Never before had India experienced such a serious crisis of political legitimacy as it encountered while dealing with the Sikh militancy in the 1980s. Never before had a state in postcolonial South Asia so calculatingly exploited the service of smugglers to further its strategic ends. This period is important to explore, not only because of the latter point but because it also initiated the erection of border fencing that slashed contraband trade, ending the self-proclaimed ‘golden phase’ of 40 years history of smuggling between India and Pakistan along the Punjab border. Drawing upon the hitherto unexplored reports of the FIU at the 10-Wing Sutlej Rangers at the PR archive, this chapter reveals how the border institutions made use of the pre-existing blackia, or ‘smuggling communities’, who for decades had trafficked contraband along the Punjab border. They put their cross-border personalised trading relationships, shared networks, creative methods and knowledge of local geographies to profitable use for arms and narcotics smuggling to India, returning to Pakistan laden with escaped Sikh militants. Motivated by profit, protection and patronage, they served as privateers recruited by the Wagah authorities for their makeshift border force.

What relationships emerged from this? This final chapter reveals that this incredible collusion served the interests of all Pakistani stakeholders and opened fresh opportunities for criminal enrichment and new possibilities for reconciliation. The blackia managed to situate themselves as influential facilitators of cross-border exchanges between the government of Pakistan and the ‘Khalistan Movement’, thereby skilfully diversifying their contraband capital accumulation into new economic activities and reinforcing their political dominance. Ultimately, the Pakistan state, somehow, not only evaded the Indian government's outcry for transgression but its support for Sikh militancy also offered new possibilities for interactions and reconciliation with some sections of the Sikh community for the first time since Partition.

There are a variety of scholarly approaches to the ‘Sikh militancy’ or ‘Khalistan Movement’, emphasising the internal dynamics of the problem, the issue of Pakistani involvement and the Sikh diaspora factor. The new academic interest generated by the 1980s crisis became institutionalised in the global academy. The agenda of ‘Punjab studies’ has also seen a significant shift during this period.

Punjabi Border Ballads/Folklore Translations

saade haal nu koi na jaane

Gall nu samjhe kehra,

Saade vehre chaanan karda

raat da ghupp hangar

vaari vaari paande jaiye

Ik dooje Vall phera

dowein paase lagg jaavega

khushaali da dera

bujhe deeve bal jaavange

din mushkil de tal jaavange

Kinnan laaya khauf ka pehra

saade aase passe

darya saade kol ne vaggde

Phiriye vaang pyaase

saare saade dushman ho gaye

Khas Gaye saathon haase

kehra saade dukhaan nu vande

deve kaun dilaase

dukhra dil da dass Nation honda

ro naeen honda, has naeen honda

azalea saanjhi dharti apni

lag Gaye khauf de pehre

akhiyaan banjar honde jaavan

saare khwaab sunehre

dukh de ghumman ghere agge

kehra aake thehre

kinaan dil da haal subaave

sare annhein behre

kinne dil te leek hai vaayi

keevein aaiye jaaiye

ik dooje naal apne-apne

dukh de dard vandaaiye mausum te dastoor badal Gaye

loki ho ke door badal Gaye

mitti ho gaye khwaab suhaane

socchan utte jaale pai Gaye

hontaan utte taale pai Gaye

saddiyaan raataan chaanan mukkeya

said din vi kaale Pai Gaye

langh Gaye khushiyaan vaale vehle

kalle rah Gaye ujde mele

saanjhe saade peeng pakheru

saanjhe ne saade dukh

vareyaan toh asi vande aaye

apne dukh te Sukh

ikk dooje ton vakh naeen hona

kheencho lakh lakeeraan

raahvan da asaan kakh nahin hona

naeen phirna vaang faqiraan

ik dooje di lodh e saanoon

kaahdi aithey thorh e saanu

saade jusse peerh e Kerri

kinoon haal sunaaiyaan

loo.n loo.n de vich dard e vassde

lokaan kinj dukhaaye

dukhaan ghar vich dere laaye

keen hassiye ki gaaiye?

