FARMERS AND BIG FARMS IN PAKISTAN
The conditions of farmers varies rom region to region. Many in the central Punjab own their own land while those in the Siraki-speaking areas of southwest Punjab are more like to be tenant farmers working under large landowners known as “feudals.” These feudals dominate the Sindh. Mechanization of agriculture has forced small landholders off their land. Some landless peasants have been hired to serve in private militias of feuding warlord-feudals.
At independence Pakistan was a country with a great many small-scale farms and a small number of very large estates. Distribution of landownership was badly skewed. Less than 1 percent of the farms consisted of more than 25 percent of the total agricultural land. Many owners of large holdings were absentee landlords, contributing little to production but extracting as much as possible from the sharecroppers who farmed the land. At the other extreme, about 65 percent of the farmers held some 15 percent of the farmland in holdings of about two hectares or less. Approximately 50 percent of the farmland was cultivated by tenants, including sharecroppers, most of whom had little security and few rights. An additional large number of landless rural inhabitants worked as agricultural laborers. Farm laborers and many tenants were extremely poor, uneducated, and undernourished, in sharp contrast to the wealth, status, and political power of the landlord elite. [Source: Peter Blood, Library of Congress, 1994 *]
According to the “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Nations”: “Farming production remains limited by primitive methods, and mechanization is uncommon. The introduction of improved wheat and rice varieties has met with some success, although the greatest impact on agriculture has derived from the Indus basin irrigation schemes, which by the 1970s had provided Pakistan with the largest irrigated network in the world. The availability of water has made possible increased use of chemical fertilizers, with the most intensive consumption occurring in cotton production. The government has instituted soil conservation, farm mechanization, land reclamation, and plant protection programs. [Source: “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Nations”, Thomson Gale, 2007]
Feudal Land Structure in Pakistan
Traditionally, large landowners in Pakistan rented parcels of land to villagers and held power over them by controlling the water supply and resources such as seeds, fertilizer and harvesting equipment. These landowners often lived in the cities or huge estates off the rents from villagers. In some cases the big landowners belong to the military, are former officers or are the military itself.
Los Angeles Times: "Historically, farming in Sindh has been sustained by sharecropping, an antiquated system in which sharecroppers receive little or no wages but split the harvest with the landlord." Some of the poorest workers are Hindus.
Huge plantation that once included hundreds of acres have been subdivided so many times as the land has been passed down from generation to generation that the individual holdings are now only a few dozen acres. Presently, more than 90 percent of the landowners have plots of land less than 25 acres, and a third, less than 5 acres. Some farmers who are from former absentee landowning families have decided to manage the land themselves.
Sometimes violence breaks out over land. Paramilitary forces in the Punjab have been accused of killing and torturing farmers in disputes over fertile. Human rights groups have reported incidents in which children have been captured and tortured to force their parents to get divorces and relinquish control of their land by signing new tenant agreements, Many of the disputes have involved tenet farmers working land owned by the military. Farmers began rebelling in 2002 after army administrators began demanding that they make payments with cash instead of grain. The army cracked down hard, paramilitary groups, known as the rangers, made up of active and retired officers, killed several farmers.
Rural Punjab
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: “At a town — not even a town, a crossroads, with two samosa stands and a cigarette shop — my driver turns off the K.L.P. road, Karachi-Lahore-Peshawar, and onto the Shahi road, the royal road, the Nawab of Bahawalpur’s road. This is the moment when I know that I’ve come home. We skirt the desert to our south, Indian Rajasthan and Jaisalmer not more than three hours away through the dunes, if the border had not been closed for decades, moving quickly, as if surging toward food and rest, having driven ten hours already, down to the farm where I am to live much of my life these next twenty-five years. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“This is cane country, canal country, desert reclaimed by the British, country well entered, white from salt on waterlogged flats, elsewhere green, drawing you into its center. From the canal-head works, running five kilometers to the boundary of the bit of property that my grandfather bought on spec in 1916 and never once visited, there were only two or three scraps of cultivated land when I showed up that day in 1987...Today, from the head works to my farm, and thirty-five kilometers on to the Indus, where the plain ends, there is hardly a patch of ground large enough to pitch a tent that is not cropped, to cotton or sugarcane, mangoes or wheat. This was the last wild place in the Punjab, and I watched its wildness fade, the Rajasthani colors almost lost. The Mahrs, the nomadic desert people, have bought land now, selling their herds.
“I had been at the farm perhaps six months, arriving in the fall cotton-picking season, the wheat-planting season. Now the wheat had ripened, yellow-eared in the fields, and every day I sat in the farm stores and weighed the bags of threshed grain as they were brought bouncing in on trolleys, the farmhands perched atop the bags, ready to unload. The summer heat had struck, here just across the Indus from the town of Sibi, supposed to have been the hottest place in British India. That evening, I walked back to my house as the sun went over the horizon, my kurta salty with sweat, the sky muted with dust and heavily orange.
