Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (7.1992/1995)

30

M. CHAKRAVARTY-KAUL

Table 1. The Commons: Mid-Nineteenth Century Punjab

Nature
Access Location
The Regional Commons
The Cluster Commons
The Village Common
Individual Property
Open Access Public - the Waste
Open Access Public & Private - (Intervillage Waste).
Limited Access Private & Communal - (Intravillage Waste).
Closed Private - Primunal.

Table 1: Inferred from the British settlement reports. □ Tafel 1. Die gemeinschaftlichen Landereien im
Pandschab in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Verbreitung hangt von der »Natur«, vom »Zugang«
und von der »Lage« ab. Erschlossen aus den britischen Siedlungsberichten.

1820 (Fortescue 1911), Martins in 1832 (Pros
1832) for Delhi, Gubbins in Karnal, 1845
(Karnal SR, 1845). Lawrence’s report of 1834
(Delhi SR, 1838) on the Delhi region com-
pletes the picture for the area. It tells us about
the use of riverine lands as the grazing fallows
in Karnal; of the Gujars using the hills in
South Delhi and Gurgaon; and of the Nardak
in North Karnal where cattle moved through
forested areas.
The next picture we get from two different
areas: In the Manjha or the central parts of
the Punjab, the description in the Govern-
ment selections from records (1851-54)
{GRAP 1851-54), tell us there were:
“Interminable wastes, overgrown with grass
and bushes scantily threaded with sheep
walks and the footprints of cattle. The chief
tenants of these parts are (were) nomad pas-
toral tribes, who knowing neither law nor
property collect herds of cattle, stolen from
the agricultural districts” (GRAP 1851-54: 3).
These areas were of immediate use because
the grass was needed for the military estab-
lishments and for the caravan trade from Ka-
bul. Its future value appeared to be even
greater as “Portions of it will become the
scene of gigantic undertakings, which will tax
the skill and resources of the State, but which
will ultimately yield an ample return for the
outlay of capital” (GRAP). How prophetic

these expectations were we shall see, for it
was only in 1853 that the railways were first
introduced in Bombay - and already “Indeed
the Punjab could ill spare its wastes: they are
almost as important as the cultivated tracts”
(GRAP). In the second area, the Kangra hills,
Barnes in 1850 (Kangra SR, 1850, 19) clearly
writes of the Gujars and the Gaddis using the
hill-sides as grazing runs and the movement
up and down the slopes of the lower hills as
well. The picture is completed by Lyall in
1865-72 (Kangra SR 1865-72, 46).
A more detailed picture is provided by
Denzil C. J. Ibbetson, whose awareness of the
waste land issue and the indigenous systems
of communal land management makes his
settlement report (Karnal SR, 1872-80) a
unique anthropological review of a district -
Karnal. To this he added a full report on Pun-
jab castes and tribes in the first synchronous
census of the Punjab in 1881. This was in a
class by itself in census analysis. In this re-
port, Ibbetson gives the description of the
colonisation of Sirsa (Punjab Census 1881),
which had been a scantily populated district
in the early nineteenth century. Ibbetson’s
pen-picture provides details of the region
“which according to tradition was once be-
fore the seat of a flourishing civilisation”,
(Punjab Census 1881, 97) but was laid waste
by the famine of 1840 and cattle moved from
the watering holes and the drainage lines in
the open wastes to the riverine lands and back