ABSTRACT
The geography of Punjab, a landlocked region divided between India and Pakistan, makes it an unlikely player in oceanic sojourns. But imperial interventions in Punjab in the middle of the nineteenth century triggered movements from Punjab that inserted this region in the littoral narrative of the Indian Ocean. Punjab historians such as Ian Talbot, David Gilmartin, Darshan Singh Tatla, Thomas Metcalf and Tan Tai Yong are divided between situating Sikh movements either in labour histories, by privileging the construction of Punjab as the granary of the Empire, or in military histories by highlighting the colonial production of Punjabis as "a martial race". Metcalf contends that the imperial connections between the dispersed sites of Sikh migration were forged by colonial officials Indian connections and interactions with Sikh soldiers producing a "distinctive policing strategy connecting India with the colonies from the 1870s to the First World War".
