Punjab is the only region of the subcontinent that was divided down the middle rather than assigned to one side, and almost everything in this era follows from that.
1947
The border was drawn in about five weeks and published two days after independence. Something in the order of ten million people crossed it in each direction; the killing that accompanied the crossing has no agreed figure, and the honest range is wide. A whole province's Muslim west and Sikh and Hindu east swapped populations at speed, Lahore and Amritsar ended up forty miles apart in different countries, and the road between them became Wagah, where two armies now perform a ceremony at sunset for crowds on both sides. Partition has its own page, and it is the single most consequential thing on this site.
Two of the era's artists are inseparable from it. Amrita Pritam wrote Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu on a train out of Lahore — a poem that addresses an eighteenth-century poet directly and asks him to look at what has happened to his Punjab, and which is still the thing both sides of the border quote. Noor Jehan, the greatest voice in Punjabi film music, stayed in Pakistan; her Indian audience never stopped listening.
What to call the state, and what to plant in it
East Punjab spent the next twenty years arguing about itself. The Punjabi Suba movement — for a state organised around the Punjabi language, written in Gurmukhi — was resisted for a decade and a half and finally granted in 1966, which split the old province again into Punjab, Haryana and part of Himachal. The unresolved leftovers of that settlement, from the shared capital at Chandigarh to river water, are still live political questions sixty years on.
At the same moment the Green Revolution arrived: dwarf wheat, tubewells, fertiliser, guaranteed procurement. Punjab fed India, became by a distance its richest state, and started drawing down a water table that has not stopped falling since. It is the most double-edged thing that ever happened to the region, and the second half of that story belongs to the era after this one.
Britain
The other great movement of the period was outward. From the 1950s Punjabis went to the British foundries, textile mills and transport depots that were advertising for labour, and built the communities that made Southall, Handsworth and Bradford what they are. Most of the Punjabi spoken in Britain today traces to those two decades.
The writers and the painters
Shiv Kumar Batalvi won the Sahitya Akademi award at thirty-one, the youngest ever, and drank himself to death at thirty-six writing about longing; he is still the poet young Punjabis quote first. Sobha Singh painted the images of Guru Nanak and of Heer that hang in more Punjabi homes than any other pictures in existence — a genuinely strange kind of fame, in which everyone knows the work and few know the name. And Milkha Singh, a Partition orphan, came fourth in the 400 metres at Rome in 1960 and became the most famous athlete India had produced.
What comes next
In June 1984 the Indian Army entered the Golden Temple complex, and in November of that year Sikhs were killed in the thousands in Delhi and elsewhere after Indira Gandhi's assassination. Everything since has been argued about in the shadow of those two events, which is why Punjab Now begins there.