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• Dissatisfaction with the rules relating to sanitation, inheritance and residence that had been imposed as conditions of occupying colony land.
  
   
• Resentment at the system of government fines increasingly resorted to in order to enforce these conditions.
  
   
• The increasing uncertainty among colonists about the irrigation department's ability to provide timely water deliveries to colony lands.

Regular water deliveries were critical to survival in the arid Chenab colony, but as water scarcities forced irrigation engineers to more carefully control and limit distribution in the interests of efficiency, confidence in these deliveries waned. All of these concerns were exacerbated by the presence in the colonies of 'a horde of (bureaucratic) underlings', who were able to use these uncertainties (and the structure of colony fines) to extort huge sums from the settlers.

On one level these protests were prompted clearly by the new relationship between the state and the cultivator that the canal colony settlement engendered. The process of colony settlement, and of state-controlled supervision, impinged on cultivators' lives in innumerable ways, and thus pushed colonists into new kinds of alliances to exert influence on the policies of the state.

The very process of mobilization in these protests suggested the impact of the colonies' transformative environment. In order to put pressure on the state, the colony protesters forged unprecedented new forms of connections between urban and rural areas, with the press and voluntary political organizations playing an active role. The politics of the colony protests of 1907 were in critical respects unprecedented in rural Punjab.

Yet, rather than celebrate such urban-rural connections as evidence of their own modernizing success, and of the emergence in the colonies of new types of 'modern' rural men, the British strongly condemned such connections as evidence only of the meddling in rural affairs by 'urban agitators'.

Rather, most British officials responded to the protests by reasserting the underlying primacy of the village-based framework of the colony settlement. While cognizant of the many administrative complaints about rules, fines and water delivery that prompted colony unrest, British officials tended to see the underlying causes of the colony protests as not rooted in any fundamental opposition to the state. They saw it as natural resistance of colony settlers to arrangements that threatened to disrupt the framework of village life that the British had transported from central Punjab.

'In creating, or attempting to create, ideal conditions,' B.H. Dobson thus wrote, colony officials had found themselves at variance with public opinion, which expressed itself emphatically in favour of ancestral custom.'

The major government answer to the unrest of 1907, reflected in the 1908 report of the Punjab colonies committee and in the Colony Act of 1912, was therefore to strengthen this village framework, and to cement its connection to the state, whatever the costs to other government programmes of social engineering.

So dramatic was this turn in government policy that some historians, such as Imran Ali, have seen 1907 as the critical turning point in the history of the canal colonies, prompting the virtual British abandonment of all transformative social goals. More concerned with political quiescence than with social change, Ali writes that 'the state' gradually began after 1907 to forfeit its 'role as an agent of innovation'.

The key British concession was to grant colony settlers full proprietary rights in their lands, which paved the way, as the Punjab colonies committee put it in 1908, for 'the colonies, when fully developed, to come under the ordinary law of the Punjab'. This undercut the ability of the British to insist on special conditions for settlement (such as those relating to sanitation and village space), and ultimately provided the framework for the colonies' full assimilation into the superstructure of customary and statutory law defining the 'village', and the 'tribal' community in central Punjab.

While allowing the government to continue to maintain certain special conditions for the colonies, the Colony Act of 1912 brought these recommendations into full force. As Ali argues, the result was that, with customary inheritance law now in full operation, land in the colonies began to fragment among multiple heirs, and with this the geometric squares, which had suggested the distinctive transformative potential of the Chenab colony, gradually began to disappear. The experiment with social engineering in the colonies was, in other words, over.

However, to see the changes resulting from the protests of 1907 in such a stark light is to overstate the case. Even after 1912 many British officials continued to see the colonies as a leading force in Punjab for what they saw as 'modernizing' social change.

Some, such as Frank Brayne, who in the early twentieth century became a crusader for 'village uplift' both within the colonies and outside them, continued to see sanitation and village order as keys to village modernity, remaining blissfully oblivious to how this squared with the workings and ideology of customary law or with the political goals of the British 'village' policy.

