Class, Caste and Housing in Rural Pakistani Punjab the Untold Story of the Five Marla Scheme

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DOI: 10.1177/006996671204600303

2012 46: 311Contributions to Indian SociologyHaris Gazdar and Hussain Bux Mallah

of the Five Marla SchemeClass, caste and housing in rural Pakistani Punjab: The untold story

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Class, caste and housing in rural

Pakistani Punjab: The untold story

of the Five Marla Scheme

Haris Gazdar and Hussain Bux Mallah

This article examines the contemporary signicance of caste as a dimension of social

stratication in Pakistani Punjab, using rural housing as a vantage point. Work on the

interplay of class and kinship group, mediated by status hierarchy between agricultural

and non-agricultural castes, serves as a point of departure. The organisation of the system

of private property in rural land, based on the colonial village record and land alienation

laws, is actively used to maintain class power and status hierarchy between kinship groups.

Post-independence reforms sustained caste disadvantage, which is particularly conspicuous

with regard to housing. The Five Marla Scheme was an exceptional intervention, rooted in

populist electoral politics of the 1970s, which provided residential land to rural workers

belonging to non-agricultural castes. This signicant but dormant and largely undocumentedintervention is examined through the case study of a large village in Okara district. We

argue for a re-engagement with caste as a valid category for the understanding of class

and citizenship in Pakistani Punjab.

Keywords:Class, caste, housing, land

I

Understandings of caste in Pakistan

Following independence in India and Pakistan, engagements with issues

of caste diverged in the two countries to the extent that discussion of caste

virtually disappeared from academic as well as policy conversations in

Contributions to Indian Sociology46, 3 (2012): 311336SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/006996671204600303

Haris Gazdaris at Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi, Pakistan.

Email: [email protected]

Hussian Bux Mallah is at Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi, Pakistan.

Email: [email protected]

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Contributions to Indian Sociology46, 3 (2012): 311336

312 /HARISGAZDARANDHUSSAINBUXMALLAH

Pakistan. While early post-partition rural ethnographies in Pakistani Punjab

persevered with the colonial interest in occupational caste (Eglar 2010;Honigmann 1954; Marriot 1960; Smith 1952), kinship group dynamics

began attracting attention away from religiously ordained hierarchy. Alavi

(1972) proposed that the prevalent Indian sense of caste was inappropri-

ate in Pakistani Punjab, where patrilineal endogamous kinship groups

(biraderis) were stratied, not by status but by economic resources and

political power.

We take Rouses (1983, 1988) analysis of the interplay between class,

kinship group and occupational caste in a Sargodha village in the 1970s

as a point of departure.1She found the kinship group (referred to as

quomrather than biraderi) to be a primary unit of political solidarity as

well as factional difference. The view from a village, stratied not only

between agrarian classes but also hierarchically ordered occupational

castes (agricultural versus non-agricultural), offered cogent insight into

technological change, market penetration and political currents in rural

Pakistani Punjab. By contrast, Hussain (1980), who was also interested

in agricultural growth and agrarian structure, based his analysis on class

dened exclusively in terms of asset ownership and employment. Muchof social science research on rural Pakistani Punjab since then has done

the same.2Our return to Rouse (1988) is based on a conviction that three

decades later, the interplay between class, kinship, group identity and

occupational caste remains a factor in shaping social disadvantage in

particular, and economic and political outcomes in general.3

In the meanwhile, the Indian debate on caste has moved beyond its

original concern with status hierarchy.4The perspective on caste as soli-

darity group diminishes the importance of status to that of an instrument

1Ahmed (1972) rst studied social stratication in this village in the mid-1960s.2 The few village-based studies that were carried out after the 1970s either focused

exclusively on economic dimensions of class (Mahmood 1988; Nabi 1985), or analysed

class and kinship group as autonomous categories (for example, Khan 1991; Lefebvre 1990;

Rauf 1987). Interest in the relationship between class and kinship group has revived recently

(for example, Cheema, Mohmand and Naqvi 2007).3Bonded labour is one area where the interplay of class, kinship group and occupational

caste is known to be important (Martin 2009). Statistical analysis of village survey datarevealed the kinship group as a signicant correlate of household economic well-being, even

after controlling for land ownership and education. The effect was strongest in central Punjab

for kinship groups associated with non-agricultural occupational castes (Gazdar 2007).4Desai and Dubey (2011) provide a useful summary.



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Housing in rural Pakistani Punjab/313


for the projection of political power, rather than as a primary source of

hierarchy.5

This is close to where Alavi (1972) and Rouse (1988) were intheir understanding of kinship groups (biraderis or quoms) in Pakistani

Punjab. The extent to which caste-based differences in well-being in India

today reect historical rather than current practices of active discrimination

is another area of empirical study that keeps open the question of status.6

Moreover, the role of policy in shaping social categories has emerged

as an important concern in Indian discussions of castewith regard to

colonial governance and post-independence afrmative action (Dirks

2001; Mayer 1993). While it is difcult to attribute causality within an

overarching narrative, the focus on policy has greatly enriched the debate

on institutional change.

This article examines the contemporary signicance of caste as a

dimension of social stratication in Pakistani Punjab using rural hous-

ing as a vantage point. We depart from earlier work on stratication by

shifting our focus from the distribution of land ownership to social and

institutional inequalities in the system of property rights in rural Pakistani

Punjab. We are particularly interested in the Punjab Five Marla Scheme,

a housing programme for the rural landless, rst introduced in the 1970s.This scheme represented, in part, the fullment of pledges made by the

populist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), as it channelled class conict into

an electoral victory. The intervention was short-lived and became dormant

when the PPP lost power in a military coup. The Five Marla Scheme

was noticed by Rouse (1988) in her eldwork in the 1970s, as well as in

political commentaries at the time (Sayeed 1980), but fell into relative

obscurity despite its signicance as a rare government intervention whose

intended beneciary was a class largely populated by the lowest castes inrural Pakistani Punjab.

