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.

This book has sought to trace the long-term and fluctuating development of community in the arid southern fringe of Panjab from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. At the core of its analysis is the household, which this study has followed anthropologists and historians from the subcontinent and beyond in studying not simply as an expression of a self-contained ‘culture’, but rather as a vehicle for subsistence in a precarious environment. In the context of late-Mughal southern Panjab, it identified two kinds of extended household or lineage as politically key. The first of these was that of the ra‘iyat, the ordinary husbandman who earned a living through a combination of agropastoralism and raiding–soldiering. The second was that of the ra’is, the chieftain, patron, and provider, who in the eighteenth-century context was often just at a generation's remove from his humble ra‘iyati roots. It was in large part through these ra‘iyati and riyasati lineages that rural folk in southern Panjab provided for themselves, by forging relations with peers, subordinates, and patrons. It is this ensemble of relations and their material context that the first three chapters in particular sought to bring into relief.

The eighteenth century in Panjab as a whole was a time of intense rural warfare. Historians of the Mughal Empire have shown that this protracted period of conflict was the result of two opposing trends: an initial economic upswing that brought prosperity and the chance for socio-economic improvement deep into the hinterland, followed by a contraction that set in by roughly the 1720s.

This information is collected from the interviews and the personal collections of the artists and employees of the gurdwaras and the PSB and compiled with reference to the existing collection at the Bhai Mati Das Museum. The PSB does not maintain an archive of the paintings or the calendars. The following list provides the year of issue and theme of the calendar, the descriptions of the paintings, along with the credits as originally published in the PSB calendars. The calendars carried the text in English and Punjabi (and at times in Hindi); I have reproduced the English text here. All illustrations refer to history paintings unless otherwise mentioned; the more recent calendars mostly publish photographs. This is an incomplete list—due to the lack of available information. At times, it was difficult to find all the pages of a calendar or the text accompanying a painting; in some cases, no information was available about the annual calendar, which is visible as a gap or missing year (for example, the years 1977 and 1980–1988). The following text has been slightly edited for clarity and readability.

1974 Important Personalities [title provided by author, original title not available]

Bhai Vir Singh, Bhai Nand Lal Goya, Bhai Gurdas, Sant Mian Mir, Baba Buddha, Bhai Kanhaiya

1975 Women in Sikh History [to mark the UN International Year of Women]

First disciple: Bebe Nanaki

Soul of sacrifice and humility: Mata Khivi

Mata Sahib Devan contributing womanly sweetness to amrit

Mai Bhago leading forty muktas in the battlefield at Muktsar

Bibi Bhani: Guru's daughter, Guru's wife and Guru's mother

Women plying heavy grindstones in Mir Manu's prison, as punishment for their steadfast faith

The first three chapters of this book have explored the ecologically embedded processes of lineage formation unfolding in southern Panjab during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, we have seen how declining Mughal reach, as well as the prosperity that Panjab enjoyed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, created room for many new riyasati lineages to emerge from husbanding populations. On the other, this very upward mobility heightened competition between rural folk for a larger share of resources including land, water, and subjects. Against this backdrop, rural households and their lineages repeatedly transformed themselves, shedding and acquiring members, and growing more or less stratified along the way. The remainder of this book considers how the processes of lineage formation described previously were impacted by colonial rule. It does so with the awareness that the colonial state was itself rapidly changing, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, as were the priorities it set itself with the annexation of southern Panjab.

This chapter begins by outlining the strategic and military reasons for this annexation. These were anchored in Anglo-French imperial competition, which had intensified in the context of the rise of Napoleon. The Company did not expect to derive significant agrarian revenues from southern Panjab. Once the Maratha armies had been driven from this tract, it hoped to govern the region indirectly for the most part, with the help of local riyasats.

If you plan a visit to Patna, the capital of Bihar in north India, guidebooks will tell you that it is little more than “a noisy, congested city” that “shows few signs today of its former glory.” These blunt assessments reflect a broad present-day consensus. A century or so ago, however, the city had quite a different reputation. In 1926, a poet named Safi Lakhnavi visited Patna for an annual gathering of Shi‘a Muslims. As he did every year, he recited a long poem in Urdu in honor of the host city. Invoking Patna's ancient past as Pataliputra, the capital of the great Mauryan Empire, he moved through Mughal times and into the present, praising the city's elegance and the sophistication and talent of its people:

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