“The two farms that my father owned, one near and one far from Lahore, were as different from each other as the moods of two towns or two landscapes can be, the near one long-settled, tractable, easy of access and familiar; and the far one unhinged from my ordinary life, distant, the land still being tamed — a frontier. I always asked to celebrate my birthday there, or to go at vacation time, making the place particularly mine.
“I suppose I will never again experience freedom as I felt it then on the farm, at five and eight and twelve, the gold and the green of it and the dust in my sandals and the cow-heavy smell of the village, piles of white warm cotton as high as houses to be climbed, and the smell of oil pooled where the tractors were kept, and where I wickedly hunted sparrows with an air gun that made a most unsatisfying sound when fired, as if it were spitting. At eight, I received my first real gun, a .22 rifle, good enough for sitting doves, though I rarely hit one; and a year later a handy little lady’s shotgun, which finally put me on the way to hunting game — deer in the nearby desert, duck on the ponds left over from the great flood of 1973, snipe in marshes that became as familiar to me as my back yard in Lahore, so that I drew them according to plan, cunningly, moving the birds about the marsh without driving them away into the distance. My shikari, or guide, who died between two visits — my first significant death — had six toes on each foot and carried an ancient muzzleloader, with which he would shoot sitting coot and long-legged wading birds, black-winged stilts, birds that no other person would eat, boiling them for hours in a stewpot that he never cleaned or emptied but simply topped up with whatever he happened to bag. In the early morning, as we knelt waist deep in reeds waiting for the flighting duck, patches of fog burning off as the sun rose, the water icy, he would groan and mutter, saying, “O God, O God, my ass is getting bumps like a peanut shell.”
Feudals of Pakistan
Pakistani society is still very much feudal in nature. The feudals (powerful large landowners) have traditionally dominated the National Assembly and blocked change there. Their power has diminished somewhat over the years but is still present. In the Sindh the landowners are called “zamindars” (See Below) . Up until 50 years ago villagers had to prostrate themselves when ever the came in the presence of a zamindar.
John Lancaster wrote in the Washington Post: ““Rooted in tribal loyalties and tradition, the feudal system in Sindh and other parts of the land now known as Pakistan reached full flower in the 19th century, when British colonial officials conferred judicial and administrative powers on prominent Muslim landlords. Since the birth of Pakistan in 1947, successive military and civilian governments have tried with little success to redress the land imbalance. As a result, in some rural areas, feudal lords — known as waderas, sardars or khans, depending on their place in the tribal and landholding hierarchy — continue to wield more power than civil authorities. A few even run their own jails. [Source: John Lancaster, Washington Post, April 8, 2003]
“With a natural constituent base among tribal followers and tenants, the feudal landlords moved easily into politics after independence, dominating provincial and national assemblies while building alliances with the all-powerful military. Although their grip on political life has loosened in recent years, they remain a potent force in Pakistan's newly reconstituted parliament; last month, Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who is from a feudal family in Balochistan province, announced that there would be no land reform on his watch.
Zamidars
Zamidars have traditionally been power brokers and large landowners in Pakistan, particularly in the Punjab and Sindh. They are a Muslim Rajput caste of horsemen and soldiers that developed into a powerful group of landowners and presided over a feudal tax collection system known as zamindari. They acquired land in various ways and but more crucially obtained state recognition to collect taxes and transmit them to more powerful leaders, including the British, and jacked up their authority with fortresses and militias. “Zamindar” comes from the Persian word for “landowner.”
Zamidars had a reputation for wasting their money, exploiting peasant farmers but also being friendly and generous. Up until the mid 20th century villagers had to prostrate themselves whenever the came in the presence of a zamindar. The zamindars described they system as benign and paternalistic. Some say they viewed themselves as parents looking after the welfare of their workers as if they were children, paying for weddings, provided medical care and giving them places to live. Zamidars are generally devout Muslims. They view themselves as Muslims rather than members of a caste.
Land was passed down generally from father to son and could not be sold without the agreement of other family members. The zamindar go through great lengths to prevent their land from falling into the hands of outsiders. Women are generally excluded from owning land and making decisions on land. Marriage is viewed as a way to form bonds between newly-bonded families or strengthen existing bonds. Age and skin complexion are taken into consideration when choosing a marriage partner.
The power of the Zamindars has been greatly reduced by democracy and the subdivision of land among relatives. Land reforms enacted in India in 1951 stripped the Zamindars of some of their holdings but they remain powerful politically and economically. The Zamindars have also seen their power reduced by laws that limited the amount of land that people could own. Zamidar landowners have tried to get around these laws by placing land holdings in the names of other family members.
