Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [11]
Greater wealth was perceived not solely in terms of individual social mobility, although it provides opportunities for this, but in terms of raising the status of a group of kin in relation to their wider biradiri and neighbours in Pakistan ... Status derives not only from wealth, mainly in terms of property and business, but also from respectability (primarily expressed by an ashraf [‘noble’] lifestyle). One element of being considered a man worthy of respect derives from having a reputation as being someone who honours his obligations to kin. Cousin marriage is one of the most important expressions of this obligation. The majority of east Oxford families have not achieved social mobility and status though massive accumulation of property and business. For them, the marriages of their children to the children of siblings in Pakistan is an important symbol of honour and respectability, a public statement that even families separated by continents recognize their mutual obligations.6
It is above all thanks to locally dominant kinship groups that over the years, beneath the froth and spray of Pakistani politics, the underlying currents of Pakistani political life have until recently been so remarkably stable. Civilian governments have come and gone with bewildering rapidity, whether overthrown by military coups or stranded by the constantly shifting allegiances of their political supporters. Yet the same people have gone on running these parties, and leading the same people or kinds of people at local level. The same has been true under military governments. None of these changes of government or regime has produced any real change to the deeper structures of Pakistani politics, because these are rooted in groups and allegiances which so far have changed with glacial slowness.
‘FEUDALS’
In the countryside, and to a great extent in the towns as well, the most powerful elements are not individuals – though they are led by individuals – or even families in the Western sense. From this point of view, as from many others, the description of the rural landowners as ‘feudals’ is false, in so far as it suggests any close comparison with their medieval European equivalents. If this were so, the Pakistani ‘feudals’ would long since have been swept away by pressure from below and reform from above.
Each individual ‘feudal’ is quite a small landowner by traditional European standards (500 acres is a big estate in Pakistan), and most of his (or sometimes her) wealth may well now come from urban property. In Punjab at least, the really big landowners lost most of their land in the land reforms of Ayub in the late 1950s and Bhutto in the early 1970s.
In fact, I thought of arguing that there is in fact no such thing as a feudal in Pakistan; but then I remembered wild-boar hunting with the noble landowners of Sindh – a remarkably ‘feudal’ experience, described in Chapter 8. So what I’ll say instead is that while there certainly are ‘feudals’ in Pakistan in the loose Pakistani sense of that term, there are no feudals in the European historical sense.
A great many leading ‘feudal’ families, especially in northern Punjab, are not old landowning families at all, but emerged quite recently, often on the basis of urban property or successful corruption when in state service. However, they adopt the same manners and behave politically in the same ways as the old families. Above all, they appeal for support in their own kinship groups, and do so on the basis of the same old politics of patronage and protection.
Indeed, the most powerful remaining ‘feudals’ in Pakistan owe their power not to the extent of their personal landholdings but to the fact that they are the chiefs of large tribes; and the importance of leadership roles in kinship groups extends down to the lesser gentry as well. It is the way in which individual landowners are embedded in landowning