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ABSTRACT
For the last 10 years, the Pakistan army has not been able to collect rent from tenant farmers on its military farms in central Punjab. In this article, I analyse the historical and cultural significance of this contested land by using insights from recent literature on the politics of infrastructure to examine the contingency of rule in Pakistan, a postcolonial state, which is dominated by its army. I illustrate these dynamics by exploring the challenge brought up by a peasant movement to tacit cultural understandings about land and political subjectivity in central Punjab, the folkloric heartland of Pakistani nationalism. I argue that place-based movements, like the Punjab Tenants Association, can radically challenge our sense of place by giving a relational account of land as both a material substance and a crucial link in the set of relations that define moral, economic and political life. This approach broadens the emerging study of infrastructures by engaging insights from science/technology studies and subaltern studies to examine how cultural legacies of colonial infrastructure projects shape state–society relations in Pakistan.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Fieldwork interviews in Okara Military Farms conducted in 2008. See Siddiqa (Citation2007) for a good overview of the Pakistan military’s growing commercial and real estate interests.
2. As I will show in this article, these military farms were established as part of the canal colonization of central Punjab that transformed this region from an open “frontier” inhabited mobile populations of riverine farmers, nomads into the centre of modern agriculture in colonial India.
3. The AMP protests challenged the conservative image of central Punjab, the folkloric heartland of Pakistani nationalism, by foregrounding the history of canal irrigation and the role of infrastructure in shaping the economic and political sociality in rural Punjab.
4. The rural continues to be seen through romantic tropes of nature and wilderness even though the bulk provisioning of energy, food and mineral resources is sourced from/through complex network of markets. An infrastructural approach to politics of land and livelihood can also open up new understanding of the contingency of land relations and socio-technical circumstances of distribution and recognition that give specific meaning to land and land rights claims. As Rob Nixon, the literary critic and environmental humanities scholar, sums up the spectral play of visibility and invisibility in his book “Slow Violence: (2012), where he shows how rural communities in global south remain “unimagined” until they come into focus around specific struggles against dispossession.
5. Farid Fieldwork interview in Okara Military farms conducted in 2007 see Appendix of HRW (Citation2004). The tenants obtained communication between the military and the Executive District Office Revenue (EDOR) that clearly stated that the land in question belonged to provincial government of Punjab and not the military (BoR Citation2001). Further archival research revealed that the disputed farmland in Okara was transferred to the Ministry of Defense on lease. Memo No. 18440S dated 9-8-13 for a period of 20 years @ 15000/- per annum for the entire land. Furthermore, the correspondence revealed that the military lease was extended for a five-year period until 1938 and the Ministry of Defence (under British rule) continued to pay the lease until 1943. The revenue board did not have any records for a half century of commercial crops like wheat, sugarcane, rice and corn.
6. Khushi Baba Fieldwork interview in Okara military farms conducted in 2007.
7. The British colonial rule was rooted in a particular conception of nature that saw it as a resource to be commanded and controlled. This ethos of environmental control meant that the indigenous livelihoods that were tied to wandering, grazing or trade without permanent settlement were seen as signs of inferiority and evolutionary backwardness. Raw nature was wasteful, even dangerous, unless it was tamed by permanent settlement in the English utilitarian tradition.
8. There is a rich literature on the customs and manners of Punjab’s tribes, castes and chiefs. One of the most influential and notable examples is C.L Tupper’s Punjab Customary Law, a comprehensive survey and guideline for colonial administration of newly annexed lands in the Punjab.
9. The year 1857 is synonymous with the great rebellion against British East India Company spread throughout central and Northern India and shook up the British rule in India.
10. Arya Samaj, Ahmediya Movement, Christian Missionaries all represented different strains of religious mobilizations that were informed by a modern understanding of piety and a mission towards social–moral reform to inculcate modernity South Asia.
11. However, this arrangement also resulted in considerable tenant resistance as early as 1907 when peasant farmers demanded full proprietary rights to the lands that they had settled as part of canal colonization schemes.
12. The Pakistani state has repeatedly charged and arrested AMP leaders under the Anti-Terrorism Act. However, the AMP mobilization has enjoyed broad support from civil society organizations, oppositional political parties and activists. This wide network of support has made it difficult for the military to sustain a prolonged siege or to suppress the movement through coercive pressure. However, it should be noted that there are no guarantees that the AMP will be able to sustain the same level of support given the deteriorating security conditions in Pakistan and the state’s heavy handedness in matters currently legislated under anti-terrorism laws.