Pakistan's Modern Feudal Lords
John Lancaster wrote in the Washington Post: “Ghulam Murtaza Jatoi steered his four-wheel-drive Toyota down a rutted dirt track and stopped a few feet from the edge of the mighty Indus River. Behind him stretched thousands of acres of family land. In front of him, on the river's opposite shore, stretched . . . thousands of acres of family land. He honked his horn and a fisherman came running. A few minutes later, the Toyota was balanced precariously on planks laid across the thwarts of a rickety wooden boat. As Jatoi sat regally in the driver's seat, the fisherman sculled him to the other side. The feudal lord then resumed his property tour. [Source: John Lancaster, Washington Post, April 8, 2003]
Jatoi, 43, is a proud member of Pakistan's feudal class, a diminished but not yet dying breed that still wields strong influence over the society and politics of” Pakistan. “ A former provincial and national legislator, Jatoi remains the undisputed political boss in this rural part of Sindh province, where his family owns 30,000 acres of prime agricultural land. From his manicured, well-guarded compound here, Jatoi oversees the cultivation of crops, adjudicates civil and criminal cases and generally serves as patron to thousands of villagers, many of whom work on Jatoi lands as sharecroppers in a pattern that has persisted for more than two centuries.
“His is a life both modern and medieval. A burly, plain-spoken man with a dry wit, Jatoi summers in London and the English countryside, shoots wild boar in the woods around his hunting lodge and tools around family lands with a Heckler and Koch MP5submachine gun at his side. "Traditions are still there which have not died down," he said, adding of the people in the area, "They respect us. It's very kind of them."
Tashfin Baloch is another member of the feudal elite. He “is the scion of a prominent feudal family who studied political science at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, interned at the World Health Organization in Geneva and lived for a time in Australia. Along the way, he acquired a taste for rap and hip hop, a shaved head and a dream to one day open a nightclub in Spain . "I'm looked at like I'm a freak of nature," Baloch, 27, said over lunch recently at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad. "People can't believe I'm my father's son."But old habits die hard. Despite his evident thirst for things Western, Baloch has come back to Pakistan, at least for now, to help manage his father's business interests. "The standard of living here you can't get anywhere else in the world," explained Baloch, who calls the feudal system "very enticing," at least for those who run it. "All the servants in my house came from my aunt's village, and their grandfathers worked for my family," he said.
Property of Modern Feudal Family
New Jatoi, a farming village about 200 kilometers northeast of Karachi, is named after the Jatoi family who have run the town and the around it since 1740, according to Jatoi. John Lancaster wrote in the Washington Post: “The Jatois initially drew their authority from provincial tribal rulers. In return for 120,000 acres of prime farmland, the family enforced the law and collected taxes over an area of roughly 200 square miles — a writ that was extended and strengthened under British rule. Since independence, the family's holdings have shrunk by three-fourths — a land reform initiative in 1958 took 45,000 acres — but its influence remains strong. It commands the allegiance of 400 to 500 lesser landlords as well as 1,200 armed "loyalists," according to Jatoi, whose status as eldest son entitles him to the exalted status of khan. Perhaps more important, the family runs its own political party and is represented in both the national and provincial legislatures. "Basically, we are born rulers in one way or another, so to retain power, this is the only way," said Jatoi, who spent two years at San Jacinto College in Texas and has a brother in the upper house of Parliament. . "I think we have had a positive role in rural society. We have got the roads made, the schools made, the hospitals made." [Source: John Lancaster, Washington Post, April 8, 2003]
“A day and a half in his company provided ample evidence that the trappings of feudalism remain very much intact. With a home in Karachi, where his wife and four children live, Jatoi spends alternate weeks at Jatoi House, a gracious, single-story brick home that his forebears built next to the family mosque in 1931. Touring the family lands, Jatoi stopped first at the home of an uncle, a big-game hunter who keeps his property stocked with deer, peacocks and crocodiles. Next door, another uncle is building a 20,000-square-foot mansion surrounded by a massive turreted wall intended as protection against dacoits, as bandits are known .
“After crossing the Indus, Jatoi piloted his Toyota through fields of bananas and wheat before arriving at dusk at his hunting lodge, where servants had prepared a lavish meal. Sitting on his terrace that night, Jatoi acknowledged, a touch wistfully, that the life he has known is probably unsustainable for the long term. His personal holdings are down to 2,000 acres, and — despite the prime minister's recent pledge — fear of land reform keeps him from buying more. "Probably my sons will have 500 acres," he said. "I think about what privilege I have had, the influence I have had with the people. Maybe my sons will not have that."”
