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Eclipse of Feudalism in Pakistan
Eclipse of Feudalism in Pakistan
By Arif Hasan
Mechanisation and middlemen: A customised tractor with a trailer full of harvested sugarcane, in Pakistan.
Let me introduce that feudal system through a story. In 1968, I was traveling in rural Sindh with a French diplomat, from a place called Sakht to Mohenjodaro. The road meant for vehicles was so bad that drivers preferred to travel along a canal embankment. We came upon a bullock cart, and my friend jumped out with his camera to take a picture. As the cart stopped, one of its two occupants, a young man, made off into the fields. His older companion came up, touched my feet, and said, “Sahib, please forgive us, we will never come in front of your car again.” This was in 1968, and that was the mindset of the villagers when they saw what they perceived to be a person of authority. Today, the highway from Sakht to Mohenjodaro is teeming with vehicles, but there is not a bullock cart in sight. And nobody will come to touch your feet and seek forgiveness for having come in front of your car. There are about 30 buses that ply between the two towns every day.
What was this system that made people touch your feet that late in the 20th century? And what has pushed the transformation in social relations? An explanation would help in the understanding of present-day Pakistan.
Sociology of Pakistan
The old society in the rural areas at the time of Partition was a caste society. You had basically three castes according to economic divisions: the landlords, artisans, and what are called the kami, or the ‘lesser’ castes. Before the arrival of the British colonials, this region actually did not have landlords. Land belonged to the chieftain, who appointed mansabdars to collect revenue from designated areas, and they were evaluated every year.
The British changed the revenue system. After their conquest, they converted all the pro-British mansabdars into hereditary landlords. This changed the earlier feudal system into one that was controlled by a network of landlords, and the peasants became serfs. This was a major departure, and under the British there developed a nexus between the bureaucracy, the deputy commissioner and the landlords. Governance was handed over to the landlords, who settled disputes, kept law and order, financed agricultural production, and maintained the rural infrastructure, including getting the peasantry to de-silt canals. The deputy commissioner would order the landlord to carry out the de-silting, and the latter would supply the labour, providing only rations (langar). Thus, it was done for free as far as the government was concerned. So the landlords maintained law and order, they financed agricultural production, they maintained the agricultural infrastructure, and they were subservient to the deputy commissioner.
The caste system was collapsing when the British came because of the rise of entrepreneurship. But with the feudal system that the British created, they re-enforced the caste system, and they re-enforced the castes as well. The classification of castes for the first time in India was done by the British. So you had agricultural castes, you had artisan castes, you had the merchant castes, and this was very rigid. This was our feudal system. Because of this feudal system, we could have wonderfully liberal constitutions, because the feudal vote would make those constitutions incorrigible. We would have military dictatorships because the feudals would support the dictatorships.
Understanding how this system of local governance and control has changed will allow us to analyse the eclipse of feudalism in Pakistan. Some transformation was already happening in the late 19th and early 20th century because of education, but the real push came with Partition. Indeed, I refer to ‘Partition’ rather than ‘Independence’ because it was the division of the Subcontinent that was the harbinger of change within what became Pakistan.
What had happened? According to the 1951 census of Pakistan, 48 percent of the urban population had origins in India, and for the whole population that figure was 17 percent. This massive influx affected the sociology of Pakistan, even as the migrants settled in the Punjab and Sindh; cities like Karachi, Hyderabad, Faisalabad and others saw their populations more than double within half a decade. This was the beginning of the collapse of the caste system.
Another anecdote will help explain the change in social relations. In the mid-1990s, in a hamlet near Faisalabad, I asked a village elder how the political situation was in Punjab.
“Afra tafri,” he responded, meaning chaos and anarchy.
“How is there anarchy?”
He replied, “The daughter of the washerman has just married an agriculturalist.”
“But how has this happened?”
He said, “It’s all because of the refugees.”
“How is it because of the refugees?”
And he said, “They lost their caste by coming here. They lost their profession. The chamars [tanners] became agriculturalists, the agriculturalists became merchants, and the whole society was destroyed.”
“But that’s about the people who came! What about the people who are living here?”
He replied, “Kharbuja kharbhuje ko dekh kar rang badalta hain.” A melon changes colour just looking at the next melon, and the bad melons have been able to infect all the others.
I will tell you another story, because it makes it easier to explain. This is in another village, a rather backward area of southern Punjab province. I asked a village elder, “Do you still decide disputes?”
He replied, “Yes, I do!”