13. It is important to note that these notions were shared by agricultural plains-dwellers communities that were more hierarchical, and the expansion of irrigation frontier was not favoured by the nomadic and pastoral communities who were subsequently labelled as “Criminal Tribes” for refusing to permanently settle down for cultivation did not share this view.
14. The name of Narkashin Singh came up several times in oral histories of older tenant farmers who epitomized the example of a strict but fair farm managers who looked out for the welfare of the tenant farmers.
15. The term “moral economy” is usually attributed to British historian Thompson who analysed eighteenth-century food riots in his classic essay “Moral Economy of the English Crowd in Eighteenth Century” to argue that the outbreaks of food riots were not spontaneous occurrences but rather these were collective actions of protest against encroaching “cash market” that violated traditional norms of justice and fair use (Citation2015). Thompson enlarged the domain of economic history by underlining the significant role played by traditional norms, ideals and values that guide the social organization of production and consumption in Europe. Historical anthropologists have questioned the Eurocentric narratives of economic transition by highlighting the vital role of plantation economies, colonial trade and peasant economies in the making of the world economy and global histories of labour (Mintz Citation1985, Wolf 1982, Trouillot 2004). More recently, cultural anthropologists have examined the cultures of capitalism by tracking the effects of communication technologies, transport and energy grids in the making of the modern world (Bear Citation2007; Larkin Citation2013; Mains Citation2012).
16. The AMP mobilization emerged at the time when the Pakistani state joined the deeply unpopular American-led War on Terror. The tenant farmers saw geopolitical events like the continued fighting in Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq from the prism of their own struggle against privatization and dispossession and they saw the military as too complacent to American interests.
17. Hanif, interview by the author, Okara, 7 March 2007.
18. His statement questions the very existence of Pakistan, while at the same time he expresses a wish for such recognition (or perhaps desire for such an idea of Pakistan based upon inclusion, better economic social justice or land rights). Here, the idea of nation (Pakistanis) is posed against the state (Pakistan). These remarks come up regularly in conversations about the state of things in the village, such as the rising cost of living, the decreasing returns from agriculture and the ‘jarnailś’ greed for the land. These comments illustrate something different from what Benedict Anderson defines as an “imaginary community living in empty homogenous time” (Anderson Citation1991). Instead, here we see clashing ideas of nation, identity and even temporality signified by “Pakistan”.
19. This point has been made by economic anthropologists like David Graeber who show the hybrid nature of markets as they become embedded in the cultural, political milieu where they take shape in context. Similarly, political anthropologists like Ajanta Subramanian and Partha Chatterjee show how of reciprocities, patronage politics of obligation akin to gift relationships survive and flourish in the contemporary market and political domains in South Asia.
20. Veena Talwar Oldenburg has documented the shifting meaning of dowry gift exchange, dahej, that was traditionally controlled by women was transformed into a different kind of transaction among property-owning families. Oldenburg’s argues that changes in land relations in canal colonies transformed the practice of Dowry, a customary practice of gift exchange that was transformed into a more contentious, competitive and even murderous custom (see Oldenburg Citation2010).
21. These texts also show how the canal recedes into the backdrop as part of the natural landscape while the train comes to represent the technical modernity of the colonial state.
22. Eaton (Citation2002), “The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid”, 203–225.
23. See Mitchell (Citation2002), Rule of Experts and Scott, on State Simplification in Seeing Like the State,
24. Glmartin, “Scientific Empire and Imperial Science”.
25. Craib (Citation2004), Cartographic Mexico, 55.
26. See Lefebvre, Production of Space, 68–168. Lefebvre’s intricate reading of space as a set of social relations between people, things and forces in a dialectical fashion where the local doesn’t simply vanish but is reworked and brought into layered relations where local spaces become a medium or a point of conjuncture, a meeting point between local and translocal fields of power and forms of knowledge Production of Space. Also See Mitchell (Citation2002), Rule of Experts, 19–49 for a materialist understanding of agency.
27. Settlement map that breaks down each village along discrete religious, biradari and occupation lines.