Bonded Serfdom in Pakistan
There are believed to be several million bonded serfs in Pakistan. Many of them are low-caste Hindus who have exploited by landowners who lend them money and keep them as virtual prisoners until the money is paid. High interest rates ensures that the serfs rarely pay off their debts. The serfs and their debts are sold from one landlord to another. About two thirds of the world’s 15 to 20 million captive laborers are in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. See India.
In villages many people work in slave-like conditions as bonded laborers and are traded like animals. The practice is especially strong in feudal areas controlled by large landowners such as in northern Punjab and the southern Sindh. Some are locked or chained by the landlords. One man said he had been chained every night for six years and was paid only flour and chilies because of a US$600 debt. [Source: Dexter Filkins, Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1999]
Some are working to pay off loans they took to pay for wedding. Some are working to pay off debts incurred buying seeds and fertilizer and other necessities. Some are trying to pay off debts incurred by their parents. Many can not read or read, don’t know how old they are or how many hours they work
Many of workers in brickworks and on commercial fishing boats and industrial farms are bonded laborers. A typical bonded serf lives in a mud-wall hut with his wife and seven children and water buffalo and goats. Many borrowed money from landlord to pay for a dowry or pay off a previous landlords. One serf told the Los Angeles Times he borrowed US$1,500 to pay off a debt from a previous landlord. He had been working since he was young children for around 60 cents a day and was not anywhere near being close to paying off his debt. The man’s children are part of the contract. He told the Los Angeles Times, "They would not allow us to leave here. We are poor people.”
Another told the New York Times he and he wife and three small children earn about US$50 a month and are trying to pay off a US$2,000 debts he incurred from his parents. He and his wife and 5-year-old daughter make bricks. Their 3-year-old son carries water.
Inheriting a Punjabi Farm
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: “My father, a stoic with the manner and the rationality of Aurelius, was living out a life of virtue in Lahore after years of government service. Ill, and no longer able to visit his inherited lands, he lived in threadbare stateliness, aristocratic decline, his large house infested with flunkies and hangers-on. Behind every great fortune a great crime, Balzac professes. Our crimes took place in the eighteen-thirties and forties, when, as the British chronicles tell it, Kashmir groaned under the exactions of my ancestors, who were sent there as overlords by Ranjit Singh, ruler of all Punjab, possessor of the Koh-i-Noor, and the man who during his lifetime stopped the inexorable British conquest north to the Khyber Pass. On his death, the British usurped his domains, and my family silkily changed allegiances and flourished under their rule, being rewarded with more lands and small honors, suitable for small gentry. By the end of the century, the family’s expansion had ceased and a contraction began, as the next generations dribbled away the property, whole bazaars sold to feed some whimsy, expending old gold on elaborate hospitality, and subjecting themselves to the ministrations of sharper, hungrier men, whom they could not be bothered to oppose. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“My father pushed back against the tide, administering his land with an indulgence toward the managers that bred corruption, but also with a genial, creative, experimenting mind: planting kiwis and papaya among his mango trees, practicing intercropping, exhibiting an enthusiasm for the new fertilizers, importing machinery — his the first tractors seen in those districts — visiting two or three times a year and suggesting innovations that the managers also indulged, distracting him with radical plows and foreign seeds while they quietly milked the place. All this innovation and control ended as age robbed him of force, and he came to accept and even perhaps to welcome, as old men will, the deluge that he expected would follow his death.
“On my return from college, he gave me a day or two to settle down and then laid (my) cards on his card table — he had just finished a morning of bridge with his usual foursome. “As you know,” he stated, “I have divided my property among you boys and the children of my first wife, giving the senior branch the lands near to Lahore. The managers at your farm in the south are forwarding to Lahore less and less money. I can no longer look to it. Perhaps you wish to make a life in America, and if you do I will support that. However, if you wish to continue controlling your land after I am gone, you must take charge there.” He threw up his hands, as if to disinvest himself of the problem.
“This gift and abdication cannot have been easy, as I now understand, having been steward of the land myself for many years. Looking back, I wonder how he rated my chances of succeeding at the farm. He died shortly afterward, to my great sorrow, for not only did I lose his support and love, I also lost the opportunity to show him what I was made of, how much I was made like him.”
