In the spring of 1972, the Ennals Mission, led by David Ennals, a British MP, visited Pakistan. The mission was informed by some members of the ‘stranded Bengali community’ in Pakistan that ‘a large number of senior Pakistani officers [have sought] to stop the Bengali officers for coming to the offices. They threatened action against the Bengali officials, if Government did not accept their demand.’1 Picking up from the previous chapter and offering a counterpart to the story of the capture and internment of the Bengali military personnel, this chapter explores the wartime experience of the Bengali civil servants. It traces their journey from being citizens and serving officials/officers of the Pakistani state to becoming marked collectively as a potential ‘traitor’ community, a threat to national security. Their situation highlights an important dimension of the idea of citizenship and the making of disenfranchised citizens of a nation state in a wartime-like situation. Some of the most detailed accounts of internment come from these servicemen who belonged to the privileged classes of Pakistan's Bengali community and were to be used as hostages in the international negotiations to free the captured Pakistani POWs. This chapter seeks to explain how and why.

The Bengali civil servants were interned in two stages: first, in their homes during and immediately after the Pakistan army surrendered in December 1971; second, in different camps after the Bangladeshi government announced the ‘trial of war crimes’ of the Pakistani POWs in early 1973. The chapter begins by explaining the Bengali servicemen's dismissal from government services before moving on to tracing their mass internment.

On 1 January 1972, a fortnight after the Pakistan army's surrender in Dacca (now known as Dhaka) signalling Bangladesh's liberation, some 300 civil servants in Islamabad submitted a petition, ‘The West Pakistan Class 1 Civil Servant Petition’, to President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asking ‘to remove all Bengali officials immediately from government secretariats’ and, similarly, to recall ‘all East Pakistan officials in the Pakistan foreign missions and embassies….’ They were considered dangerous and were possibly communicating with ‘enemies’, and they were to be secluded from the rest of the public and confined to one locality in Islamabad, the petition continued, so that ‘their activities and movements could be easily checked’. Further, it carried on, ‘interning allowance admissible to East Pakistani officials working in West Pakistan should be disallowed’, and all their movable and immovable assets, including ‘gold whether in the pockets, family possessions or with the individuals should be taken … till the situation is well under control’. This remarkable petition, most of whose signatories were Punjabi bureaucrats, concluded thus:

This petition irrevocably changed the position of Bengalis residing in West Pakistan, who were no longer regarded as fellow citizens but as disenfranchised citizens or enemies of the state.

This chapter explores a further aspect of colonial sedentarization, focusing upon the state's attempts to settle and agrarianize the agropastoral economy of southern Panjab. It does so by studying, as in the previous chapters, how conflicting financial, political, and moral calculations shaped these efforts. The most significant positive measures taken in this direction, as opposed to measures that impeded itinerant subsistence, pertained to irrigation. This chapter therefore begins by tracing the history of one of the oldest canalization projects undertaken by the colonial state in northern India, the repair and extension of the Delhi and Feruz Shahi canals, or, as they together came to be known, the Western Jumna Canal (WJC). The following pages highlight some of the challenges that the state encountered in the WJC's construction, the unintended effects it had upon the land and the health of rural populations, and the system of revenue assessment with which it was bound up. If in the short term, the WJC did lead to an agrarian expansion, this upward trend already began to stagnate by mid-century, even as its disadvantages became apparent.1 Its reliance upon canals in southern Panjab, where the viability of this form of irrigation was limited by the lack of perennial sources of water, underscores the narrow policy framework that in fact underpinned the colonial state's rhetoric of agrarian expansion.

The latter half of the chapter then considers patterns of agropastoral subsistence outside the tracts that benefitted from canals. It demonstrates that in the arid interior of southern Panjab, settled cultivation variously advanced and retreated over the course of the nineteenth century.

