In 1914 a chartered steamship carrying 376 Punjabis was held in Vancouver harbour for two months and turned away. Within fifty years, the laws that turned it away had been repealed, and Punjabis were leaving for Britain, Canada, the United States and the Gulf in numbers that dwarfed every earlier departure — from both Punjabs, and from all three communities. This is the entry in which the audience for this website comes into existence.
Causes
Three things converged in the two decades after Partition.
Labour. Post-war Britain had a severe labour shortage in exactly the industries — foundries, textile mills, transport, later airports — that would absorb Punjabi migrants. The British Nationality Act 1948 gave citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to enter, live and work in the United Kingdom.
Dislocation. Partition had severed livelihoods, moved millions of people onto unfamiliar land, and left rural Punjab on both sides with more claimants than holdings. Migration was frequently a household strategy rather than an individual decision: one member sent, the remittance supporting the rest.
The end of racial exclusion. Canada dismantled its explicitly racial immigration restrictions from the late 1940s and decisively by 1967; the United States did so with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Where the migration came from
It was regional, not general — a fact that shapes the diaspora to this day.
From Indian Punjab it came overwhelmingly from the Doaba, the tract between the Beas and the Sutlej: Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, Nawanshahr. That is why the Punjabi most often heard in Britain is Doabi, and why particular villages in those four districts have more descendants in Britain than in Punjab.
From Pakistani Punjab it came chiefly from the Jhelum–Gujrat belt, and from Mirpur — in Azad Kashmir, adjacent to that belt and tied to it by kinship, trade and language. From 1967 the filling of the Mangla Dam reservoir displaced on the order of a hundred thousand people, many of whom held British passports or resettlement compensation, and produced one of the largest single migrant flows to Britain. The river is the Jhelum: the same water this site's timeline first meets at the Hydaspes in 326 BCE, and again in the canal colonies.
Where it went
Southall, Smethwick, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Slough. Vancouver and Toronto. The Central Valley of California, where Punjabi farming families had been established since before the Komagata Maru, and the lumber towns of British Columbia. From the 1970s, the Gulf states, which took large numbers of Pakistani Punjabis on temporary contracts — a migration that produced remittances rather than settlement, and is therefore much less visible in the diaspora's account of itself than the migration to Britain and Canada.
1948
The British Nationality Act
Commonwealth citizens gain the right to enter, live and work in the United Kingdom.
Late 1940s – 1967
Canada opens
Explicitly racial immigration restrictions are dismantled, decisively by 1967.
1965
The Immigration and Nationality Act
The United States ends the national-origins quota system.
1967 onward
Mangla Dam fills
On the order of a hundred thousand people are displaced around Mirpur; one of the largest single flows to Britain follows.
1970s
The Gulf
Contract labour migration from Pakistani Punjab produces remittances rather than settlement.
Consequences — the language
Punjabi became, for the first time, a language with a large permanent readership outside Punjab: newspapers, radio, later television and film financed from Britain and Canada. It also became a language increasingly not passed on. The generational shift to English, Urdu or Hindi is documented in every destination country, and it is the reason a project like this one exists.
Consequences — the two scripts
The station sign at Southall reads Southall and ਸਾਊਥਹਾਲ. That the Punjabi appears in Gurmukhi and not Shahmukhi is part of the story rather than an accident: Britain's Pakistani Punjabis arrived in the same decades and in comparable numbers, but their public and institutional life was conducted largely in Urdu, so the same language is far less visible in its other script. One language, two scripts, and the same line running through the diaspora that runs through the land.
Long-term impact
The diaspora is now a constituent part of Punjabi culture rather than an appendix to it — in music, in the economy of both Punjabs through remittances, in the politics of both, and in the survival of the language. A history of Punjab that stops at the border is no longer a history of Punjab.
Modern place-names
Doaba — the tract between the Beas and the Sutlej, Punjab, India. Mirpur — Azad Kashmir, Pakistan. Southall — London Borough of Ealing, United Kingdom.