Life on a Punjabi Farm
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: “Showered, cooling, I sat in the garden and smoked the rough local cigarettes, because I could not get imported ones closer than Lahore. A pedestal fan swung back and forth, blowing on me. The majordomo, Fezoo, walked through the rooms of the house behind my back, snapping on the lights, a progressive transformation. I felt vulnerable and exposed. In my childhood, we always travelled with servants from Lahore, maintaining the bubble that kept my father comfy. Fezoo, who had haunted this house from before I was born, was not my familiar, had treated even my father with a propriety that substituted for his emotions, which were locked behind an unlined, beardless Asiatic face and green eyes, the features of some long-ago ancestor from the north again pressed into being. He would sell me out for a few sacks of wheat, for nothing. Why shouldn’t he? Everyone thought that I would soon be gone. Even my countenance betrayed me, not just my pale skin but my expressions, the indecision of my smile, the absence of cunning, and, most of all, the absence of command — an American face. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“At the farm, I lived more and more according to routines, because only that way could I escape the paralyzing dread that sometimes came over me, the sense that I could trust no one, and that soon I would be driven away, to do God only knows what, to leave Pakistan a failure and work in America. Fezoo brought tea out to me, as he did each evening, in the center of the lawn, and then, returning into the house, came out with a platter covered with a white embroidered handkerchief.
“Sitting back, I took out a cigarette and lit it. I felt better. The chorus of birds that earlier had filled the garden now was silent, and had been replaced by the sound of the night insects, a steady humming background, with some different genus occasionally breaking in with an aria. The breeze came up. The moon came up over the high mud walls that surrounded the garden. All the dogs in the village barked, then fell silent. The food that the cook prepared for me had no personality, no love in it. He used the most expensive ingredients but assembled the food without care, without harmony of flavors.
Managers of a Punjab Farm
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: ““My God, how penny-bright and clueless I was, arriving at the farm that day in 1987, to be met by the managers — the Committee, as I came to think of them. (Because they or their progeny still today carry weight in the environs of the farm, I have assigned them fictitious names.) They should have been standing there in order of size as my jeep chugged up the drive: tall, volatile, vicious Shakil at one end of the line — in a cartoon, he would be the slavering Doberman, no brains but lots of bad muscle between the ears — and, at the other end, dumpy, lame Shafik, the accountant, born to be a sidekick to some rogue, who spent the next four or five years trotting around me in circles as I struggled to understand the double-entry bookkeeping system he had devised expressly to be intelligible only to him. In lore and reality, these managers are a type as well defined as the English butler, but of a very different temper. Every absentee landowner has them, and most believe that theirs alone are honest.
“That first day, rumpled and dust-covered after the ten-hour drive from Lahore in this crate, I was met, as I would be met each time I drove back in the early years, by these suave, ruthless, cunning operators, lined up in the farmhouse portico and waiting to embrace me, size me up, and then retire — like a conclave of Renaissance cardinals — to plot my confusion.
“The man among this crew who dominated the farm, who blooded me most persistently, I smiting his head, and he smiting my heel, was one Chaudhry Sameer. How I resented him, even hated him, and yet how I relied upon him in those early years. He had a round face like a lollipop, very dark skin, a little tuft of hair, brilliantly white teeth, and a strong body with the muscle equally distributed and the limbs seeming to be of equal length — resembling a tough, lumbering, earth-loving animal, a badger, perhaps, that would fight silently and without relenting if cornered. His charm derived from his strength — he had a way of grooming imaginary threads from the shoulders of my kurta which felt both deferential and sinister — and I relied upon his knowledge, for he was, among other things, supremely competent. Drop by drop, he would dole out bits of information or misinformation about the farm, not only about agricultural techniques but also about personalities and power structures, shaping my understanding of the place. He held long views, and I suppose imagined that, when I tired of the struggle and returned to the fleshpots of the West, he would be left as my representative, the faithful servant.
“In all the trouble of dealing with these men, there were moments and days of happiness, and, more, of an almost ecstatic happiness. Those were my twenties, and I took pride in my strangeness, in days that seemed jewelled and mysterious, pierced with loneliness. Although I lived among many people — house staff and farm managers, cotton buyers, wood merchants, neighboring farmers — I had no one with whom I could discuss the books I was reading or the poems that I was then writing, the constant anxiety I felt about the farm, about being overpowered, manipulated, outmaneuvered. I would escape into books, I lived in them, reading unsystematically, often to the point of sickness, of being surfeited. After jogging in the twilight, I lay on the grass at the far end of the garden, which spread out like a green tongue from the U-shaped house, staring up into the sky, through a swarm of mosquitoes hanging above my head, and thought of infinity and the purity of my soul.
