“This is the sound of order,” he says. “You don’t hear it anymore. Now you only hear the gun.” Was the Zaildar a monster or a necessity? He was a tyrant by modern democratic standards. He extracted grain from the hungry. He enforced a caste hierarchy that kept millions illiterate. But in the brutal ecology of the 19th-century Punjab, he was also the only firewall against anarchy.
He was not an aristocrat by colonial decree; he was an aristocrat by local recognition. The British simply formalized the existing hierarchy. The criteria were brutal and pragmatic: land ownership, martial reputation, and loyalty. In a province obsessed with zat (caste) and biradari (brotherhood), the Zaildar was the Sardar of the common man. Visually, the Zaildar was a paradox. He wore a flowing choga (robe) and a turban that signified his tribe—a Dogra Zaildar wore his turban differently than a Jat from Montgomery. But over this, he draped a British-era khaki tunic. In one hand, he held a staff of office, topped with silver; in the other, a brass lotah (water vessel) for ritual cleansing. He was a fusion of the ancient and the colonial. zaildar
He unwraps the staff. The silver has tarnished black. He taps it on the mud floor. “This is the sound of order,” he says
But the role has rotted. The old Zaildar was a mediator; the modern Wadera is often a gun-runner. The old Zaildar knew the price of wheat; the new one knows the price of a police officer’s bribe. In a village near Faisalabad, I met Muhammad Akram, aged 82. His grandfather was a Zaildar under the British. He still keeps the staff, wrapped in a dirty cloth, in a trunk filled with mothballs. He was a tyrant by modern democratic standards