5This is an implication of Srinivass (1987) thesis of the local dominant caste. Studies of

landless labour in different regions of India have highlighted the importance of caste in the

construction of class solidarity among upwardly mobile groups. While ritual purity was a key

dimension in Bremans (1993) early writing on class relations between Anavil landlords and

Dubla labourers, his later work was more attentive to classcaste solidarity (Breman 2007).

Lerches (1999) understanding of the situation of western UP Jats is comparable.6See, for example, Desai and Dubeys (2011) analysis of survey data on caste and Gazdar

(2007) for a similar exercise in Pakistan. Shah et al. (2006) provide useful empirical evidence

on current practices of active discrimination across India, while Ram (2004) examines

untouchability in contemporary Indian Punjab within a historical-political context.



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II

Colonial land administration and caste

The colonial land administration system in Punjab was based on the vil-

lage record, which remains the legal record of property rights in rural

areas. The mauza, or the land revenue village, is the territorial division

for which land revenue liabilities were rst settled by the colonial govern-

ment in the late 19th century. The village record consists of a eld map

(shajra kishtwar), a genealogical tree (shajra nasab), a record of rights

(jamabandi) and additional observations of land revenue ofcials. The

West Pakistan Land Revenue Act of 1967, which is the legal foundation

of the system, is in turn based on a framework of denitions, laws, regula-

tions and manuals developed in the course of the land revenue settlement.7

While land revenue itself is now an insignicant source of taxation, land

revenue administration acts as a de factoland registry.

The village record requires the identication of individuals with rights

to the land of the mauza by paternity and caste traced through the male

line. The most privileged form of property right is the ownership of cul-

tivated land and corresponding shares in any uncultivated area within the

mauza. Such owners, recognised as haqdaran-e-zaminin land revenue

administration terminology, are part of the proprietary body collectively

known aspatti. Below this category, there are those who may own cul-

tivated land but do not enjoy rights in the uncultivated area (known in

land administration terms as malik qabzaor possession holders). Then

there are muzaras(non-owner tenants) who are ofcially recognised as

cultivators. Agricultural labourers and village service providers may be

recorded as residents but not as cultivators or as having property entitle-ments in the village.

According to the Settlements Manual, A village community is a body

of proprietors who now or formerly owned part of the village lands in

common[and]the members of the proprietary body in a true village

community are often united by real or assumed ties of kinship (Mahmood

2006: 932).8The pattis collective interests and liabilities are represented

7

A number of legal authors have reproduced the text of the 1967 law, subsequentamendments and provided commentaries on its interpretation in case law. We have made

extensive use of Mahmood (2006).8Nazir (1981) provides a corresponding account of the proprietary body before and

since the establishment of the colonial government.



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by the lambardarwho is recognised as an agent of the land revenue admin-

istration.9

The entitlements of the haqdaran-e-zamin are essentially sharesin the land resources of the revenue estate that come closest to unfettered

private property rights but also include rights in common property and

rights of pre-emption.

The development of irrigation canals from the 1880s onwards and

the colonisation of newly opened land in western Punjab by migrants

from northern and eastern districts represented a major change in the

geography and demography of the region (Ali 1988). Here, it was the

government rather than the proprietary body that owned non-cultivated

land, but grantees eventually came to acquire ownership rights and rights

of pre-emption that were analogous to those enjoyed by the proprietary

body in the older villages. Grantees in a canal village were usually entire

kinship groups of cultivators from the same village, whose leaders were

appointed as lambardars (The Punjab Government 1996).10

Ibbetsons (1986) inuential classication of Punjabs population

was based on the rst census of the province in the 1880s. Occupational

castes were divided into three broad categories: landowners; priests and

merchants; and artisans and menials. Economic importance, social statusand political power were ascribed to these groups in this very order. It was

in the social organisation of the village that the caste groups enumerated

in the population census were actually visible. The hierarchy of functions

between landowners, muzara tenants, village servants (kammis) and menial

workers in the village was reected not only in wealth but also in status,

and ultimately in political power.11The institution ofseypor harvest obli-

gations of cultivators (landowners and tenants) to village or patti servants

in return for service throughout the year regulated economic relationsbetween the two groups and was still in evidence though declining into

the 1970s (Nazir 1991; Rouse 1988).

Economic and social hierarchy between cultivators and others was

given legal expression in 1900 with the Punjab Land Alienation Act which

9See also Marriott (1953) for a discussion of the linkage between village social

organisation, and particularly patti and land revenue administration.10

Ali (1988) documented the efforts that were undertaken during canal colonisation forpreserving elements of existing village social organisation of the colonists home regions.

11Colonial administration saw this hierarchy in village social organisation as self-evident

and unremarkable (Marriott 1953) in proprietary and colony villages alike (The Punjab

Government 1994, 1996).



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divided Punjab society formally into agricultural and non-agricultural

tribes. The stated purpose of the law was to protect landowners, who thecolonial government regarded as the bedrock of agricultural growth and

political stability, from the loss of mortgaged property to professional

moneylenders (Ali 1988; Islam 1995). The law regulated the transfer of

agricultural land from an agricultural tribe owner to a person from a

non-agricultural tribe. The land revenue bureaucracy became the arbiter

of the tribe or kinship group to which a person belonged and whether that

tribe was agricultural. While the primary target of this law was the class of

professional moneylenders, it also provided a legal basis for turning occu-

pational groups such as kammis and menial workers into non-agricultural

tribes. The village record combined with the Punjab Land Alienation Act

ensured a close association between tribal or kinship group identity and

occupational caste.