Managers Cheating Their Punjab Landowner
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: “It took me years to establish that the managers had been nibbling away at my family’s land since the nineteen-seventies, like the monkey in the fable, who evened the two shares of the cookie by chewing it away. Although he denied it with eyes heaven-raised, I suspected that Chaudhry Sameer stole water and fertilizer and labor and tractor hours from the farm. My father — amazingly! — had given the other managers unlimited powers of attorney, and I guessed (later knew) that they had acquired some of their holdings, which were scattered around my farm, by erasing reference to that land from the farm ledgers, transferring title to their nominees, servants and family, and getting local revenue officials to backdate the transfers into the miasma of the past. Some nominees later disgorged their plunder, some didn’t, depending upon the proofs that I gathered. Later, when we sat with gold pens and signed documents reversing the transfers, we all maintained that the old mutations had been justified when made, a matter of rationalizing boundaries, of defending against ownership ceilings, if there should ever be real land reforms. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“Over the years, I have learned the stories of how the transfers into the managers’ names were made, how the local land-revenue officials came secretly to the farm, and held their meetings in my living room. Musing, like a man imagining his wife’s adulteries, I imagine their crimes. I once asked the son of my father’s first manager, who lives a voluptuary life on his father’s takings, “Everyone tells me you’re a substantial farmer. Where is all this land you own?” And he turned his feral head sideways, shook his shovel beard, and then, with a wheezing laugh, replied, “Let’s put it this way. Where you have land, I have land.” Even today, I see the son’s red tractors brazenly cruising around, plowing and disking the fields all around me, like bees circling my bonnet, the drivers waving offhandedly.
“If I was fatuous, it was in part because I was struggling to preserve a virtue that was not simply ridiculous but actually crippling and even dangerous, as I struggled with Chaudhry Sameer and his buddies. They might so easily have palmed a few drops of some poison in my tea, and so put an end to my troubles and theirs. I raged against Sameer like a woman in love with a man who is no good. I longed for him to turn his plotting mind to some better purpose, one that I shared. Fatuous! I dreamed of rewarding him, for virtues that he would never possess, for helping me run this farm on model lines. I minded his ridiculous mustard-colored cap, with earflaps, minded that he sat cross-legged in the accounts office, picking at the callus on his big toe, while for the twentieth time we added up tractor-repair bills that I knew, but could never prove, had been inflated. If I became too excited, he would take me outside and have someone pour a gunnysack of old tractor parts on the ground. See, there are the pistons, those are the rings we replaced. A pile of metal. He thought me obtuse, I’m sure. Why would I want to live here in the middle of nowhere, when I had a perfectly comfortable house in Lahore, the bright city, or could even live in the West? He would certainly have been willing to make a deal, for me to back off, to return to Lahore and become a pensioner, as my father had been at the end; and he would increase the yearly payments.
“He tried me in various ways. Soon after I showed up at the farm, walking in the fields one afternoon while the village women picked cotton, a girl caught my eye, so that in days following whenever I passed her I became embarrassed, striking up some absurd conversation with Sameer, averting my gaze — I had not spoken to a girl since I shipped out from New York, several months earlier. Now I found myself encountering this beauty everywhere I turned, seemingly every time I left the house, as if she had proliferated and been posted across the farm, discovering her in the orchard with demure eyes downcast, or cutting fodder with quick swipes of her little hand. Sameer might as well have thrown her over the wall of the house and into the garden with a catapult. But I disappointed him; I would not be caged so easily. I knew that, if once he delivered a girl into my bed, he could ever after toss it in my teeth, point out that I, like him, had bowed to life’s exigencies.
Punjabi Landowner Learns the Degree He Was Cheated
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: “A couple of years after I returned to the farm, he came to see me. At eight sharp, having already knocked back two cups of walnut-brown tea at my desk, and written half a dozen wispy lines of poetry, I would meet people — buyers and sellers, managers — sitting under a banyan in the garden. A servant led Jhanda Mahr across the grass, a worn man, his fingers like corkscrews, his knees and elbows loose like hinges on an old barn door. His cracked, club-hard feet had walked thousands of miles in his time, to the desert and through it and back, and I suppose the old men traversing the wastes of Palestine in Biblical times must have looked much like Jhanda. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“Having seen to the formalities, the polite questions, and having insisted that he came only to see after my health, he settled into silence. “Is there anything else?” I asked, for there always is. I expected that he had come to ask some favor, more fodder or a new corral — he sometimes presumed on the intimacy of our long-ago hunts, and I often obliged him, out of sentimentality. “You ask what I came for. This, then. I came to ask why you keep people like me so distant. Why can I never see you, why do your servants always tell me you’re busy when I come to your house? People like me are turned away without so much as a cup of tea, and that never happened even in your father’s time, when no one rode herd on the managers from one year to the next.” I had intended to throw open my doors to all who came, but over time it dawned on me that Sameer’s agents stood guard and strained the flood with a fine-meshed net — managing my information flow. Jhanda’s voice had an aggrieved, nagging tone, which could only irritate me, reminding me that my own household servants wouldn’t do my bidding. “Do you know what they say,” he continued, “about the happy-go-lucky sons of rich fathers? You are trussed and tied and you don’t even know it. You’ve misplaced your trust.”
