Compounding issues even further, the population of the Punjab had risen significantly, causing urban overcrowding and leaving some families with very little land upon which to subsist. Nevertheless, agricultural yields remained unpredictable, and repeated shortages in 18 damaged the financial stability of local farmers. The significant extension of canal and irrigation infrastructure by the British over the past decades had increased the yield per acre of Punjabi fields prodigiously, leading the price of land per acre to skyrocket, rising nearly 400% by the end of the century.

By the 1870s, however, Punjab had come under significant financial strain. The last part of South Asia to fall to colonial rule, Punjab occupied a significant position in the British Raj, with its plains producing vast surpluses and its denizens forming a disproportionate majority in the British Indian armed forces. It was in the turbulent Punjab that the Sikh religion first emerged in the 15th century, and it was with the Sikhs, in 1849, that Punjab fell to yet another conqueror, the British East India Company, at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War.

If the Khyber was the door to Hindustan, Punjab was the foyer, with conquerors from Alexander to the Hephthalites to Babur having established their first (or only) foothold in South Asia in the Punjab.

Punjab, a vast river basin straddling the Hindu Kush and the Gangetic Plain has for centuries served as the entry point to the South Asia peninsula.

Echoes of Mutiny by Seema Sohi