Despite a number of amendments over the decades, essential features

of the legal framework governing land administration remain unchanged.

The West Pakistan Land Revenue Act of 1967 (subsequently called the

Punjab Land Revenue Act of 1967) is the foundation of the formal system

of property rights in land in rural Punjab, and is based on the village recordwhich consists of a cadastre, family lineage and jamabandi. The hierarchy

between agricultural and non-agricultural tribes is also retained through

the currency of the Punjab Land Alienation Act.12India, which inherited

the same law in its part of partitioned Punjab, repealed it in 1951 through

a constitutional order (Ram 2004).

The land revenue administration system did not only stratify the popula-

tion between cultivator and non-cultivator castes, but also privileged the

claims and rights to land of haqdaran-e-zamin over others in rural Punjab.The Punjab Land Revenue Act of 1967, like its colonial predecessor, had

no jurisdiction over the village site as this was not assessed for revenue

(Mahmood 2006: 9). Nor was there any other authority that was respon-

sible for maintaining a register of property rights within village sites. The

Land Settlement Manual implied that the village site (abadi deh) was

divided among pattis of haqdaran-e-zamin, whose individual and collec-

tive property rights in the cultivable land of the mauza were part of the

12In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the provisions of the Punjab Land Alienation Act

that empower the district land revenue ofcer to regulate the transaction of land between

agricultural and non-agricultural tribes (Muhammad Anwar versus Deputy Commissioner

Faisalabad, Supreme Court Monthly Review 422, 2002).



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village record. The village record included a record of abadi deh but this

was based on surveys conducted at the time of the land settlement, thelast of which was completed in 1915 (ibid.: 139), and invariably favoured

the original proprietary body over others.

In older proprietary villages, it was assumed that the individual owner

of cultivated land and a patti or group of pattis made provision for the

accommodation of their dependent seyp service providers and menials.

Kammis and menials who served a patti or the entire village were entitled

to live in the village at the pleasure of the proprietary body. Individual

owners were responsible for housing their private farm and domestic

servants. In canal colonies, village sites were demarcated and plots within

these were allotted to land grantees. Many such villages also had separate

quarters with smaller plot sizes for village servants.13Farm land, known

as the kammiahata(kammi square), was also set aside for subsistence

farming by village kammis (The Punjab Government 1996). Unlike older

proprietary villages, village sites in the canal colonies were liable to land

revenue. The jamabandi, therefore, included a record of ownership or ten-

ure of the village site (jamabandi abadi) even though most residents were

actually exempt from land revenue. The jamabandi abadi is signicantbecause it is one of the few revenue documents where village servants

or kammis are actually supposed to be recorded (Mahmood 2006: 873).

Even in these canal colony villages, however, the kammis entitlement

to a subsistence farm and housing was in lieu of service to a patti and

regulated by the lambardar (The Punjab Government 1996).

Post-independence population census and large-scale surveys in Paki-

stan do not report data on caste. To get a measure of the distribution of

occupational castes at the time of independence and Punjabs partitionbetween India and Pakistan, we need to go back to the 1931 population

census. Communal displacement left few Hindus and Sikhs in the Pakistani

portion of Punjab which, in turn, received the main body of Muslim mi-

grants from the Indian side of the province. Data for undivided Punjabs

Muslim population in 1931, therefore, provide us with a proxy for the

caste distribution that Pakistani Punjab might have started with at the

time of independence.

13The village site was usually allotted 25 acres, and typical grantee homesteads measured

over 1,000 square metres (The Punjab Government 1996: Appendix 14). These were

considered sufciently large compounds for housing the grantees, their private servants

and farm animals.



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The share of the population of Punjab Muslims by occupational castes

is reported in Table 1.14

Between ofcially recognised agricultural and non-agricultural castes, the former constituted three-fths of the population.15

We have further clustered castes into categories that correspond with the

classications used in post-independence Indian Punjab as Backward and

Scheduled Castes, to indicate the proportions of population which might

have faced different degrees of caste-based disadvantage.16Kammis who

may have been classied as Backward Castes in Indian Punjab made up

21 per cent of the population and included occupational groups which

would have been engaged as village or patti servants. The occupational

categories which would have constituted Scheduled Castes, including

weavers, shoemakers and sweepers (ChuhraandMussali) were 12 per

cent of the reference population, with Chuhras and Mussalis accounting

14Christians constituted a small proportion of the Chuhra population in 1931, and it

is believed a large part of this caste had converted to Christianity by or at the time of the

partition and remained in Pakistani Punjab. We therefore, include all Chuhras resident in the

western districts of undivided Punjab, regardless of religion, in our calculations.15Cassan (2011) has shown that the land alienation law had induced a reporting bias

in favour of agricultural castes in the census. Changing ones caste in the village record,however, was and is a more complex matter. The census, therefore, may have underestimated

the proportion of non-cultivators.16See Department of Revenue, Rehabilitation and Disaster Management. Available at

http://punjabrevenue.nic.in/gaz_asr38.htm (Accessed on 1 November 2011).

Table 1

Caste distribution of Muslim population of Punjab in 1931

Occupational

caste status Main castes, tribes and kinship groups

Proportion of

Muslim population

Agriculture Jat, Rajput, Awan, Biloch, Gujjar, Pathan 50.7

Agriculture: backward Arain, Ahir, Kamboh 11.7

Kammi: backward Kumhar (potter), Tarkhan (carpenter),

Teli (oil-presser), Machhi (water-carrier),

Faqir (beggar), Mirasi (minstrel), Lohar

(ironsmith), Nai (barber)

20.8

Kammi and menials:

scheduled

Julaha (weavers), Mochi (shoemakers),

Mussali and Chuhra (sweepers)

12.1

Others Sheikh, Kashmiri 4.6

Source:Authors calculations based on Khan (1992).