Yet others, such as Malcolm Darling, noted how the colonies remained a centre of economic and social dynamism, even after the shifts in British policy following 1912. The 'hand of man', as Darling put it, had transformed the canal colony environment, and this had irresistibly raised incomes and transformed popular attitudes. Visiting a Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) village in the 1920s, Darling thus found an 'atmosphere of development' and a 'thirst' for education, which he saw as slowly spreading in the colonies.

Darling was hardly oblivious to the many obstacles to agricultural development that the colonies continued to face (including land fragmentation and, even more important, the collapse of prices during the depression), but in his eyes the granting of proprietary rights to colonists had scarcely undermined the colonies' transformative potential.

A yet more telling argument concerning the continuation of British social engineering lies in an appreciation of the 'village' system that was embodied in the 'ordinary law' of the Punjab, which the British applied to the colonies through the granting of full proprietary rights.

Imran Ali is certainly right that this was motivated in large part by political calculation, but to suggest that the British abandoned social engineering in the colonies in the face of 'conservative' peasant resistance to change is to buy far too fully into the rhetoric of the British themselves. In fact, the attempt to transfer the village system of central Punjab into the canal colonies was itself a massive feat of British social engineering, made possible only through a sustained policy of linked environmental and legal change.

Indeed, British policy in the colonies is probably best seen not within the framework of 'modernization' at all but within a framework of environmental control and state power. In the wake of their successful experiments on the Sidhnai and the opening of the Chenab colony, British officials realized that new engineering levers of control over the environment also offered them new levers of control over the population of Punjab.

However, British officials could not effectively fasten state control onto the 'wastes' of western Punjab without mobilizing hundreds of thousands of village migrants from central Punjab. British attempts to deploy these peasants as the shock troops of agricultural expansion went hand in hand with British efforts to assimilate them to new standards of state control and 'civilization'.

Yet, the success of such assimilation depended upon the state itself maintaining firm control over the environment, which it ultimately was unable to do.

For their part, canal colony 'villagers' saw little advantage in the end in accepting extensive new forms of state control over their lives when the state increasingly proved incapable of either predictably delivering water, or effectively controlling its administrative subordinates. Colony settlers thus found a far more attractive bargain with the state in the full extension into the canal colonies of the central Punjab's village property order.

Extension of this system into the colonies had represented a key framework for colonial policy from the beginning, even though it was, in some respects, in rhetorical tension with British commitments to 'modernization' and social engineering. For most colonial migrants, however, such rhetorical tensions were of far less importance than the fact that the language of 'custom' and 'village' offered a framework for simultaneously adapting to state power, and resisting greater state interference and control in their lives.

The legal framework of proprietary rights and customary law facilitated the development of biradari networks, often linking colonists with home villages in central Punjab, which in turn helped to provide the social wherewithal to deal with the colonial bureaucracy. As the colonies committee noted in 1908, colony settlers saw among the chief benefits of the establishment of customary law and proprietary rights the fact that they could then better compete in the marriage markets of central Punjab.

Rather than a sign of blind adherence to 'tradition' such connections, in fact, helped migrants to deal better with the political and social realities that they faced.

Any analysis of the colonies as a project for social engineering must thus be framed by a consideration of the institutions that defined the colonial structure of rule more generally. This is in no way to suggest, of course, that the entrepreneurial spirit that man saw in colony migration was not very real, and a critical reason for the Chenab colony's success.

Yet, the social engineering rhetoric of the canal colony settlement was contained within another socially engineered structure, the Punjabi village community. To say that this was an engineered structure is not to suggest, of course, that village communities were a creation of the British, because this would be absurd, but the legal form of the village in colonial Punjab reflected the policies of British rule.

Long before the opening of the canal colonies the British had developed a form of law and administration, which bolstered their own vision of an essentialized tribally-based village as central to the life of Punjab. For many Punjabis this framework became all the more relevant as they sought to deal with the new spatial and political frameworks, which the canal colonies created.

Ian Talbot is professor in South Asian studies at Coventry University, UK.

Shinder Thandi is lecturer in economics at the same university

David Gilmartin is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, USA.

This volume brings together 11 research papers on migration in Punjab in the 19th century. Beginning with the movement of the Sikhs from central Punjab to the canal colonies set up in the western part of the province, the writers trace the phenomenon till the late 20th century emigration of the Punjabis overseas.