darte khauf de pebre lag Gaye

kaahda jashan manaaiye

jeevan de sab heele muk gaye

jeevein vaggde darya ruk Gaye

This chapter explores the history of the Punjab borderland spanning almost four decades. Its starting point is 1947, when the international boundary was created, and its ending 1987, when in the wake of the Sikh militancy in the Indian Punjab fencing began along a section of the Punjab boundary. This period constituted the development of the border as a continuous boundary-making project, in which broad processes of state-building were shaped as several levels of government were involved in the exercise of negotiating, surveying, cataloguing and mapping the border on the ground. An analysis of the border in this period reveals that boundary making was a work in progress and accordingly it provided opportunities for moving goods and the movement of people. First, this chapter studies the environment of the Punjab borderland and its enforcement, focusing on the borderline itself, from the natural boundaries to the development of border to the man-made institutions such as customs posts and police checkpoints. Second, it traces the difficulty, confusion and delays in demarcating the boundary on the ground. Finally, it investigates the emergence and gradual securitisation of the border that began with the effects of the 1965 war and culminated in the erection of fencing in the late 1980s with the crisis of Sikh militancy in the Indian Punjab. It shows how the act of crossing the border itself served to reinforce the border. Based on archival findings, the chapter challenges the standard narratives about the Punjab borderland as an ‘adult’ one and its Bengal counterpart as an ‘adolescent’, as Van Schendel has drawn. My argument, by contrast, is that the Punjab border, far from being a permanently enclosing frontier, has been as fragile, porous and permeable as its Bengal counterpart.

Haines and Chester have analysed the Punjab border politics during Partition and its aftermath. More recently, Haines has examined the relationship between Indus Basin waters, territory and bilateral politics at the local scale in divided Punjab. Chester argues that Radcliffe was aware of the desirability of preserving the unity of Punjab's canal system and draws attention to some of the problems that the unsettled border presented after Partition. She rightly declares that we comprehend Bengal borderlands more thoroughly than their Punjab counterparts. Van Schendel has provided the most sustained analysis in The Bengal Borderland, and striking contrasts between the Punjab and Bengal borderlands emerge from his work.

What and who moved across the Punjab border? Broadly, border flows could be divided into ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’. In certain cases, the ‘illegal’ movement was significant when compared with the limited ‘legal’ counterpart, especially in terms of trade and people. This chapter looks at the cross-border exchanges of people and commodities and investigates the local actions that transgressed the imposition of state authority at the border. It reveals the sheer scale of mobilities across the border, explaining the pre-partition continuities and postcolonial porosity of the border. Did the Punjabi borderlanders believe in the new international boundary? Did their movements threaten the authority of the state? Did they bind the divided region together, creating a ‘borderland’ relationship between both sides of Punjab?

Much scholarly work on borderland studies has identified different typologies of cross-border interplays that could be either a fount of affability or a perennial source of contention, depending on the landscape of borders the neighbouring states share. Along the Punjab borderland, border interactions could be categorised as what Momoh has termed as ‘maximal borderlands’ where indigenous populations across the borders have shared ethnic, cultural, linguistic and ancestral inheritance. These affinities, in the case of Punjab, helped in maintaining relations across the borderland and resulted in cross-border interactions, regardless of governments of India's and Pakistan's different political ideologies at the centre and the preventive laws at the border. Punjab's 550-kilometre-long boundary had given shape to social and economic intersections at the ‘twin’ cities—Gurdaspur–Sialkot, Lahore–Amritsar and Kasur–Ferozepur—because of their long history of trade and communication networks. In addition to these cities, numerous other small towns would serve as mandi (market) and retailing centres. Locals spoke Punjabi and agriculture remained their primary occupation, and the villagers were mostly farmers, who still engaged in the barter system as well as resembled each other in methods of housing and patterns of agriculture. Momoh argues the spatial limit and extent of a ‘maximal borderland’ depends on the area occupied by residents on each side of the boundary. In terms of an effective patrol of boundaries, ‘maximal borderlands’ with varied modes of contact—physical or emotional—among borderland residents have proved very difficult for the state because border citizens have not been directly co-opted into the official scheme of things.

A close reading of the recorded patterns of goods seized at the Wagah–Attari crossing reveals the overriding significance of gold smuggling. Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, more people were involved in gold smuggling than any other form of cross-border contraband, who were driven by prices and profits. What is inescapable throughout, however, is the continuing demand for gold that fuelled the black market in bullion. What seems to have happened is that coordinated entrepreneurs secured batches of gold wherever possible and smuggled them into the subcontinent to take advantage of the prices inflated by Partition, the state prohibition and sheer demand of gold for the societal preference for a variety of reasons. Gold flows brought some wealth to the Punjab borderland, which served as the global countryside and transit points for a vibrant flow of contraband trade with India. This chapter explores some of the contours of illicit gold trade, asking firstly what its polymorphous character could tell us about the nature of boundary and dynamics of smuggling along the Punjab border. Which social groups monopolised gold smuggling and how were they connected across the border? How serious a threat was gold smuggling to the functioning of local and national economies? What could the extent of gold smuggling tell us about the early postcolonial India–Pakistan states?

Answers to these questions have a relevance which reach well beyond Punjab to many other places in the contemporary world from Dubai to London where much gold was contrabanded. The chapter also considers how contraband gold played a part in the expansion of regions’ bullion markets in the immediate years after Partition. Comparative studies in other parts of the world have highlighted the influence of contraband gold in the development of some Asian cities’ bullion markets as well as capital accumulation. There is, however, no comparable in Pakistan studies. This exploration seeks to account for the growth of Lahore's bullion market and the consolidation of its sarafa community through the global contraband flows of gold in the early years after Partition.

