Google Scholarįor example, Ayub Khan married his sons into industrial families of the NWFP and his daughter wedded the son of the Wali of Swat, whose daughter was married off to a senior bureaucrat. Napier became famous for his dispatch in Latin to the British military command after he conquered the province: “Peccavi -I have sinned.” As children we thought it a confession, not a pun’ (Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East, London, 1988, p. He was surprised when some time later he woke up on his own. ”Wake me up when we are off Bhutto’s lands”, he ordered. “Bhutto’s lands”, came the inevitable response.
My feudal lord pdf driver#
“Whose lands are these?” he reportedly asked his driver as he toured the province. As children we loved to hear the story of the amazement of Charles Napier, the British conqueror of Sindh in 1843. Our lands like those of other landowners in Sindh were measured in square miles, not acres. An Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto went to great lengths to describe the ancestral land-holdings in her autobiography: ‘Before the first land reforms in 1958, the Bhuttos were among the largest employers of agricultural workers in the province. It is not uncommon to meet former graduates of prominent Western universities belonging to aristocratic families unabashedly bragging about their land possessions.
The ruling dynasties of Pakistan have been simply land-based. Job opportunities and better civic facilities attracted peasant and tribal communities to the cities and, especially in the 1980s, new socio-political forces and tensions were unleashed. Cross-border migration in 1947, ambitious plans for rapid industrialisation, mechanised agriculture leading to the green revolution of the 1960s, migration to the UK and, in the 1970s, to the oil-rich Gulf states, were all decisive factors in the development of South Asian mobility. Industrialisation and the resultant urbanisation had been relatively recent developments in British India. The consolidation of ruralisation under the Raj reflected the very imbalance in the demographic realities of the sub-continent where threequarters of its population lived in villages depending on agriculture. South Asia essentially remained segmentary due to a marriage of convenience among the tripolar forces of the land-holding tribal, feudal and imperial hierarchies.
My feudal lord pdf professional#
1 The colonial state harboured suspicions towards the professional elites and therefore coopted the landed elites 2 and attempted to ensure their preservation as regional potentates.
In predominantly agrarian societies elsewhere, especially in colonies like the South Asian sub-continent, the emergence of a bourgeoisie was a slow and largely state-dependent process. Historically speaking, the feudal lords lost their politico-economic ascendancy in Europe and North America to an ambitious, highly literate, and urban-based middle class, forerunner of modern Western civilisation.