Two Centuries on the Commons: The Punjab

Abstract

"This is an historical enquiry into common lands and institutions of communal control in north India from early nineteenth century to almost the end of the present one. The region more or less co-incides with British Punjab--a Province encompassing Delhi until 1912. In this region, common lands evolved and transformed, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of two major changes in the system of agriculture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first was a transition from a system utilising cultivable 'waste' baniar kadim or long fallow, for grazing, to one of intensive and irrigated land-use for arable, and short fallows for pastoral purposes. The second change was a decline in the joint control exercised by the village proprietary body or malikan deh over resource management in the course of the nineteenth century."