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for 4 per cent. Less than half the Chuhras and under a third of the Mus-

salis were actually reported working as sweepers, and around a third ineach group worked as agricultural labourers.

III

Land reforms and Punjab Five Marla Scheme

Soon after independence, the ruling Muslim League appointed a com-

mittee to review the agrarian situation and to make recommendations

for reform. The main focus of its deliberations was on the conditions of

tenant cultivatorsfarmers who mostly belonged to cultivating castes

but did not have outright property rights in land. Their recommendations

and the reforms that followed in the succeeding decade, aimed to protect

tenants from arbitrary eviction and to convert long-standing tenancies into

ownership rights. In terms of land revenue vocabulary, the reforms were

aimed at expanding the class of haqdaran-e-zamin through the grant of

ownership rights to muzara tenant-cultivators. The Muslim League com-

mittee acknowledged the oppressed position of non-cultivator service

castes and agricultural labourers in dramatic terms (Naqvi, Khan andChaudhry 1987: 107):

Lower even than the tenants-at-will in the social and economic scale

of the village society come the village artisans (kammis) and the land-

less labourers. Unattached to land but tied to the village, the kammi

who works both as daily artisan and seasonal labour has, except in

some newly-settled and colony areas, no homestead, no security of a

minimum wage and no protection against sweated labour. He is themenial of the landlord and he often has to struggle even against the

oppression of the peasantry. Even the protection of elementary human

and moral rights is frequently denied to him.17

The committee recommended legislation for residential security and

regulation of wages, working conditions and other forms of protection. The

17

The committee estimated that there were 1.6 million kammi and landless labourfamilies in the province, equivalent to around a quarter of the population recorded in the

1951 Census (Mahmood 1951). The committees estimate is comparable to the proportion

of landless labourers and service workers in the 1951 Census (18 per cent), and of kammi

and menial castes in the 1931 Census (33 per cent).



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provincial legislature of Punjab accepted the committees recommenda-

tions with respect to tenant cultivators when it passed the Protection andRestoration of Tenancy Act in 1950. All of the recommendations relating

to agricultural labourers and non-cultivator service castes were ignored.

A small concession was made in land revenue manuals to replace the

word kammi, which was acknowledged now to have pejorative connota-

tions, with the formal Urdu term mueen(helper) to refer to the service

castes.18

Some elements within the Muslim League continued to press unsuc-

cessfully for reforms aimed at these castes and classes in the rst ve-year

plan of the country. The setting up of a Land Reform Commission for

West Pakistan to draft the rst redistributive land reform law followed a

military coup in 1958 which was implemented in 1959. The 1959 reforms

empowered the government to set land ceilings for private ownership,

and the appropriation of above-ceiling land for redistribution. The primary

beneciaries were to be tenants already cultivating land (Naqvi, Khan

and Chaudhry 1987). About agricultural labourers, the commission said

(ibid.: 215):

We have not dealt with agricultural labour and the steps that should be

taken for the amelioration of its condition. We do realise that this class

of workers is almost entirely at the mercy of its employer [.] this,

however, is a problem which, to our mind, is more akin to the condi-

tions of labour generally. Sooner or later, it will be necessary to provide

the agricultural labour some measure of security and protection, but

the problems involved in devising such measures are so intricate that

it would need far more time than we had at our disposal.

It took another 15 years and the election of a populist government

before the recommendations of the Muslim League committee with re-

spect to residential security were nally addressed. Zulkar Ali Bhuttos

PPP rode a wave of political mobilisation in the late 1960s and swept

into ofce on slogans of bread, clothing and shelter. One of its early acts

was to renew redistributive land reforms that had started in the 1950s.

The Land Reforms Regulations of 1972, however, retained the focus on

18It was, in fact, in the record of rights in the village site (jamabandi abadi) that the kammi

or mueen were recognised at all by land revenue administration (Mahmood 2006: 875).



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tenants, virtually excluding non-agricultural castes from beneciaries

(Haq 1989: 6768):

Land which vests in Government shall [.] be granted free of charge

to the tenants who are shown in Revenue Records to be in cultivating

possession of itWhere any land is not shown in the Revenue Records

to be in cultivating possession of any tenant [] it shall be granted to

such tenant or other persons, owning less than a subsistence holding.

But in a departure from past practice, the government also announced

measures that went beyond an agrarian agenda. The Punjab Housing Facili-

ties for Non-Proprietors in Rural Areas Act, popularly known as the Five

Marla Scheme, was passed by the Punjab Provincial Assembly in 1975 to

grant government-owned or acquired land to the rural landless for housing

purposes (Government of Punjab 1975). A non-proprietor was dened

as a person who or any other member of his family does not own any

agricultural land or other immovable property anywhere in the country.

Immovable property, moreover, did not include the structure raised by

a non-proprietor on land not owned by him, thus covering kammis andother non-proprietors living in village sites effectively owned by pattis.

Beneciaries were to receive land measuring ve marla(126 square

metres) free of cost for home building in rural housing schemes on state-

owned or acquired land. If a non-proprietor already had a home in the

abadi deh or recognised village site, he was to be recognised as its owner.

Since most kammis (or mueens) as well as landless tenants did, in fact,

possess houses in established village sites, the main beneciaries of the

Five Marla grants were likely to be menial castes who worked as farmlabour or domestic servants for individual cultivators.

