In the previous chapter, we saw how the East India Company used an evolving and sometimes inconsistent body of family and property law to dismantle the households and confiscate the wealth of several riyasats of southern Panjab. In the following pages, I develop this analysis further to consider the colonial state's treatment of the extended networks of riyasati relatives (rishtadaran), as well as the elites of dominant ra‘iyati lineages (got) studied in Chapters 2 and 3. Since there was some degree of overlap between these two categories, for the sake of convenience I will refer to these groups collectively in this chapter simply as ‘ra‘iyati elites’. As we have seen, there were great differences of rank and status within this class, some being no more than first-amongst-equals in their lineages and others having clearly established dominance therein. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these rural lineages were moreover quite volatile, with fierce competition between them as well as amongst their members. When the Company inserted itself into the politics of southern Panjab, it found itself entangled in these lineage ambitions and rivalries, which it sought to exploit to its own advantage.

This chapter studies this colonial involvement in inter- and intra-lineage competition, foregrounding the use of titles such as jagirdar, malik, muqaddam, chaudhari, and biswadar as well as their associated privileged tenures as forms of patronage. It focuses principally on the period prior to 1857 when the bulk of existing titles and tenures were reviewed and variously scrapped, limited, or reconfigured, even as new ones were created.