“That means you are a bigger leader than the MLAs and MPs, because they cannot take such decisions.”
Addressing me – a much younger man – as ‘Kakke’ in Punjabi, he said, “You don’t understand anything. If I give a judgement in favour of one side, they bring me sweets. Those that I decide against file a FIR and go to the courts!”
This transformation was the result of migration. A PhD student of mine studied two mohallas of Lahore, one where the Hindus had left and Muslims had come and settled, and the other which had not seen such a drastic demographic change. In the latter neighbourhood, you had a panchayat with its old system of maintaining community relations through caste. The mohalla with the new Muslim arrivals had no caste system.
Revolutionary green
The agricultural planners of the newborn country pushed both irrigation and mechanisation. To use the new technology, you needed money. This required loans and other transactions, and so a whole set of financial institutions grew up to provide services, including cooperative banks and agricultural banks. Cash finally replaced barter, but then it was pumped back into industrialisation and for the first time village self-sufficiency was lost. Under the old system, it was the sunar [goldsmith] who would pawn the gold, cut it into pieces depending on who owns how much and how much credit he needs. All this was replaced by cheques and bonds.
Industrially manufactured goods arrived in the village. So the cobbler lost his calling as footwear came from the city; the weaver lost his profession with cloth coming from the factories; the potter became an anachronism as plastic and aluminium replaced mud. The piped water schemes made the water carriers redundant, as they did the animals which carried the water. For this and other reasons, we saw the disappearance of donkeys and camels. The horses disappeared completely. I have often wondered where these animals went.
Then another player entered the equation at the village level – the middleman. Formal credit was very difficult for small farmers to access, and the middlemen slipped in to fill the gap, creating a new layer in the rural economy. When local body elections were organised under Zia ul-Haq, these middlemen ran for office and beat the feudal candidates. Partition, the Green Revolution, mechanisation, financing – these were all harbingers of shifts in rural livelihoods which we hardly sought to document or understand as they occurred. Personally, I sought to do so through my work, The Unplanned Revolution. The scale of transformation was enormous, and by the 1970s the whole system of feudal relationships in rural Pakistan had collapsed.
It was not long before an even more transformative revolution took place, and that was the introduction of the Suzuki pickup. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto decided to give new loans for rural transport. Before long, Suzuki pickups were carrying agricultural products. This is how the bullock carts and the camel caravans were replaced by mechanised transport. With this, all of a sudden, the small market towns vanished, since the Suzuki could cover longer distances. Together with this, the power of the landlord to control the market also disappeared, and the keys went into the hands of the middleman and transporter.
A new game entered the rural marketplace as the middleman-transporter nexus developed. It made it impossible for the peasant or the landlord to enter the mandi, or marketplace. It was no longer possible for a landlord to simply place his produce in a van and take it to market. It would not be allowed to enter. The goods had to arrive through the transporter, who was linked to the middleman.
Then there was another factor at work – urbanisation. In the study of censuses, the most important age group in society is that between 15 and 24. In the 1981 census, in the data for Karachi, we noted that 39 percent of women in this age bracket were married, as were 16 percent of the men. Today, the figure for married women in this bracket is less than 20 percent, and for married men 7 percent. For the first time in the history of our city, we have an overwhelming majority of unmarried adolescents. For this same 15-24 age group in Karachi, 67 percent of the men were literate in 1981, as were 63 percent of the women. Today, we have 84 percent literacy among men and 85 percent literacy among women.
As any sociologist will tell you, this data indicates the possibility of great shifts in family structures. All my studies show that the extended family, which has been under enormous pressure over the decades, has been dying a slow death. By now, 89 percent of the households of Karachi are made up of nuclear families, whereas in 1989 it was 58 percent. This is not only an indication of a great demographic shift, it is also indicates a crisis of values.
Women of Karachi
I asked an elder from the taluka whom I had met in 1983, now much older, “Sahib, did you have honour killings before?”
He said, “Yes, we used to have one in perhaps ten years. It was a rare occurrence, and we would discuss one for ten years until another happened.”
“Then why it is happening now with such regularity?”
He said, “Now, everyone has become shameless, without honour, so honour killings are taking place.”
I asked, “Why is there no honour today?”
He responded, “The young people, they’ve gone to the city, and they’ve done all the wrong things. The girls have learned how to read and write, they’ve gone to school, some of them have gone to university as well. They have no morals left, so this is bound to happen.”
“You mean this is going to continue like this forever?”
“No, no, it will stop!”