Unlike the land reform laws, which were administered exclusively

by the land revenue administration, the Punjab Five Marla Scheme was

to be implemented in partnership with newly formed Peoples Village

Committees (PVCs) set up specically for this purpose at the mauza

level. The PVCs were composed of local PPP activists and, as we show

in the following sections, there was general agreement that the scheme

was for the benet of kammis and menial caste labourers. Beneciarieswere awarded lease titles to their plots of land and in many villages in

Punjab, the settlements thus created became known as Bhutto colonies. It

is in and around these Bhutto colonies in a number of districts of central

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Punjab that we carried out our eldwork. The PPP claimed that by 1977,

some 700,000 families in rural Punjab had received plots under the FiveMarla Scheme (Pakistan Peoples Party 1977).19

Soon after, Bhuttos government was overthrown in a military coup

and the country was placed under Martial Law. The Five Marla Scheme

became inactive. In 1985, the military regime initiated a transfer of power

to its civilian allies who were also opponents of the PPP and Bhutto. At

this moment, when Martial Law regulations were rescinded, a transitional

government repealed the original Five Marla Scheme law of 1975 and the

1973 law expediting land acquisition. A new law called the Jinnah Abadis

for Non-Proprietors in Rural Areas Act of 1986 was enacted (Government

of Punjab 1986). An Allotment Committee which included a nominee

of the provincial government and the lambardar replaced the PVC. The

presence of the lambardar restored the inuence of the proprietary body

in decisions over village housing. The 1986 law also weakened the pro-

vision for recognising property rights of non-proprietors over existing

homes within the village site or on other uncultivated area of the village.

A subsequent circular (Government of Punjab 1988), ostensibly for the

recognition of rural katchi abadis (unplanned settlements), also ruledthat the home of a mueen (formerly kammi) allotted in the village site in

lieu of service was no longer eligible for the regularisation of ownership

rights in favour of the holder.20

The Jinnah Abadis law remains on statute and the Ofce for Land

Colonisation within the provincial Land Revenue Department is its

responsible authority. We nd sketchy records of the functioning of the

1986 scheme, while none exist at the provincial level for the original

1975 scheme. Jinnah Abadis implementation currently receives nominalfundingthe provincial budget for 200809 (Government of Punjab 2009)

allocated only 2.6 million rupees (equivalent of $ 50,000)conrming

the impression that the scheme is moribund. In the 1990s, policy focus

shifted to regularising existing unauthorised settlements (Government of

Punjab 1992), but with a restricted mandate in rural areas.

In interviews, some ofcials suggested that the post-1986 version of the

Five Marla Scheme had to be stopped because it had become an instrument

19See Pakistan Peoples Party 1977. Election Manifesto. Available at http://www.ppp.

org.pk/manifestos/1977.html (Accessed on 1 November 2011).20This made explicit the reversal of the provision in the 1975 law which had declared

non-proprietors homes within the village site as eligible for grant of ownership rights.



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of local elites to legalise their possession of public land. This impression,

even if true, was based on anecdotes rather than documentation, let aloneanalysis of evidence. The fact is that a window that had been opened for

classes and castes marginalised by the village record was effectively closed

without anything else being put in its place.

IV

Looking for Five Marla Schemes

Interviews with provincial government ofcials and other key informants

suggested that the Five Marla Scheme had been particularly active in the

Okara, Kasur, Faisalabad and Jhang districts of central Punjab. Visits re-

vealed that records are not maintained systematically even at the district

level. While ofcial documents proved unreliable, on the ground it was

easy to nd villages with Five Marla Schemesthose from before and

since the 1986 change of law. Interviews were conducted in seven mauzas

across these districts. Land revenue ofcials in Okara were able to provide

a list of villages with information on scheme implementation. Some of

these villages were then selected for more in-depth eldwork.The Okara list contained information on the area of land acquired and

number of plots allotted by mauza in Okara Tehsil (sub-district unit) until

1980, the earlier phase of the Five Marla Scheme. A total of 28 villages

out of 371 in this tehsil had some Five Marla Scheme intervention, and ap-

proximately 1,800 plots were allotted in all. A number of these villages were

visited to verify the record. Exploratory eldwork revealed many villages in

the tehsil where the Five Marla Scheme had been implemented, but which

were not in the record of the revenue department. We present the case studyof one of the mauzas in Okara where in-depth eldwork was conducted.21

While observations from a broader range of eldwork sites inform our

understanding of residential security and the Five Marla Schemes, we feel

that the case study of Chak 003 contains sufcient nuance and variation to

be able to represent much of what we wish to illustrate.22

21Fieldwork was also carried out in another Okara mauza, as well as villages in

Faisalabad, Jhang, Kasur and Lahore.22All proper names including those of the mauza, its various settlements and individuals

have been disguised. Caste and kinship group names of the main proprietor groups have

been modied in instances where actual names were likely to breach condentiality. All

other caste and kinship group names are real.



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V

A description of Chak 003

Chak 003 is a canal colony mauza located 17 km from Okara city. It

was developed between 1920 and 1928 during the British period, at the

time of excavation of the Lower Bari Doab Canal. In the 1998 Census,

the mauza was the sixth largest in the district with a population of over

5,000 individuals. At the time of the eldwork in 2010, it was estimated

that there were 1,362 households compared with around 700 in the 1998

Census (Government of Pakistan 1999). Chak 003 is well-endowed with

physical and social infrastructure. There are several government and pri-

vate schools and health clinics. The road link with the district headquar-

ters and transport connections are excellent, and the village has an urban

level of public utility provision including electricity, water supply and

gas. Chak 003 is urbanised in other ways as wellmany of its residents

are engaged in non-agricultural work within and outside the mauza. The

agrarian economy is productive and well-connected with the urban market,

particularly for the supply of fresh vegetables and dairy products.

