sacking towns including Saidpur (Eminabad), which Nanak appears to have witnessed.

Nanak wrote about it. Four compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib are known as the Babarvani — "the utterances concerning Babur." They are extraordinary: an eyewitness account of an invasion, written as scripture, in Punjabi.

And they are not a nationalist war-cry. Nanak describes the horror in unsparing terms — women's hair torn, homes destroyed, the powerful reduced to nothing — and then turns and asks God why He allowed it, and also turns on the Indian rulers whose incompetence and self-indulgence left their people defenceless.

He blames the invader. He also blames the local elite. He also demands an answer from God. In three verses.

8Scorecard: what Part 3 proves

Timeline of Part 3

What happens in Part 4

Part 4, Gurus and the Khalsa, covers 1469 to 1708 — and it is where this book's central subject finally arrives.

Ten Gurus across 239 years. We will follow the whole arc: Nanak's radical simplicity and his attack on ritual and caste; the institutions that made Sikhism a society rather than a philosophy — langar, sangat, the city of Amritsar, the scripture itself; the execution of Guru Arjan in 1606 under Jahangir, which changed everything; Guru Hargobind's doctrine of Miri-Piri, worldly power alongside spiritual power, and the two swords; the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur in Delhi in 1675 — which he accepted, on the evidence, in defence of the religious freedom of Kashmiri Hindus, not of Sikhs; and finally Guru Gobind Singh and the founding of the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699.

Above all, Part 4 answers the question this book has been circling since Part 1: where does the Punjabi tradition of martyrdom actually come from? Why is shaheedi — being killed for a cause — not merely tolerated in Punjabi culture but understood as the highest achievement available to a human being?

The answer is specific, it is theological, it is historically datable, and it has been used and misused by almost everyone in this story since. Getting it right in Part 4 is what will let me judge Part 9 fairly.

9Sources and further reading — Part 3

Primary and contemporary sources (in translation)

• Al-Biruni, Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind ("India," c. 1030) — written by a scholar attached to Mahmud's court; invaluable and unusually fair-minded about Indian society.
• Utbi, Tarikh-i-Yamini; Baihaqi, Tarikh-i-Baihaqi — Ghaznavid court histories, including the boasts about temple destruction.
• Minhaj-i-Siraj, Tabaqat-i-Nasiri — the key thirteenth-century source for the Ghurid conquest and the early Sultanate.
• Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi — on Balban and Alauddin Khalji, including the Mongol wars and the frontier system.
• Amir Khusrau — poet and eyewitness to the Khalji period.
• Timur, Tuzk-i-Timuri (the memoirs attributed to him) and Sharafuddin Yazdi, Zafarnama — for the 1398 campaign, the Loni order, and the sack of Delhi, recorded by the perpetrator's own side.
• Guru Granth Sahib — the compositions of Sheikh Farid, and the Babarvani of Guru Nanak. Multiple translations available; Sant Singh Khalsa's and Gopal Singh's are widely used in English.

Modern scholarship

• Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004) — the essential study of what actually happened at Somnath and how the memory of it was constructed much later.
• Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier and his essays on temple desecration in medieval India — the standard modern analysis of conversion mechanisms and of when and why temples were actually destroyed. Eaton's work is the best answer to both of the popular positions in Chapter 5.
• Simon Digby, War-Horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate — on the horse-supply problem and its military consequences.
• Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare and The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire — on the military ecology of the north-west frontier.
• Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History — the standard work, excellent on the Mongol wars.
• André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World.
• Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Persianate culture in India.
• On Punjabi literature and Sufism: Christopher Shackle's work on Farid and on early Punjabi; Denis Matringe on Punjabi Sufi poetry.

Reference sources used for dates and figures

• Britannica, "Sack of Delhi (1398)"; Wikipedia, Sack of Somnath, Sack of Delhi (1398), Battle of the Indus (1027), Mongol invasion of India (1297–98) and (1303), Battle of Amroha, Alauddin Khalji's conquest of Multan, Baba Farid.
• Auqaf and Religious Affairs Department, Government of Punjab (Pakistan) — official pages on the shrine of Baba Farid at Pakpattan.
• Vajiram & Ravi and other Indian civil-service preparation resources for the standard Tarain and Sultanate chronology — cross-checked against Peter Jackson.

10About the author

Lovepreet Singh is a researcher and writer working toward doctoral research. He writes long-form work on Indian history, society, religion, public policy and technology — from the record, in plain language, with competing views left standing.

Background

He is the founder of Lovelace, an independent design and engineering studio building websites, brand systems, 3D and WebGL experiences and digital products, and is Founder and Managing Director of Five Rivers Inc.

He has studied at Panjab University and Chandigarh University, and is in the second year of an MBA in Business Strategy and Analysis. He is a Certified Ethical Hacker and a self-taught developer working in the MERN stack.

His interests run across history, epistemology, belief and public life — and the common thread, in the security work as much as the research, is a preference for testing a claim to destruction rather than defending it.

The Living Archive

Punjab: The Whole Truth is the first major work of The Living Archive, a long-form research project examining subjects that are argued about constantly and read about rarely. The method is fixed across everything published there: plain language, named sources, disputed figures shown as ranges, and every opposing argument stated at full strength before it is answered.

What comes next

He is working toward doctoral research, with Punjab — its history, its politics and the contested decades between 1966 and 1995 — as the intended field. These thirteen parts are the groundwork for it.

If you find an error of fact in this work, please write. Sources are listed at the end of every part so that any claim here can be checked against the record. A corrected edition is better than a confident one.