“How and when will it stop?”
His reply was educative: “The honour killings will stop when everyone becomes shameless, then it will end.” Then he added, “But I hope that I die before that day.”
He was a man of the old, feudal rural culture, with its own pattern of behaviour and way of thinking. He was part of it, and it was dying, so he wished to die with it.
In 1992, the applications for court marriages in Karachi amounted to about 10 or 15, mainly applications from couples who were seeking the protection of the court for wedlock without familial consent. By 2006, we were seeing more than 250 applications for court marriages per day in Karachi. Significantly, more than half of the couples seeking court recognition of their betrothal came from rural areas of Sindh. This is yet another indication of how the entire feudal system and its values are in rapid collapse.
This collapse is also heralded by the advances in women’s education. According to 2006 figures, fully 72 percent of the University of Karachi student body is today female. Among medical students, 87 percent are women, and the figure for architecture and planning is as high as 92 percent. In fact, our vice chancellor was so concerned that he suggested a quota for men. I used to teach a class with one boy and 15 girls. That has changed a little now as we have tried to even it out. But the reason is simply that women do better on the entrance tests. There’s no other reason for it.
In 1971, I started working in low-income settlements in Karachi, and a decade later I joined the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). The settlements that we worked in at that time were primarily working-class, and when we went over we were met by older men who were mostly illiterate. They spoke to us in very formal, feudal language – janaab, huzoor, sahib, miyan, “We are all your children and need your protection,” and all that. At that time, in the 1980s, the women hardly worked. Things are entirely different when you go to the OPP today; it’s not what you would call a shanty settlement. It’s mostly the younger generation who will meet you, and they will address you as ‘uncle’ rather than ‘sahib’. The people you meet are bank managers, school teachers, professionals working in the service sector of Karachi.
The additional phenomenon of the past decade has been the growing anarchy linked to the Afghan war, and the further demise of feudal institutions. Spending a week in northern Sindh earlier this year, I was struck by three elements. Firstly, I noticed the immense physical mobility women have gained from the end of feudalism. Nothing can control them or contain them anymore. Secondly, there are protests against the excesses both of the landlords and of the establishment. If the landlord has been harsh, or if the state has not delivered on some demand, the men come out and block the highway. Often it is women who carry out the blockade because the police action against them is not so harsh. Thirdly, the nature of landlord-ship has changed. The landlord is now married to a modern, urban woman, and that heralds significant shifts. When I asked villagers about the difference between the old landlords and the new, the reply was, “The young landlord has married into the city and stays in Karachi. His children never come here either, so we are alright.” The result is that sharecropping has given way to contracting, and this has transformed the society of rural Sindh.
Afghan war
Pakistani society continues in its state of flux, and the Afghan war has escalated this. The normal evolution of society has been stopped by the militancy in Pakistan linked to the war in Afghanistan. If you remove these militants – which you won’t, by the way – then a whole new world emerges in Pakistan, a transformation in a society trying to define itself. The recent shooting of Malala Yusufzhai has shown what Pakistani society really feels and how it thinks on issues. For the first time the Pakistani establishment – the army as well as the three major political parties – have all condemned the Taliban for the shooting. The people have spoken in the huge rallies, in Karachi and elsewhere. Earlier, this never happened because people were scared of being shot, kidnapped, and having bombs thrown at them. This is the first time that there has been such a huge public outpouring.
But even as people find a voice, we do need the inculcation of new societal values. The problem is, how do you promote these values and through whom? It is too much to ask media, and academia is busy in consultancies for the donor institutions. The literature is all about the struggle between fundamentalism and liberalism, but that is not where the problem lies. The challenge is for Pakistani society to consolidate itself in the post-feudal era. The society has freed itself from the shackles of feudalism, but our values still remain very much the same. There are very big changes that are taking place – how do you support them, how do you institutionalise them, how do you give the people a voice? I leave you with these questions, rather than try and provide the answers.
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This article is a summarised version of a presentation made by Arif Hasan in Kathmandu on 15 October 2012, organised by Himal Southasian.
~ Arif Hasan is an award-winning architect, urban planner, social researcher, teacher and writer. He has been involved with the Orangi Pilot Project since its inception in 1982, and has been founding Chairman of the Urban Resource Centre, Karachi, since 1989.
http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/5126-the-eclipse-of-f...
Views: 854
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Comment by Riaz Haq on December 16, 2012 at 9:16am
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Here's an AFP story about love online in Pakistani town of Muzaffargarh:
MUZAFFARABAD: Sania was just a schoolgirl when she logged onto an Internet chat room and met a young college student called Mohammad. They fell in love and decided to get married.