The history of settlement in Chak 003 is similar to other canal colony

villages in central Punjab. Semi-arid lands opened up for irrigated cultiva-

tion were allotted to recognised cultivator or agriculturist caste families

from high population density districts of Punjab. These groups of fami-

lies migrated en-massealong with their kammis to cultivate new land.

They also engaged indigenous landless families as farm labourers and

servants. There are two major groups of grantees in Chak 003: a Rajput

clan from eastern Punjab and a Jat clan from a neighbouring district in

western Punjab. There are other landowners too, mostly from ofciallyrecognised cultivator castes or tribes who had purchased land from the

original Rajput and Jat grantees. The Rajputs and Jats still own more

land than the others and also enjoy greater entitlements by virtue of their

status as haqdaran-e-zamin. There are three lambardars, two Rajput and

one Jat. The haqdaran-e-zamin are represented by lambardars of their

own respective kinship groups and the later owners are scattered among

the three original pattis.

Agricultural castes or tribes account for a fth of the population ofChak 003 compared with our estimates of three-fths for the province as

a whole. A high concentration of non-cultivators is partly due to the pres-

ence of a large Five Marla Scheme in this mauzaand hence its selection



16/27



for in-depth study. Non-cultivator castes include kammis of whom only

a handful of households are still engaged in their traditional occupationunder seyp arrangements. The most numerous among the non-cultivator

castes in Chak 003 are the two menial groups identied as sweepers in

the 1931 CensusChuhra and Mussali. These caste names are used by

landowners in a pejorative manner, and resisted for the same reason by

their bearers. Chuhras are all Christian and like to assert their religious

identity in place of a caste title that is regarded as a term of insult.23Many

Mussalis insist on being recognised as Muslim Shaikh.24Most workers

from these groups are either casual wage labourers or farm servants of

landowners.

Words used for referring to the groups that are of particular interest to

us, namely those identied as belonging to service and menial castes in

colonial classication, are obviously loaded with political meaning. As

we have noted above, kammi was acknowledged as having a pejorative

association and was replaced in land revenue manuals with mueen. The

names Chuhra and Mussali likewise were used casually in earlier records

but are considered offensive in our eldwork villages today. Even employ-

ers, who frequently use these words as terms of abuse, switch to Christianand Muslim Shaikh when they choose to be respectful. This is not to say

that speakers or those who are being spoken about universally accept the

new terms. We have used classicatory categories in English (service

and menial castes) as well as other terms (kammi and mueen, Chuhra and

Christian, Mussali and Muslim Shaikh) with reference to context.

VI

Residential insecurity in the original village

The original canal colony village is currently one of six settlements within

Chak 003, accounting for around a quarter of the total population of the

mauza. It is still the central location in terms of economic activity and

infrastructure. Most of the landowners of the mauza reside in the original

settlement. Even so, cultivator castes make up barely half the population

23The 1931 Census reported only 5 per cent of the Chuhra population of Punjab as

Christian. There is complete identication between Chuhras and Christians in contemporary

Pakistani Punjab (OBrien 2012).24The term Muslim Shaikh enables a distinction from trader castes and other kinship

groups that identify themselves simply as Shaikh.



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who lived in their employers compounds. Besides Christians and Muslim

Shaikhs, a number ofJulaha(weaver caste) families were also allottedplots in TBS.

A second Five Marla Scheme settlement, known as the Pullwali Bhutto

Scheme (PBS), was also initiated in the 1970s. This was located along a

canal bank on land that belonged to the irrigation department. Approxi-

mately 100 plots of ve marla each were allotted to farm and domestic

labourers, mostly Muslim Shaikh families. Because this land was in an

isolated spot, far away from the main settlement, the allottees did not take

possession of it. After a few years when the area had become more acces-

sible, original allottees as well as some landowning families attempted to

take possession of these plots. Since the original sanction had lapsed with

the repeal of the 1975 law, new allotments had to be made which nally

happened in the 1990san action attributed by Muslim Shaikh allottees

to the brief return to ofce of the PPP.25

There are two other predominantly low caste settlements in the mauza

that were developed by private individuals from landowning families.26In

the 1990s, a Jat lambardar partitioned two and a half acres of his farmland

adjacent to the original settlement and sold possession of these plots tolandless families. Muslim Shaikhs or Mussalis constitute a majority of the

inhabitants, while another signicant group consists ofFaqir(a traditional

beggar caste) families who have adopted the surname Jat Gill and now

work as casual labourers. Plots in Jat Basti are not ofcially leased and

the lambardar had consistently refused demands from the residents to

register sale deeds in the land record. There is a similar story with School

Basti which was developed by inuential Rajput landowners who took

possession of unoccupied government land reserved for public amenity,and sold possession of plots to landless families, mostly from service and

menial castes. Like their counterparts in Jat Basti, the residents of School

Basti were not given title documents and their ownership of residential

plots was not ofcially recorded.

Many original allottees in TBS and PBS had sold their plots and mi-

grated out of the village. Buyers were nearly all from service and menial

25Although the PPP has led three national governments since its overthrow in the 1970s,

it has only held ofce at the provincial level for three years in the 1990s.26Rouse (1988) had found a similar development (Lokri) besides the Marla Scheme in

her eldwork village in the 1970s, and found such settlements to be common across the

eldwork districts.



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castes, as well as a small number of landless agricultural caste Arain

families. We found this pattern repeated in many Five Marla Schemesacross the province. The schemes had contributed to the creation of a

market in low-cost rural housing for low caste people where none existed.

There were transactions also in the privately developed settlements such

as Jat Basti and School Basti. Property rights in these settlements had

become more secure with the passage of time, but developers who were

haqdaran-e-zamin owned the title to land and enjoyed a privileged posi-

tion in the village record which remained the ultimate proof of property

rights. The latter day katchi abadi regularisation law does not apply to Jat

Basti or School Basti. The Five Marla Scheme, by contrast, had invoked

government acquisition of land prior to its allotment and thus breached an

institutional barrier to secure property rights for the low castes.

