This book explores the links between militancy and migration, two movements that transformed the socio-political landscape of late 20th-century Punjab. Re-analysing existing writings and drawing on fieldwork and local history archives, it presents a different framework to analyse the politics and social history of Punjab.

The Punjab--an area now divided between Pakistan and India--experienced significant economic growth under British rule from the second half of the nineteenth century. This expansion was founded on the construction of an extensive network of canals in the western parts of the province. The ensuing agricultural settlement transformed the previously barren area into one of the most important regions of commercial agriculture in South Asia. Nevertheless, Imran Ali argues that colonial strategy distorted the development of what came to be called the "bread basket" of the Indian subcontinent. This comprehensive survey of British rule in the Punjab demonstrates that colonial policy making led to many of the socio-economic and political problems currently plaguing Pakistan and Indian Punjab. Subordinating developmental goals to its political and military imperatives, the colonial state cooperated with the dominant social classes, the members of which became the major beneficiaries of agricultural colonization. Even while the rulers tried to use the vast resources of the Punjab to advance imperial purposes, they were themselves being used by their collaborators to advance implacable private interests. Such processes effectively retarded both nationalism and social change and resulted in the continued backwardness of the region even after the departure of the British. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

poetics of belonging in the region. --Book Jacket.

Contributed articles.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between social structure and economic performance in India and Pakistan. It seeks to establish whether the social system had a significant dysfunctional role in hindering growth in the past, and whether the situation has changed since independence. It analyses the extent to which governments in office really tried to change the social structure and the degree to which their rhetorical commitments were constrained by the inertia of tradition and by the vested interests which inherited economic and social power.