Internet dating in the West is now so common that it is no longer considered an act of shameful desperation but an acceptable way for busy professionals to discover a like-minded partner.
But for Sania, the 22-year-old daughter of a conservative truck driver in Pakistan, online romance and her subsequent marriage has meant repeated beatings and death threats at the hands of her relatives.
“No one gets married outside our community. It is our tradition,” Sania told AFP. She is from the garrison city of Rawalpindi and Mohammad comes from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
At first she and Mohammad chatted online. Then they both bought mobiles to continue their relationship by telephone. For several years they asked their parents for permission to marry, but were refused.
So Sania decided to escape.
She packed a bag and sneaked out while her brother was at school, her mother sleeping and her father out at work. She took the bus straight to Muzaffarabad.
“I spent the four-hour journey in fear. I kept thinking that if my family caught me, they’d kill me,” she told AFP.
In Muzaffarabad, Mohammad met her off the bus and they got married immediately. But while his family quickly accepted Sania, nearly two years later the couple still live in fear of her relatives.
Twice they have dragged her back to Rawalpindi since her marriage and have demanded repeatedly that she break off relations with Mohammad.
“Last time they took me back three months ago and put lot of pressure on me to break off this relationship. I got in contact with my husband and asked him to fetch me. I escaped from the house at midnight and we managed to flee,” she said.
Now Sania and her 24-year-old husband have moved to a new one-room house in a slum, changed their phone number and dare not venture out of the city.
“They say they will kill us whenever they find us,” Sania says.
Women in Pakistan who marry against the wishes of their parents are ostracised or even killed by male relatives for supposedly bringing dishonour on the family.
But online relationships are a new phenomenon.
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Mohammad Zaman, professor of sociology at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, who has written a book about marriage, says arranged unions that have dominated for centuries are on the wane.
“Internet marriage is a new trend emerging in Pakistan. Technological advancement has entered into our homes and traditional taboos are slowly vanishing in educated and affluent families,” Zaman told AFP.
Online, they can share personal information and swap photographs — things that would be restricted or prohibited in the traditional selection of partners.
The Internet is changing mindsets, giving young people freedom and privacy, and a forum to discuss matters frowned upon by Pakistan’s traditional, conservative society.
“There is a kind of emancipation in society and young people want their say in the selection of their future partner,” Zaman said, although he conceded that parents find it easier to accept a son’s choice than that of a daughter.
Tahir, a Pakistani peace activist, knows only too well how the freedom of the Internet can collide with the restrictions of everyday life — not only conservative sensibilities but politics and war.
The 26-year-old fell for university student Nazia on Facebook and Skype.
All fine and good, except that Nazia lives on the other side of one of the most heavily militarised borders in the world — that which divides the Himalayan region of Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
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http://dawn.com/2012/12/16/love-online-challenges-pakistan-taboos/
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The "peace of the dead" is ending with the "eclipse of feudalism" in Pakistan. What we are seeing now is an "unplanned revolution" in the words of a Pakistani sociologist, a revolution that is transforming Pakistan for the better in the long run.
http://books.google.com/books?id=EKHZAAAAMAAJ&q=feudalism#searc...
http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/5126-the-eclipse-of-f...
http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/5126-the-eclipse-of-f...
http://sai.columbia.edu/outreach_files/Social%20&%20Structural%...
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Here's an Express Tribune list of Pakistani companies with over a billion in revenue:
The Billion Dollar Club
1. Pakistan State Oil Company
Revenues: $11.57 billion
Joined club: Before 1986
2. Pak-Arab Refinery
Revenues: $3.00 billion
Joined club: 2000
3. Sui Northern Gas Pipelines
Revenues: $2.52 billion
Joined club: 2004
4. Shell Pakistan
Revenues: $2.38 billion
Joined club: 2000
5. Oil & Gas Development Company
Revenues: $2.23 billion
Joined club: 2005
6. National Refinery
Revenues: $1.97 billion
Joined club: 2005
7. Hub Power Company
Revenues: $1.97 billion
Joined club: 2009
8. Karachi Electric Supply Company
Revenues: $1.84 billion
Joined club: 2008
9. Attock Refinery
Revenues: $1.74 billion
Joined club: 2008
10. Attock Petroleum
Revenues: $1.72 billion
Joined club: 2010
11. Lahore Electric Supply Company
Revenues: $1.49 billion
Joined club: 2006
12. Pakistan Refinery
Revenues: $1.44 billion
Joined club: 2011
13. Sui Southern Gas Company
Revenues: $1.38 billion
Joined club: 2005
14. Pakistan International Airlines
Revenues: $1.36 billion
Joined club: 2005
15. Engro Corporation
Revenues: $1.29 billion
Joined club: 2011
16. Pakistan Telecommunications Company
Revenues: $1.25 billion
Joined club: 2000
17. Kot Addu Power Company
Revenues: $1.14 billion
Joined club: 2012
18. Mobilink
Revenues: $1.11 billion
Joined club: 2006
19. Pakistan Petroleum
Revenues: $1.09 billion
Joined club: 2012
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http://tribune.com.pk/story/483287/corporate-revenues-the-growth-of...