“My anger rose. Me, happy-go-lucky! Old fool. Trying to get the inside track again, and being rude in the bargain. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a piece of dog-eared dirty paper, much folded, with wide lines as if torn from a child’s exercise book, and smoothed it on the table with hornèd hands, the nails all split from ropes and reins. Someone else had given him this; he couldn’t read or write. “I’ve eaten your family’s salt since I could walk. These are Chaudhry Sameer’s C.P.R. account numbers at the mill. My camels have dragged your cane to the mill since the mill was built. Do you think I don’t know whose name and whose account they write in their books when I pass the factory gate? Your cane, Sameer’s account. There. It’s all there.”
“He refolded the paper, laid it on the table, where it seemed to shimmer with portent. I knew immediately that I could not use it, that the mill accountants would cover for Sameer; but still, I had broken through, I had turned at least old Jhanda in my favor. “Everyone knows what Sameer did to you,” he continued. “He practiced spells, he took herbs from an old man with an evil eye. It’s in you right now.” He held my gaze, his own eyes blurred by desert wind and sun, no longer seeing far. “Sameer fed you things, didn’t he?”
“The little orgy in the garden had at the time seemed a harmless dissipation, but now a voice in my head spoke mockingly, “Remember gobbling those samosas and licking that greasy plate?” Surely Sameer believed in spells. His wife would have put something into the batter, the ash of a paper on which a spell had been written. Coincidentally, increasingly, he made me his creature. The farm scared me, business scared me; I knew nothing of crops, castes, police stations, fuel costs, bribery, revenue records, canal timings, cotton gins. I felt ashamed, standing there with Jhanda, confronted with my complicity in Sameer’s domination of me. Sameer pretended to serve me, and I pretended to believe him, sheltering behind his strong right arm, letting him have his way because I dared not be independent. My face burning, I rose, signalling to Jhanda that the interview was ended, and, as I did, it seemed that ropes coiled around me unclasped and fell limp at my feet, releasing me.
Showdown Between the Managers and the Punjab Landowner
Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote in The New Yorker: ““The relationship with Sameer hinged on this moment, the moment of before and after, the shift that sometimes happens in relationships based upon power. In the myth, this is the moment when the sword is found or the lamp broken. I thereafter worked consciously to develop my cunning, resolved to stand by myself, even at the cost of losing my way, of being exposed. [Source: Daniyal Mueenuddin, The New Yorker, December 3, 2012]
“The end, a year or so later, came as quietly as a blown rowboat reaching shore. We had exhausted each other, but I had legitimacy and youth. During that last year, I cut away at his powers. I hired a couple of men whom I knew to be his enemies. A few times, sitting in a crowd, I ridiculed his advice and took an opposite line. His cards were all the compendium of his knowledge of the farm, and one by one he played them to me. He taught me what he knew, and I could now go on without him.
“We were standing on a twelve-acre plot in a reach of scrub not yet brought under cultivation, an isolated place. At the far end, in a natural depression, water would collect during the monsoon; one of the marshes where I shot snipe as a boy lay nearby. The previous day, a bulldozer had scraped the saline topsoil to one side, clearing a stretch in order to bring it under cultivation, piling up a berm twenty feet high. Sameer and I had driven there at sunrise, and were waiting for laborers who would walk from the village with shovels and ropes, to mark out boundaries and watercourses on the raw land. We had climbed on top of the berm, with a rising dawn breeze blowing, and because of the flatness of the surrounding landscape we could see for a great distance, to the faraway village of Nizam Shah, hidden under the crown of a date plantation, smoke from morning cook-fires laced over it.
“For a moment we had been silent, taking in the unfamiliar perspective, winded from the climb up on the loose dirt. “The strugglesome life,” he mused, in English — the only time I heard him speak an English phrase, appealing to me in my first language, attributing my taste for struggle to that other self. “You and I both want the strugglesome life. Do you know that you’re the first person in your family ever to spend more than a week at one time on this land?” “Yes, Fezoo told me something like that.” “I’ve been here for twenty years,” he said, his voice freshening. “I’ve served your family faithfully, I built this farm. But I’m really at the end of my rope. You don’t understand these people, you trust too much, you let all sorts of jumped-up favorites bend your ear. The Saith from Pakka Larra has asked me to be his manager, and I honestly don’t know what to tell him.”