VIII

Farm servants

Landowners have constructed shelters known as derason their farmlands.

A dera may be used as a store room for inputs and produce and a shed forfarm implements and animals, particularly dairy cattle. Many of the deras

also prepare farm produce for marketing. Simple but labour-intensive

processes, such as cleaning and packing vegetables and the checking and

blending of milk are carried out there. The dera is a link in a protable

supply chain to the market. It is also a residential site for a large number

of workers and their families who provide much of the labour to this sup-

ply chain. There are estimated to be around 80 deras in the mauza with

a combined population of around 400 households. Nearly all of the deraservants in the mauza are Mussali or Muslim Shaikh, while the remainder

are Chuhra or Christian. The owners of deras themselves reside in the

main settlement.

The terms of employment of farm servants in Chak 003 are compa-

rable to tied labour arrangements documented elsewhere.27At the time

of the eldwork in 2010, the monthly salary of a male servant ranged

between three and four thousand rupees (35 to 50 US dollars). This was

27Bremans (1993) account of the Hali system in southern Gujarat can serve as a virtual

template. Our observations in Chak 003 deras are comparable with Martins (2009) ndings

in Sargodha. We found similar arrangements in our eldwork in other districtsservants

being either Chuhra/Christian or Mussali/Muslim Shaikh in nearly all cases.



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approximately half the amount that an employer would have to pay if

he were to hire from the casual labour market, and also around half theminimum wage. In addition to specic duties, it is expected that family

members will, without additional pay, perform many unspecied tasks.

Family members are not allowed to take up work with other employers.

They can work for extra pay with the employer well below the going rate

of pay in the casual labour market.

A loan or an advance is an essential part of this arrangement. The

amount of outstanding debt ranges from 30,000 to 70,000 rupees (350

to 800 US dollars). In many cases, the debt was inherited. A servant can

negotiate with a new employer at the end of a crop cycle. When landown-

ers hire new servants, they must compensate the previous employer for

any outstanding debt, which then gets transferred to the new employer.

Landowners have strong networks across the district and province and

are able to track down absconding servants. They prefer to hire servants

who have families, so that it is difcult for the entire family to abscond

together. If a servant absconds, the landowner can and does use other

family members as hostages.28

There are stories of individuals in the eldwork villages who hadgained their independence by paying off debts. A conspicuous problem

after securing freedom from their employers was to nd a place to live.

In most cases, present day dera servants are descendants of servants who

lived on deras or in their employers residential compounds. They never

had homes of their own. Many had been acquired by Chak 003 landown-

ers upon payments to other employers, and a neighbouring village whose

landowners had obstructed the establishment of a Five Marla Scheme

settlement, was frequently mentioned as the place of origin.

IX

Politics of Five Marla Schemes

The late 1960s and early 1970s are recalled in Chak 003 and other villages

of Okara as a period of class tensions between landlords and tenantsor

the major haqdaran-e-zamin and their muzaras. Young men from different

classes and kinship groups, including the dominant landowner families,

28We documented several individual cases of servants who had run off and were then

tracked down.



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had been mobilised by political parties, notably the PPP, using social-

ist slogans. This movement was particularly strong in Chak 003 wherePPPs election victory in 1970 triggered tenant takeovers of land.29Family

members of some of the Chak 003 landowners had joined the PPP and

sided with the tenants. It was in this politically charged atmosphere that

the Five Marla Scheme was announced. A PVC consisting of local party

workers, some of them sons of local landlords but also including individu-

als from service and menial castes, began implementing the scheme soon

after it was launched.

Although the formal wording of the law mentioned non-proprietors

as beneciaries in Chak 003, this was interpreted to mean farm servants

of landowners who lived in their private compounds. At least other non-

proprietors such as tenant-cultivators and kammis had their own homes,

even if they did not enjoy secure possession. Servants in Chak 003 like

the ones currently living on deras did not have an independent home, and

local activists understood that the scheme was meant for them. Nearly all

of the allotees of TBS were families of farm servantseither Christian

Chuhras or Muslim Shaikh Mussalis.

The allottees of TBS as well as their former employers recall the dis-ruption caused to the landowners economy by the sudden departure of

the servants. It was as though the village had been abandoned en-masse.

There was no real distinction in the minds of both sets of protagonists at

the time between farm servants work relationship and their residential

dependence on employers. The TBS grantees stopped being farm servants

the moment they left their employers houses. Some individuals from the

landowning families claim they were active in implementing the scheme

out of commitment to their partys programme. It was also widely believedthat attempts at stopping the farm servants from leaving would have led

to violence.

The relationship between tied labour arrangements and housing

dependence on employers is not straightforward. While there was an

apparent correlation between the Five Marla Scheme and a wave of

farm servant emancipation in Chak 003, we have also observed in our

eldwork, situations where farm servant families do not reside on deras

29The tenants movement was revived recently in Okara when tenants of military-

owned farms resisted pressure from military authorities for changes in the terms of tenure

(Akhtar 2006).



22/27



or in employers houses. It is harder, however, to come across instances

of labourers who live on deras or in employers houses and are not in tiedlabour arrangements.

The fact that the farm servant system was revived quickly at deras, and

that there were villages nearby where the scheme had been blocked, sug-

gests that local politics were instrumental in the success of the Five Marla

Scheme in Chak 003. Although many of the local leaders who ensured

scheme implementation in this mauza were men from cultivator castes,

the scheme triggered political articulation among the formerly voiceless

Christian Chuhras and Muslim Shaikh Mussalis.

