Recent history is the hardest kind to write, because the people in it are alive, the disputes are unsettled, and every figure has a constituency behind it. That is a reason to be careful, not a reason to leave it out — and leaving it out is what most Punjabi-language resources do.

Why the era starts in 1984

In June 1984 the Indian Army entered the Harmandir Sahib complex at Amritsar. In late October Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and in the first days of November organised killings of Sikhs took place in Delhi and other cities. A decade of insurgency and counter-insurgency in Punjab followed, ending in the mid-1990s. Casualty figures for all three are contested, and the commissions and court cases about them ran for more than twenty years.

Nothing about Punjab since is legible without those events, including things that look unconnected: patterns of emigration, the tone of diaspora politics, why certain songs are banned and certain others are anthems. Articles on each are the next thing to be written for this site, sourced to the commission reports and the contemporary record, with the disputes named as disputes.

What the era already holds

Pash belongs exactly to this moment. Punjab's great revolutionary poet — sabh ton khatarnaak hunda hai, saade sufneyaan da mar jaana, the most dangerous thing is the death of our dreams — was shot dead at his village in 1988 by militants, at thirty-seven. Surjit Patar wrote through the same years and lived to become the elder of Punjabi letters, the poet governments and protest camps both quoted, until his death in 2024.

Across the border, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan took qawwali out of the shrine and onto the world's festival stages from the mid-1980s, and made Punjabi devotional music a global genre before he died at forty-eight in 1997. He is the reason a great many non-Punjabis have heard the language sung at all.

The things this era is actually about

Four subjects run through Punjab's present, and the articles for them are commissioned:

  • Water. The Green Revolution's bill came due. Groundwater under central Punjab is falling metre by metre, the river-sharing disputes left over from 1966 are unresolved, and the autumn burning of paddy stubble is now an annual public-health emergency across north India.
  • The farmers' protest. In 2020 three farm laws brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Punjabi farmers to the borders of Delhi for a year. The laws were repealed in November 2021. It is the direct descendant of a movement that started in 1907 at Pagri Sambhal Jatta.
  • Leaving. Punjab now exports its young people the way it once exported wheat — to Canada above all, through a study-visa industry that reshaped whole towns, and lately into deportation flights and closing doors.
  • The music. Punjabi is one of the most-streamed languages on earth. That story runs from the folk singers of the 1950s through UK bhangra and Chamkila to artists selling out arenas in cities where nobody speaks the language.

Where this sits

This era is the thinnest on the site and the fastest-moving. If you want the long view first, start at Ancient & Classical and walk forward, or take the whole timeline in one page.