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Here's ET on near billion dollar Pak companies:
The Near-Billion Dollar club
1. Telenor Pakistan
Revenues: $951 million
2. Pepsico Pakistan
Revenues: $922 million
3. State Life Insurance Corporation
Revenues: $885 million
4. Toyota Indus
Revenues: $869 million
5. Habib Bank
Revenues: $831 million
6. Nestle Pakistan
Revenues: $804 million
7. National Bank of Pakistan
Revenues: $781 million
8. Faisalabad Electric Supply Company
Revenues: $775 million
9. Multan Electric Power Company
Revenues: $761 million
10. Unilever Pakistan
Revenues: $746 million
11. Pakistan Tobacco Company
Revenues: $728 million
12. Pak Suzuki
Revenues: $713 million
13. Islamabad Electric Supply Company
Revenues: $681 million
14. Fauji Fertilizer Company
Revenues: $634 million
15. Lotte Pakistan
Revenues: $624 million
16. United Bank
Revenues: $622 million
17. MCB Bank
Revenues: $617 million
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tribune.com.pk/story/483448/rising-tide-consumer-centric-companies-dominate-the-near-billion-dollar-club/
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Here's an interesting piece in <a href="http://f5web1.economist.com/news/asia/21578104-wrestlers-son-overthrows-landed-gentry-gone-wind">The Economist</a> on decline of feudal power in Pakistan:
<i>A wrestler’s son overthrows the landed gentry
May 18th 2013 | LAHOREJamshed Dasti takes success on the chin
Pakistan’s waning feudalismA wrestler’s son overthrows the landed gentry
JAMSHED DASTI is tired but triumphant. “This is a revolution,” he says. “These feudals never before considered poor people to be even human.” Speaking on May 13th from Muzaffargarh, in south Punjab, he had much to crow about. The son of an illiterate wrestler had just inflicted a humiliating political defeat on the patriarch of a hitherto unassailable clan of landed gentry.
Ghulam Rabbani Khar is head of a family that owns 600 hectares (1,500 acres) in cotton country and is powerful in the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). His daughter, Hina Rabbani Khar, was foreign minister in the last government. She did not stand for election, but her father was thrashed, with less than half Mr Dasti’s 100,000-plus votes.
Mr Dasti, in his 30s, quotes Marxist poetry and rides a donkey cart. He ran as an independent, and Mr Khar was not his only obstacle. In April a court imposed a three-year jail sentence for claiming a fake degree; the sentence was later scrapped. He has faced dozens of criminal cases, speaks no English and is variously described as a “thug” or Pakistan’s answer to Robin Hood.
His victory, he claims, is proof of an “awakening consciousness” against feudal bosses. They used to instruct villagers how to vote. Now voters are more mobile and sometimes better educated. Electronic media, even in rural corners, have helped change attitudes.
In Punjab the PPP is destroyed. Elsewhere the gentry hang on; in Sindh, landed families got out the votes for the PPP. But politics is being reshaped. Ijaz Gilani, a pollster in Islamabad, says populist figures like Mr Dasti fill “vacuums” formed as labour-intensive plantations decline, cotton farming modernises and old families lose clout.
Villagers need someone to help them deal with police, teachers and other bits of the state. The local press makes much of Mr Dasti’s readiness, even at night, to jump on his cart to help troubled constituents. He made his name during floods in 2010. He set up a free ambulance service and a bus that, at times, he drives himself. Deference, he says, is out.</i>http://f5web1.economist.com/news/asia/21578104-wrestlers-son-overth...
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Change is most difficult to recognize when it is actually happening.
It can often resemble chaos, even to those who demand it loudest.
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