Gurdwara Sisganj in Delhi is one of the holiest Sikh shrines in India. It stands prominently on Chandni Chowk, the main street in the former Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (now popularly referred to as purani Dilli, or old Delhi). The site of Sisganj is immensely significant for its association with the martyrdom of the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur (1621–75), and also for its location, very close to the Red Fort, the seat of the Mughals. Sikh tradition2 informs us that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707) was forcing a group of Kashmiri brahmins to convert to Islam, and they approached Guru Tegh Bahadur for help. The Guru declared that if Aurangzeb could convert him, everyone else would convert; if not, the emperor must leave them alone. The Guru, along with three of his disciples, Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das and Bhai Dyala, was imprisoned at the Mughal kotwali (prison) in Chandni Chowk. The three Sikhs were tortured in the Guru's presence to scare him into converting to Islam. It is said that Bhai Mati Das was sawn in half, Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton and burnt and Bhai Dyala was boiled alive. Even after witnessing the torture and death of his followers, the Guru refused to convert.

Long-standing racialised stereotypes of Bengalis in the eastern wing of the country fed into the narrative surrounding the community in West Pakistan. The stereotypes drew inspiration from Orientalist narratives, which were reinforced by the growing political tensions in the post-colonial state. Successive West Pakistani governments were accustomed to branding everything as seditious, treacherous or disloyal. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the future founder of Bangladesh, was the lightning rod of the labels ‘anti-Pakistan’, ‘anti-state’ and ‘disloyal’ because of his view that East Pakistan had been treated as ‘a colony’ by the ruling class and because of his demand for parity between the two wings. The Daily Situation Report (DSR) for Mujib's file, named ‘P.F. 606-48’, reveals that from 1950 to 1971, he was regularly monitored and detained on various charges ranging from sedition to treason. In July 1971, Major Nazir Baig, the commander in Faridpur district during the Pakistani army crackdown in East Pakistan, told an American journalist:

Major Baig's racial slur echoes essentialist colonial stereotypes of the Bengali population based on their ethnicity and geographical location. This chapter investigates this figure of the Bengali in Pakistan before and during the wartime while posing some critical questions. Did the West Pakistani authorities’ long-standing racialised narratives about Bengalis give Major Baig the mandate to label them as disloyal co-religionists?

Visitors to Patna in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were invariably impressed with what they found there. As “the chefest marte towne of all Bengala,” Patna was among the largest cities in India.1 It struck travelers as “a very sweet city and honoured place … a place of perpetual spring, … [among] the best of the cities of Hind” and a fitting home for “many traders and comfort-loving men.”2 By the end of the nineteenth century, though, it had become a dilapidated provincial town, merely one among several middling, semiagrarian cities lining the Ganges. In this chapter, I show what Patna's decline meant for the city and its people. Patna's shifting fortunes were molded by its place within the wider region, and they shaped every aspect of the city's geography. As Patna became increasingly provincial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the consequences were felt most strongly in the older part of the city. The city's social landscape was restructured amid political contestations over health and sanitation, challenges to the nature of elite patronage and neighborhood leadership, and efforts—ultimately unsuccessful—to redirect the spatial changes taking place.

Nineteenth-century Patna was organized around two poles. In the east lay the historic Patna, built in the sixteenth century and renamed Azimabad in the early 1700s.

This chapter takes a specific example from the museum's narrative—the story of Baghel Singh's conquest of Delhi—to show the use of history paintings and the museum's narrative in contemporary heritage politics. The choice of this episode is relevant for several reasons. Bhai Mati Das Museum has four paintings dedicated to this story, and the event it describes unfolds at a site very close to the Gurdwara Sisganj and the museum, the Red Fort. Similar paintings on Baghel Singh appear in other Sikh museums too, including the Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar. Another prominent Sikh museum in Delhi, the Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum (Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Virasat Multimedia Ajaibghar) at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, not only includes this story but is also named after its main protagonist. Also, Dilli Fateh, or the Sikh conquest of Delhi, is a popularly known story and remembered with great pride in the Sikh community. And, in recent years, the story of Baghel Singh's victory over Delhi through his occupation of the Red Fort has acquired tremendous relevance in heritage politics. It is widely invoked and celebrated in prominent events (such as the Fateh Diwas celebrations at the Red Fort which began in 2014, and the historic Farmers’ Protests in Delhi in 2020–21). This claim and its symbolism are important to understand heritage politics in India today. This chapter includes a discussion of the different ways in which stories of the Sikh tradition are invoked. These ways of producing and consuming Sikh history offer insights into not only what the Sikhs think of their past but also what the Sikhs think of themselves today, of their place in contemporary India.

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.