Public life in the Five Marla Schemes is marked by segmentation

between Christians and Muslim Shaikhs but also cooperation within and

between the two groups. By contrast, individual service and menial caste

residents of localities such as Jat Basti and School Basti are fragmented

within and isolated from their counterparts in the Five Marla Schemes.

Christians and Muslim Shaikhs inhabit different parts of TBS. The former

organise their religious activities around a small house which serves as a

chapel as well as a community centre. They also receive support from a

Christian non-governmental organisation. Support for the PPP, however,cuts across religious lines in TBS and is a factor in dening the collec-

tive identity of the settlements residents. They have remained strong

supporters of the party for nearly four decades since the establishment

of the Five Marla Scheme despite turnover in the population as original

grantees sold their plots and moved on. TBS voters regard themselves as

authentic party supporters unlike leaders from local landowner families

who are known to switch party afliation. Local party leaders respond

to this widely accepted claim of authenticity and ensure they remain ongood terms with the partys vote bank in TBS. Although most residents

of the two commercially developed settlements (Jat Basti and School

Basti) are also counted as PPP supporters, they are not seen as a depend-

able vote block.

National political currents and policy changes were manifested in Chak

003. The repeal of the 1975 law and its replacement with the Jinnah Abadis

in the mid-1980s was felt locally when an already sanctioned Pullwali

Bhutto Scheme was stalled, only to be revived with the brief return ofthe PPP to ofce. Rightly or wrongly, PPP supporters tend to credit all

development initiatives in their settlement to the fortunes of their party

and its leaders in national politics. The development of Jat Basti and



23/27



School Basti and the inability of their residents to gain secure property

rights attests to the dormancy of the Jinnah Abadi legislation that mighthave been used to provide legal cover to the possession claims of non-

proprietors. The regression in the latter law with respect to the rights of

village kammis or mueens is also visible from the ability of lambardars

and other haqdaran-e-zamin of the original village of Chak 003 to initiate

eviction proceedings against non-proprietors.

X

Re-engaging with casteThe understanding of class, or even citizenship, in Pakistani Punjab re-

mains partial without engagement with those identied as belonging to

service and menial castesknown variously as kammi or mueen, Chuhra

or Christian, Mussali or Muslim Shaikh and in many other ways. The

apparent absence of a religiously ordained status hierarchy is not suf-

cient to rule out close and abiding correspondence between class and

occupational caste. Although our focus in this article has been on housing,

and through it on land and labour, some observations on status ideolo-gies which might exist in contemporary Pakistani Punjab can be useful.

Chuhra Christians are associated with the unclean work of dealing with

human bodily waste and are victims of untouchability, particularly with

respect to the sharing of meals and utensils. Discrimination against them

is commonly explained away as premised on their being non-Muslims

whose diet includes foods forbidden to Muslims. Muslim kammis and

menial castes that experience systematic disadvantage in housing, as well

as land and labour transactions, do not necessarily face overt religiouslyordained hierarchy or untouchability, even though there are references to

Mussalis not being proper Muslims.

Rouse (1988) had argued that the agricultural versus non-agricultural

division of Pakistani Punjab society, rooted in Hindu tradition, represented

a salient status ideology which prevented the realisation of class solidarity

among the landless and the land-poor. Our examination of rural housing

and the Five Marla Scheme suggests that the status hierarchy between

agricultural and non-agricultural castes implicates the very organisationalprops of the institution of private property in rural Pakistani Punjab.

The ofcial village record, with its reliance on patrilineal genealogy,

kinship-based collective entitlements and authority to classify a person,



24/27



is not only the legal register of private property in land but a signier of

the institutionalised disadvantage of service and menial castes. Othercitizenship-based interactions and entitlements reinforce the structure

buttressed by the village record.30

It is telling that the only reforms that directly addressed the situation

of castes and classes comprising up to a third of the population were ini-

tiated by a section of the elite which sought electoral support in the rst

ever national general elections based on adult franchise. This intervention

formally chose the language of class rather than caste, even though the

message was widely interpreted locally as being directed to those landless

who belonged to service and menial castes, particularly the latter. Even

a reformist regime, like that of the PPP in the 1970s, was unwilling or

unable to directly address the institutionalised inequality embedded in the

village record and the land alienation law.

If the narrative of an overarching ideology of caste in India was in-

strumental in the construction of caste identity, it also suggested identities

for resistance.31The absence of this narrative in Pakistani Punjab has not

meant that resistance is absent, but rather that identities that are used for

resistance vary across time and place. The adoption of agricultural castesurnames is not uncommon even when confronted by the immutable vil-

lage record. The transition from Chuhra to Christian was clearly more

than a name change and involved a higher level of articulation and com-

mitment. It is another matter that discriminatory laws and politics later

confronted the new religious identity. The Five Marla Schemes themselves

became sources of identity. The generic name Bhutto colony survived

ebbs and ows in the fortunes of the PPP, and residents reputation as

authentic party loyalists inuenced access to public resources positivelyor negatively, depending on whether their party was in ofce or in op-

position. In either case, this reputation guaranteed status within a large

national organisation.

The relationship between caste and class varies across rural Pakistani

Punjab. As our case study shows, there can be variation in the housing

conditions of the landless low castes even within an administrative village.

30Government school enrolment forms in Pakistani Punjab demand to know a childs caste

using three alternative wordsbiraderi, quom andzaat. As though to drive home the message,

the form further enquires if the child is from a cultivator or non-cultivator family.31Ram (2004) demonstrates this with respect to the Scheduled Castes, Ad Dharmis and

Dalits of Indian Punjab.



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Documents

Class, Caste and Housing in Rural Pakistani Punjab the Untold Story of the Five Marla Scheme