Collaborating elite of Kalabagh and patterns of control in colonial Punjab, 1849–1939

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the local dynamics of control by the rural elite in colonial Punjab over agricultural land, the informal credit market and labour supply. I argue, the landed elite in collaboration with bureaucratic patronage, developed linkages between indigenous institutions and imperial ideology, controlled and manipulated the means of power and wealth. This led to a one-dimensional flow of capital and profit, towards elite and state, causing a serious check on social mobility and economic development. In a local study of a rural town, Kalabagh, in the north-west of Pakistani Punjab, the article brings forward an understudied aspect of colonial policies which followed a different trajectory from the rest of the Punjab. The colonial state, instead of development, maintained the structure of society under feudal setup. Rais, the ruling elite of the town, as colonial collaborator, managed the moneylending system in his estate and trapped the wage labourers in complex debt bondage, perpetuating jajmani type relationship in the twentieth century. At one level this arrangement invigorated hierarchical differentiation and dispossession of rural proletariat, at another level, the social differentiation acted as an instrument to mobilize the community for collective action towards nationalist discourse.