“I thought of all the trouble that would flow from his leaving, but I knew I had to break with him, must strike hard now. “The Saith is a shrewd judge, he’s smart to choose you. You’ll do well with him. You’re right, it’s time for you to go.” He looked over at me with an unblinking crocodile eye, appearing stunned, reproachful, but I knew his disguises. I steeled myself against pity. Suddenly he cried out, “None of this would have happened if your father were here!” Strong praise, I thought, coming from you....And that’s how we ended it.
Land Reform in Pakistan
After independence the country's political leaders recognized the need for more equitable ownership of farmland and security of tenancy. In the early 1950s, provincial governments attempted to eliminate some of the absentee landlords or rent collectors, but they had little success in the face of strong opposition. Security of tenancy was also legislated in the provinces, but because of their dependent position, tenant farmers benefited only slightly. In fact, the reforms created an atmosphere of uncertainty in the countryside and intensified the animosity between wealthy landlords and small farmers and sharecroppers. [Source: Peter Blood, Library of Congress, 1994 *]
In January 1959, accepting the recommendations of a special commission on the subject, General Mohammad Ayub Khan's government issued new land reform regulations that aimed to boost agricultural output, promote social justice, and ensure security of tenure. A ceiling of about 200 hectares of irrigated land and 400 hectares of nonirrigated land was placed on individual ownership; compensation was paid to owners for land surrendered. Numerous exemptions, including title transfers to family members, limited the impact of the ceilings. Slightly fewer than 1 million hectares of land were surrendered, of which a little more than 250,000 hectares were sold to about 50,000 tenants. The land reform regulations made no serious attempt to break up large estates or to lessen the power or privileges of the landed elite. However, the measures attempted to provide some security of tenure to tenants, consolidate existing holdings, and prevent fragmentation of farm plots. An average holding of about five hectares was considered necessary for a family's subsistence, and a holding of about twenty to twenty-five hectares was pronounced as a desirable "economic" holding.*
In March 1972, the Bhutto government announced further land reform measures, which went into effect in 1973. The landownership ceiling was officially lowered to about five hectares of irrigated land and about twelve hectares of nonirrigated land; exceptions were in theory limited to an additional 20 percent of land for owners having tractors and tube wells. The ceiling could also be extended for poor-quality land. Owners of expropriated excess land received no compensation, and beneficiaries were not charged for land distributed. Official statistics showed that by 1977 only about 520,000 hectares had been surrendered, and nearly 285,000 hectares had been redistributed to about 71,000 farmers.*
The 1973 measure required landlords to pay all taxes, water charges, seed costs, and one-half of the cost of fertilizer and other inputs. It prohibited eviction of tenants as long as they cultivated the land, and it gave tenants first rights of purchase. Other regulations increased tenants' security of tenure and prescribed lower rent rates than had existed.*
In 1977 the Bhutto government further reduced ceilings on private ownership of farmland to about four hectares of irrigated land and about eight hectares of nonirrigated land. In an additional measure, agricultural income became taxable, although small farmers owning ten hectares or fewer — the majority of the farm population — were exempted. The military regime of Zia ul-Haq that ousted Bhutto neglected to implement these later reforms. Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s avoided significant land reform measures, perhaps because they drew much of their support from landowners in the countryside.*
Government policies designed to reduce the concentration of landownership had some effect, but their significance was difficult to measure because of limited data. In 1993 the most recent agricultural census was that of 1980, which was used to compare statistics with the agricultural census of 1960. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of farms declined by 17 percent and farms decreased in area by 4 percent, resulting in slightly larger farms. This decline in the number of farms was confined to marginal farms of two hectares or fewer, which in 1980 represented 34 percent of all farms, constituting 7 percent of the farm hectarage. At the other extreme, the number of very large farms of sixty hectares or more was 14,000 — both in 1960 and in 1980 — although the average size of the biggest farms was smaller in 1980. The number of farms between two and ten hectares increased during this time. Greater use of higher-yielding seeds requiring heavier applications of fertilizers, installations of private tube wells, and mechanization accounted for much of the shift away from very small farms toward mid-sized farms, as owners of the latter undertook cultivation instead of renting out part of their land. Observers believed that this trend had continued in the 1980s and early 1990s.*
In early 1994, land reform remained a controversial and complex issue. Large landowners retain their power over small farmers and tenants, especially in the interior of Sindh, which has a feudal agricultural establishment. Tenancy continues on a large-scale: one-third of Pakistan's farmers are tenant farmers, including almost one-half of the farmers in Sindh. Tenant farmers typically give almost 50 percent of what they produce to landlords. Fragmented holdings remain a substantial and widespread problem. Studies indicate that larger farms are usually less productive per hectare or unit of water than smaller ones.*
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (tourism.gov.pk), Official Gateway to the Government of Pakistan (pakistan.gov.pk), The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Wikipedia and various books, websites and other publications.
Last updated February 2022