Punjab was the last major region in the subcontinent the British took and, once taken, the one they leaned on hardest. In under a century it went from an independent kingdom to the main recruiting ground of the Indian Army, the largest irrigation project on earth, and the place most of the diaspora's grandparents left from.
What happened to the royal family
The state ended on 29 March 1849. Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja, was ten. He was separated from his mother, converted to Christianity, shipped to England, given an estate in Norfolk and photographed a great deal; the Koh-i-Noor went with him. He spent the last part of his life trying and failing to get back. It is the cleanest available illustration of how annexation actually worked.
Water, wheat and soldiers
Two colonial projects reshaped the province physically. The canal system turned scrub in western Punjab into the most productive irrigated farmland in Asia, and built new cities to work it — Faisalabad, founded as Lyallpur in 1892, is one of them. Second, recruitment. Punjab supplied a share of the Indian Army out of all proportion to its population, which is how twenty-one men of the 36th Sikhs came to be holding a signalling post on the Samana Range in 1897 at Saragarhi, and how Punjabi soldiers ended up in both world wars, from Flanders to Gallipoli to Burma. Rawalpindi grew around the largest garrison in northern India; Ludhiana grew around industry.
The same colonial engineering produced its own opposition. The Pagri Sambhal Jatta agitation of 1907 — over canal colony tenancy and land law — is the first mass farmers' movement in Punjab's history, and the direct ancestor of everything that has happened on that subject since.
Reforming from the inside
Two movements changed Sikh institutions in this period. The Singh Sabha, from 1873, was a reform and education movement that argued about what Sikh practice was and produced the modern printed, schooled, self-defining version of it — Bhai Vir Singh is its greatest literary product and the father of modern Punjabi prose. The Gurdwara Reform Movement of 1920–25 then took the shrines themselves out of the hands of hereditary custodians, by non-violent occupation and at considerable cost, and put them under an elected committee. Hemkund Sahib was identified and made reachable in the same decades.
Leaving
This is when the diaspora starts, and it starts from the same places the soldiers did. Sikh workers went to East Africa for the Uganda Railway from 1896. Others went east across the Pacific — and found the door shut. The Komagata Maru, turned away from Vancouver in 1914 after two months in the harbour, is the emblematic case. In California, men who could not bring wives and could not own land under the alien land laws married Mexican-American women and farmed in their names: the Punjabi-Mexican families of the Imperial Valley.
Exclusion radicalised the emigrants, which the authorities had not planned for. The Ghadar movement, founded in San Francisco in 1913, tried to send a revolution home; the 1915 rising was betrayed and crushed, and the survivors fed straight into the next generation.
And then the fighting back
Jallianwala Bagh, on 13 April 1919, is the point where Punjab's politics stopped being reformist — it has its own page. Bhagat Singh, hanged at Lahore in 1931 at twenty-three, is what the province produced afterwards, and remains the most-quoted Punjabi of the twentieth century. Udham Singh waited twenty-one years and shot Michael O'Dwyer in Caxton Hall in 1940.
Not all of it was politics. The Great Gama went undefeated for fifty years and beat the world's best wrestlers in London in 1910. Kila Raipur, started in 1933, is still going.
What comes next
In August 1947 the province was cut in half, and roughly ten million people moved in each direction. Partition & After begins there.