Travel

The Old Rural Punjab: Alive and Well Across The Border

by SUNIL SETHI

A lightning strike by Pakistan International Airlines having delayed our plans for our return to Delhi, we found ourselves with a few extra days in Lahore, awaiting our air exit permits to be converted for the overland crossing at Wagah.

Our friend, Jugnu Mohsin, the Cambridge-educated lawyer who is also a leading newspaper publisher and editor, suggested we take a day off to visit her ancestral village about a 100 km southwest of the city on the Multan road. I leapt at the opportunity, for it had been many years since I took a turn in the countryside of West Punjab, now in Pakistan.

At first, everything looked utterly familiar: the same flat fertile landscape with fields of ripening wheat and sugarcane flecked yellow, here and there, with rippling stands of mustard. Even the fruit and flowering shrubs for springtime planting bought at a nursery on the way were the same: identical species of mango, guava, rose and jasmine.

Most reassuring of all was the sweet cadence of the rustic Punjabi dialect spoken in these parts: women are courteously addressed as bibi and men as janaab or huzoor.

The first difference was how quickly agricultural land starts outside city limits. In East Punjab (India), industrial and housing developments have swallowed up large tracts so that it is many miles before one encounters tilled fields.

The other major difference is the size of the landholdings. An average farmer would own as least one marabba of land, equivalent to about 25 acres, and old feudal families like Mohsin's would own several hundred acres, either tenanted or personally managed. A well-irrigated system of British-era canals means that farmers harvest two to three crops a year.

In East Punjab, by contrast, average landholdings have shrunk to between five and 10 acres. A recent survey reports soaring land values due to urbanisation; scarce fields outside the state capital go for Rs 4 crore an acre and land for townships being developed outside Patiala is worth Rs 30 lakh an acre.

Across the border, in West Punjab, agricultural land is a fraction of that price.

Jugnu Mohsin's village, Sher Garh, is a medieval settlement built round the 16th century shrine of a Sufi pir who came from southern Persia and from whom her family is descended. His Akbar-period mausoleum is immaculately preserved and maintained.

Close by, in an enclosed garden, are the family cenotaphs. Above it rises a magnificent, many-tiered haveli of fine Mughal brick, portions of which are being painstakingly restored. In an upper chamber, a local artisan on scaffolding was carefully touching up the exquisite painted decoration of her grandfather's bedchamber.

Mohsin and her father have set up 26 schools for 4,000 students in the area through a family trust and NGO; there are two colleges, a teachers' training centre and dispensary in modern brick buildings of excellent design, and a hospital is being planned.

All afternoon I observed Mohsin holding court on a moorah (chair) in an open air courtyard, a sort of super-panchayat head and leader by inheritance. She holds no elected or administrative office, though her late uncle held this constituency in Islamabad's National Assembly for decades.

As the sole woman in a stream of men who came and went, she arbitrated over tenancy disputes, heard petitions, rang local officials, took accounts and supervised building works, cajoling errant carpenters and threatening lazy guards. Head covered in a local woollen shawl known as a lo-ee, she commanded attention with her mix of patient listening, good humour and swift redressal of problems. She is not an absentee landlord and comes here to spend almost each weekend as her forbears have done for generations.

I asked her how she remembered every family in the village and her knowledge of the Punjabi vernacular, with its range of aphorism and innuendo. "I grew up with these people," she said. "In our home in Lahore, we have no one but servants from our village."

It was a performance in enlightened feudalism that has all but vanished in East Punjab.

[Courtesy: Business Standard]

February 19, 2011

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