Not all rural lineages in southern Panjab made the transition from ra‘iyati origins to riyasat as successfully as did Gurbaksh and Jodh Singh. If the Kalsia household were amongst the still considerable pool of rural folk that carved out principalities for themselves in late Mughal Panjab, there was a far larger number of lineages that continued to jostle with each other in less successful bids at expansion and stratification. This chapter considers the ensemble of these communities in the early nineteenth century. Using James Skinner's Tazkirat al-Umara, it identifies a number of powerful ra‘iyati lineages that were dominant in the region in this period. Using early correspondence of the East India Company, which had formally annexed the region in 1803 and was slowly gathering local information, this chapter then considers the coalescence and internal organization of these rural lineages. It brings their shallow hierarchies into relief, highlighting the narrow and unstable differences in status and influence between lineage elites and other members. It suggests that this tenuous stratification was the counterpart of two paradoxical tendencies that animated such lineages: the necessity to cooperate to collectively manage resources, and the ambition amongst members to establish a position of superiority within the lineage.

The weak hierarchies within ra‘iyati lineages and the circumscribed localities within which these emerged both reflected and shaped the practice of caste in the early nineteenth century. The second half of this chapter uses a close reading of Skinner's Tashrih al-Aqwam to identify some of the key aspects of this practice.

This chapter reflects upon the conditions that made southern Panjab a political and ecological frontier. The region's nature as a borderland was particularly in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Mughal imperial control receded in tandem with an efflorescence of regional polities. This fragmentation is explicable with reference to two opposing trends—the growing prosperity of rural Panjab during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and its subsequent economic stagnation. This at once facilitated the rise of ambitious new rural elites and intensified their internecine competition, as each of these fledgling states fought to attract subjects to their domains and keep them there, and to protect precious resources such as pasture and watering holes from encroachment. Yet these efforts were consistently undermined: first, by the very processes of competition to which this political efflorescence owed. Political consolidation also came up short against ecological factors. The aridity and seasonal variability of southern Panjab lent husbanding in the region a hybrid, itinerant, and opportunistic nature, which was not conducive to centralization but rather to the dispersion of authority. To illustrate the interplay of these dynamics, this chapter alternates between an analysis of enduring ecological patterns and the political context of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Local Topologies

Southern Panjab is an arid, rolling plain that roughly corresponds with the Indo- Gangetic Divide. This is the belt of land separating the river systems of the Indus and the Ganga. It is bordered on the east and southeast by the Yamuna River and the Aravalli Hills and on the north and west by the Satlaj River.

In early 1972, a group of Bengali civil servants residing in Islamabad were able to deliver a petition to David Ennals (1922–1995), a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) and human rights campaigner in the United Kingdom. Ennals, a former minister, was the leader of a group called the Friends of Bangladesh Conciliation Mission at the time. In their appeal for the safety of Bengalis in West Pakistan, the petitioners described their circumstances as below:

This chapter investigates Pakistan's encampment system for Bengali military personnel during the wartime period, 1971–1974. This reveals the captivity landscape by analysing the location, categorisation and spatial regulations of the camps in different parts of West Pakistan that housed Bengali military personnel, non-combatant servicemen and their families.

April 2022: One of us is talking to a group of Dalits from a Tamil village, mainly women. The discussion revolves around price increases, and the villagers debate which increases are most problematic, from fuel to onions and oil. ‘It is the price of gold that is a problem,’ exclaims one of them. ‘If the government wants to help us, it must lower the price of gold.’ The price of gold is indeed a permanent and daily concern. In the same discussion, another woman wonders how she will find the five gold sovereigns for her daughter's future wedding. To give less to in-laws would be to lose face but also, as we shall see, to lose the investment in her son's education and housing. Gold acts as a currency, used as a unit of account and a means of exchange for matrimonial transactions. It is also a store of value: its price has increased tenfold between 2000 and 2020, while the general consumer price index has increased threefold. Through pledging, gold is also a payment technology for daily transactions, now used to access cash to smooth out expenses and income and make ends meet. Long reserved for the dominant castes as a symbol of purity and prosperity, gold is now a currency accessible to many, even if its uses and meanings remain deep markers and drivers of social differentiation.

In this chapter we explore the political and moral economies of gold as money and its profound transformations in rural Tamil Nadu over the past two decades. The political economy of gold refers to the structural and material conditions that allow the unequal access and use of gold to occur and be sustained.

Between 1921 and 1924 Edgar was in Baghdad, and Winifred in St Albans. Through Edgar’s eyes, we see Baghdad during the tense early years of the British ‘mandate’ in Iraq. Now a company director, Edgar’s talents were exploited by Baghdad elites, co-opting him as an ‘agent of imperialism’, as Britain dominated the new Iraqi constitutional monarchy, while the Baghdad Anglican church used him to run its new parish. Through Winifred’s eyes, her public profile flowering, we see her expatriate adjustment to middle-class suburban life, with two stepsons and two daughters occasioning stepmothering anxiety. Immersed in the local Anglican church and feminist organisations such as the National Council of Women, alongside the local Conservative association, her conservative politics co-existed with progressive and cosmopolitan social attitudes. The love correspondence is integral to their expatriate identity, with insights into early twentieth-century middle-class marital sexuality, explicit details of a playful sexual relationship underpinned by spirituality, and a description of consensual birth-control practices. Winifred’s sudden departure to join Edgar in Baghdad, placing two young daughters, unhappily, in a small, boarding school, marked the urgency of their passion, but also the strength of a companionate marriage, a product of shared expatriate experience.

Gold ornaments play a critical role in the production of goods and services – and the sustaining of life – in India's informal sector. Held largely in the form of ornaments, the gold owned by Indian households is estimated to weigh 25,000 tonnes – which is equal in combined rupee value to about 40 per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) (Pattanayak 2019). Since Independence in 1947, policymakers in India have been preoccupied with preventing gold acquisition and ownership – which they see as keeping capital idle and unproductive in addition to being a drain on foreign exchange reserves (EPW Research Foundation 2005; see discussion in Chapters 1 to 3 in this volume). Yet even from prior to the period of colonial rule1 and despite a three-decade-long set of restrictions on imports, gold has constantly been in circulation in agricultural and business cycles, in festivals and marriages.

In this chapter I show how gold has not been idle or deployed for unproductive purposes. Indeed, it is essential for production. The opening up of markets to gold imports through the 1990s came as part of broader liberalisation reforms in India. These included dismantling trade barriers on thousands of commodities. Silk, the commodity focus of this chapter, was one (Patnaik 2005). At this time, ‘monetising’ gold by promoting lending against it by banks and specialised gold loan companies became a policy priority (Vaidyanathan 1999). This reshaped the landscape of gold-based lending in India.

While this book shows how gold is produced, distributed and then deployed in socially separate stages, the same is true of many other commodities in India. Silk is no exception.