Counting the people

Karachi is in Madras and Lahore is in Bengal; when will they be in Pakistan, and Pakistan in Southasia? During the late 1840s, the troops of the Bengal Presidency invaded the Sikh empire and conquered Punjab. Earlier in the same decade, a British expeditionary force had fought the Talpur Mirs at Miani, and annexed Sindh to the Bombay Presidency. But colonisation was not merely a matter of military defeat. Punjab and Sindh had seen many defeats and victories in their times. It was the establishment of a political system around the 'settlement' of land revenues that marked the real shift. By then, the landlord-based Permanent Settlement in Bengal was already a half-century old, and in disrepute among British colonial officers. The Madras Presidency experimented with the cultivator-based ryotwari system, which was eventually adopted by Bombay and implemented in Sindh. The Bengal Presidency drew a different lesson from the failure of the Permanent Settlement, and in its later conquests settled land revenues with 'village estates', on a mahalwari basis. Hence, Karachi is in Madras and Lahore is in Bengal.

This is not just a 'checking whether you're awake' historical vignette. Although much has changed, much has also stayed the same. The village records of the late Bengal Presidency today remain the administrative base of Punjab, the NWFP (or Pashtunkhwa) and Balochistan. The NWFP was, after all, carved out of Punjab in 1901, and Balochistan was infiltrated and annexed by colonial officials from Punjab province. The basic administrative unit in these provinces is the mouza, and the lowest government functionary is the patwari. Sindh has the nomenclature of Bombay, with its deh and tappaydar respectively. In essence, Sindh and Punjab (and Balochistan and Pashtunkhwa) are still in presidencies of the British Indian empire.