Not all rural lineages in southern Panjab made the transition from ra‘iyati origins to riyasat as successfully as did Gurbaksh and Jodh Singh. If the Kalsia household were amongst the still considerable pool of rural folk that carved out principalities for themselves in late Mughal Panjab, there was a far larger number of lineages that continued to jostle with each other in less successful bids at expansion and stratification. This chapter considers the ensemble of these communities in the early nineteenth century. Using James Skinner's Tazkirat al-Umara, it identifies a number of powerful ra‘iyati lineages that were dominant in the region in this period. Using early correspondence of the East India Company, which had formally annexed the region in 1803 and was slowly gathering local information, this chapter then considers the coalescence and internal organization of these rural lineages. It brings their shallow hierarchies into relief, highlighting the narrow and unstable differences in status and influence between lineage elites and other members. It suggests that this tenuous stratification was the counterpart of two paradoxical tendencies that animated such lineages: the necessity to cooperate to collectively manage resources, and the ambition amongst members to establish a position of superiority within the lineage.

The weak hierarchies within ra‘iyati lineages and the circumscribed localities within which these emerged both reflected and shaped the practice of caste in the early nineteenth century. The second half of this chapter uses a close reading of Skinner's Tashrih al-Aqwam to identify some of the key aspects of this practice.

This chapter reflects upon the conditions that made southern Panjab a political and ecological frontier. The region's nature as a borderland was particularly in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Mughal imperial control receded in tandem with an efflorescence of regional polities. This fragmentation is explicable with reference to two opposing trends—the growing prosperity of rural Panjab during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and its subsequent economic stagnation. This at once facilitated the rise of ambitious new rural elites and intensified their internecine competition, as each of these fledgling states fought to attract subjects to their domains and keep them there, and to protect precious resources such as pasture and watering holes from encroachment. Yet these efforts were consistently undermined: first, by the very processes of competition to which this political efflorescence owed. Political consolidation also came up short against ecological factors. The aridity and seasonal variability of southern Panjab lent husbanding in the region a hybrid, itinerant, and opportunistic nature, which was not conducive to centralization but rather to the dispersion of authority. To illustrate the interplay of these dynamics, this chapter alternates between an analysis of enduring ecological patterns and the political context of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Local Topologies

Southern Panjab is an arid, rolling plain that roughly corresponds with the Indo- Gangetic Divide. This is the belt of land separating the river systems of the Indus and the Ganga. It is bordered on the east and southeast by the Yamuna River and the Aravalli Hills and on the north and west by the Satlaj River.

In early 1972, a group of Bengali civil servants residing in Islamabad were able to deliver a petition to David Ennals (1922–1995), a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) and human rights campaigner in the United Kingdom. Ennals, a former minister, was the leader of a group called the Friends of Bangladesh Conciliation Mission at the time. In their appeal for the safety of Bengalis in West Pakistan, the petitioners described their circumstances as below:

This chapter investigates Pakistan's encampment system for Bengali military personnel during the wartime period, 1971–1974. This reveals the captivity landscape by analysing the location, categorisation and spatial regulations of the camps in different parts of West Pakistan that housed Bengali military personnel, non-combatant servicemen and their families.

The global peasantry today is at an important crossroads. With much of the world well into a fourth decade of economic liberalisation, there are few localities left which are outside of the reach of globalised capitalist commodity or labour markets. Unprecedented improvements in transport and communication over recent decades have intensified this process of integration into the world economy. While capitalist industrialisation across the periphery is highly uneven, urban areas are experiencing a more dynamic trajectory of growth, with a surging service sector and the rise of a consumerist middle class. However, for the countryside, the expansion of capitalism has left in its wake a wave of monetisation, enclosure of land, rising costs of living and intensified inequalities (see Levien et al., 2018). These are paralleled by a cultural transformation, which includes a rising ambivalence towards the peasant ‘way of life’ (White, 2012). This is evident particularly amongst young people, who are increasingly in touch with the aspirations of globalised youth via the vastly improved telecommunications networks of recent decades and the social media revolution.

These economic and cultural transformations for the farming population converge with the rising ecological stresses associated with climate change. With spiralling costs of farm inputs and a depleted natural resource base, some of the gains of the ‘Green Revolution’ years are being reversed (Vaidyanathan, 2006). Agrarian stress, alongside cultural change amongst youth, has consolidated cyclical labour in the capitalist sector as a major feature of rural life (Shah and Lerche, 2020; Singh, 2007; Sugden, 2019; Zhan and Scully, 2018) – either via long-distance migration or ‘commuting’ to local towns.