Gold is a commodity of many contexts in India and Pakistan where South Asian communities traditionally valued gold both for hoarding bars and as ornaments. During British rule, restrictions on gold imports were imposed during the Second World War.

This border ballad offers a unique perspective where the IPB is perceived and represented as a ‘superimposed’ boundary on a previously homogeneous cultural landscape. Weaving together archival material and newspaper accounts with oral histories, this book explores and makes accessible the world of the Punjab borderland, which straddles the states of India and Pakistan. It has analysed the evolving social history of the Punjab borderland, presenting an alternative reading of spaces and territories, challenging the established historiographical narrative about the problematisation of the border as a concept in the Pakistan boundaries that focuses solely on the constraint side of state borders. The Punjab Borderland, in many ways, offers an account of the IPB that counters the noise created by the state security narrative— the heavily guarded border, violence, the epitome of inter-state—which is far too often one-dimensional. It corrects these accounts by re-surfacing narratives of border crossings and social relations built on mutual benefit and trust. The findings of this book have revealed the border to be vibrant and often transgressed, for trade purposes, albeit illicit, for much longer and more profitable than presumed. The establishment of Punjab as an international boundary and new restrictions on trade and mobility that accompanied it significantly disrupted the traditional lifeways of the region. There were however distinct advantages to the local population in the borderland where it presented untold benefits and people continued to carry goods across the new international lines, responding to the state-imposed restrictions in varied ways and creating their own native values about transborder mobilities.

With no previous experience of bordering, Punjab border population proved themselves highly adept at exploiting the newly created international border. People visited relatives on the other side of the line and attended social events such as marriages and funerals. They also attended each other's markets and visited cinema theatres even during periods of tension. While people would cross the border for social necessities, cross-border trade formed the most enduring basis of continuing cross-border interplays that challenged national definitions of space and sovereignty and resiliently persisted decades after Partition.

The journey towards completing this book has been a long one. My early inspiration for this began shortly after completing my PhD under the mentorship of Ian Talbot, who taught me how to be a historian and to whom I owe a great intellectual debt for guiding me to think differently about South Asian history and partition studies. I believe this book is better thanks to his intellectual generosity and mentorship. The seeds of this book were planted in 2008 when during my PhD fieldwork, I stumbled across numerous documents in the several Thana Record Rooms in Punjab. They contained thousands of files and registers, revealing the 1947 partition-related events, the opposite of what I had expected to find. Partition and Locality (OUP 2012) was the outcome of my research of mulling over my sources. I have since dug more and realised the importance of local sources, not merely because it was part of my training (at Warwick and Southampton) to be as true as one could be to the voices of the past, and their relationships to power and subalterns, but because to go on and question everything we thought we ‘knew’.

There has been a proliferation of research on South Asian partition studies over the past decade, which reflects its centrality in the everyday interactions between the postcolonial state and its new citizens relating to refugee status, state practices over citizenship, and categories of identities and belonging in South Asia. This begs me whether the aftermath of Partition could be tested through a different lens than it has been. The Punjab Borderland is a pioneering work, both in its intellectual scope and its archival significance, and offers a fascinating insight into how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was made, subverted and transformed. Dispelling the established historiographical narratives of an increasingly militarised border symbolic of interstate animosity, this book corrects these accounts by resurfacing narratives of border crossings and social relations built on mutual benefit and trust. A unique and timely analysis of the Indo-Pakistan borderland in the decades after independence, this book conceptualises the making of contraband as more than just a way for borderland societies to evade the state imposition of a partitioned geography on their lifeworlds but as a catalyst for enabling social mobility and political empowerment for the population involved and a thriving market for consumption in the urban centres.

This chapter explores the history of postcolonial criminalisation in the Punjab borderland. It investigates first the social organisation of contraband trade and the ethnic constitution of the ‘smuggling community’ in the Punjab border. It then examines both individual actions and the structured system of contraband trade. The chapter graphs a typology of blackia— a term that covered a range of activity from involvement in the black market to smuggling—from the ‘small fry’ to the ‘gold kings’ as per the roles they performed in the smuggling operations and their intertwined relationships both at the border and transnationally. Drawing upon both local archival sources and Punjabi border ballads, this typology helps us to clarify how the smuggling economy, in general, operated at the Punjab borderland. How did local groups relate to larger organised flows of smuggling and what roles did they play? How were they entrenched and connected? To what extent did the milieu of gold smuggling affect the border dwellers? Which social groups constituted an emerging blackia or ‘smuggling community’? Who were the ‘gold kings’ of the Punjab borderland and how best could their actions be understood? Did they stimulate entrepreneurship and popular empowerment, or promote criminality and exploitation? Finally, to what extent was Lahore's post-independence development affected by the wealth of smugglers? A remarkable finding of this exploration is the emergence of a new borderland elite who grew rich by seizing opportunities to smuggle large amount of goods and human cargo.

Recent studies have shown that opportunities are brought about by ‘border effects’ in the social, political and economic landscape along and related to borders. Their realities on the ground are not simply outcomes of national policies on each side but instead outcomes of a creative interaction between opportunities and constraints, which Nugent has referred to as ‘a single package’. Borderland societies, especially those with shared cultural affinities, are often skilful at appropriating, subverting and posing astute challenges to border authorities and policies of the state. Nugent criticises the conventional wisdom about African boundaries that focuses solely ‘on the constraints side of state borders’. ‘Apart from opening up new trade routes, the smuggling complex summons forth a new breed of entrepreneurs whose very livelihoods depended upon the perpetuation of the international boundary.’

Smuggling along the Punjab border was rampant in the years following decolonisation. Lahore and Amritsar constituted its key nodes, spinning together a regional economy, the spatial and functional limits of which, this chapter argues, exceeded the official trade between India and Pakistan. Most of the contraband flows were everyday household, consumer goods and commercial items. The Wagah–Attari crossing that divided the cities was pivotal for moving goods and movement of people. The main advantage of this route seems to have been that it was an area of pre-partition linkages of trade and communication. Besides, it had in the cities of Lahore and Amritsar—connected by trading networks, migrants and smugglers—a fairly safe route to Delhi. Despite the fact that the border administrative presence was stronger at the Wagah–Attari crossing than anywhere else along the Punjab border, this checkpost was the waystation for the traffics. The flow of ‘legal’ goods across the border provided a convenient cover to hide its ‘illegal’ counterparts in commercial cargo conveyances. What were the types of illicit movement of goods and how extensive were these activities and their effects? How did varying types of actors benefit from different types of contraband trades? What interactions did contraband commodities hold with the bazaars and urban consumers? Did these flows defy the state authority? Or were they minor flows that could be tolerated across the porous border? What were the reactions of society to contraband goods? Finally, what light do these practices shine on the early Pakistan state?

Informal border crossing is more frequently found than could be imagined from official accounts. Documents from the Lahore archives reveal that the contraband trade between Lahore and Amritsar had exceeded its ‘legal’ counterpart and it developed as an almost parallel economy with its own values and significance. Yet surprisingly, there is very little scholarship on the implications of smuggling in Punjab, although research on its Bengal counterpart has developed. This chapter investigates the role of the 1947 partition-related migrants in cross-border trades by focusing on the influence of consumer goods and considering the contribution of smuggling economy, which acted as an enabler of upward social mobility in the period immediately after Partition. It explores the wider social and cultural implications contraband trade had for the entrenchment of consumerism.

India and Pakistan tried to deal with the potential threats of smuggling through the physical presence of forces at the border and to erect a body of legislation to stop illegal traffic. This chapter details the triumphs and frustrations of the law enforcement's attempts to regulate contraband along the borderlands, on high seas, in the air and in parliament. It explains to what extent smuggling was to be controlled through the long length of the border. What nodes of control and mechanisms of surveillance were employed to establish territorial legitimacy and economic sovereignty? What was the best mechanism for keeping the borderland societies under control? Were lessons that were learned at one border applied at the other? An examination of the state response to the threat of unregulated mobilities in the early years of independence not only provides an understanding of the ‘everyday state’ working at the new international border but also sheds light on the evolution of the formation of a modern system of border schemes, their implementation and challenges to them by mundane transgressions of the borderlanders.

The chapter reveals that while policing, legislation and technologies of enforcement continued to be changed and upgraded over the years, India and Pakistan largely failed to stem the rising tide of smuggling. In that sense, it clarifies both the mechanics and the failures of state-making at another level. The chapter also shows how border institutions involved local people directly in anti-smuggling measures through the informal intelligence-gathering system. Finally, the chapter shows how anti-smuggling efforts significantly increased during Ayub Khan's military rule in Pakistan. These drives were intended as a fix for the problem of price increases and to combat hoarding. While they formed part of the initial attempt to restore some semblance of law and order after months of crime, this chapter reveals how these regulation initiatives were subsequently deployed as weaponry against rival politicians. At the very same time, this study exposes how paradoxically Pakistan's ‘gold king’ smugglers immensely depended on a wide range of institutional resources and state patronage.

The state had a significant role to play in the smuggling operations at the Punjab border. There is a great deal of literature that looks at transnational illegal economics at border areas as places where the state fails to rule efficiently.