(Part -1)

Memory – A prayer

After a night spent with the bhajans and kafis of Khwaja Ghulam Farid, with the strings of the yaktara carrying us between longing and ecstasy, we sat down for breakfast. Hari, son of the legendary Fakira Bhagat, looked around at the concrete walls and said, almost as a prayer:

“These walls suffocate me. I want to return to the Rohi—to roam with my herd where the land remains open and the gaze may travel as far as the eyes can see.”

A little later, Aadu Bhagat received a call from home. A goat had gone missing from their herd.

“Shala kutta kha gaya hove,” he said. May a dog have eaten it.

For a moment, the sentence startled us. Why would anyone hope that a lost animal had been eaten? Then Aadu explained: if a dog had taken the goat, the loss would end there. But if it had strayed into another family’s herd, there might be suspicion, accusation and quarrel among people who must continue living, grazing and sharing water together.

It was not indifference to the animal. Nor was it some pastoral innocence untouched by conflict. It was an expression of an ethic shaped by interdependence: the recognition that a material loss may sometimes be easier to bear than the breaking of relations upon which an entire way of life depends. In a landscape of scarcity, conviviality is not a decorative virtue. It is part of how life continues.

Through that strange prayer – may the dog have eaten it – one arrives at something like what  “Rakh” is.

Not a complete definition. The rakh exceeds the language through which the state has tried to contain it: grazing reserve, rangeland, scrubland, state land, barren land. These words describe a surface while erasing the relations that make it live. The soil itself is regenerative, it stores carbon, absorb more rainfall, retain water and bring back bio-diversity.

“Rakh”, the word invites another kind of hearing. Rakh is a place, but it also carries the force of an act: to keep, to hold, to tend, to protect, to let something remain. To rakh is not to lock something away from life. It is to keep it within life A rakh is not merely land left uncultivated. It is land kept within relations of care. It exists because pasture is not exhausted all at once; because animals are allowed to move; because water is shared; because people remember routes, seasons and limits; because something is taken, but something is also left for others and for the time still to come.

The rakh, then, is both a noun and a practice.

It is a place that is kept, and the continuous labour of keeping it.

This keeping is not the paternalistic conservation of distant experts who divide nature from people and then claim authority over both. Nor is it preservation through exclusion, where the land is protected only after those who live through it have been removed. The rakh is nurtured materially: through moving herds, shared tobas, women’s work, remembered rainfall, negotiated access, reciprocal obligation and the restraint not to consume everything merely because it is momentarily available.

Its abundance is not the abundance of accumulation. It is the abundance created by relationship.

To rakh is not to possess something absolutely. It is to remain answerable to what one keeps.

And perhaps this is what Hari’s longing for the open Rohi carried. He was not simply asking for more space than the concrete room could provide. He was longing for a world in which the human body, the herd, the horizon and the land had not yet been separated into individual enclosures. The suffocation came not only from the walls. It came from a form of life in which everything must be bounded before it can be recognised.

Thal and Rohi offers another measure of existence: the gaze travels, the herd moves, and belonging is made not through the fence/banna but through the relations one refuses to break.

A rakh is not land without an owner. It is land kept alive through shared obligations that no single owner can contain.

Commons and Commoning

The commons are often described as shared resources. That description is too still. A commons does not survive merely because several people have access to the same thing. It survives through commoning: the repeated work of making and remaking relations around what is shared.

In Rohi and Thal, commoning may mean remembering a route that joins pasture to water; cleaning and protecting a toba; moving a herd with rainfall rather than forcing the land to produce on command; negotiating who may enter and when; carrying another household through drought; or leaving a grazing patch so that it can return. Women tend animals, process milk, gather fodder, preserve food and stretch household life across seasons of scarcity. Children learn the desert by walking it. Elders carry the memory of wells, plants, storms, deaths and recoveries. None of this appears as ownership. All of it makes the commons.

Commoning is not a claim that the old order was perfectly equal. Herds could be unequal. Influence vary through the caste and class. Women’s work is often hidden. Custom can exclude as well as include. The precarious presence of Hindu – Bheel, Meghwar and other communities – cant be ignored. The answer to these injustices is not to destroy the shared ground on which collective life depends. It is to democratise the commons: to make power visible, to centre those whose labour is erased, and to renew the rules of sharing from within the ecology of the place.

James McCarthy calls the commons counter-hegemonic because they keep alive relations that refuse the absolute rule of private property and the market. The importance of the rakh lies precisely here. It proves that land can be productive without becoming a commodity, governed without a single owner, and cared for without being separated from the people who live through it.

Part 2

Rakh – A land we keep

When “Apna” is cut from “Saanjha”

Punjab’s Apna Khait Apna Rozgar enters this world, in continuity of colonial making and through this colonisation of this land, with the promise of one’s own field and one’s own livelihood. The language is carefully chosen. Who would stand against land for the landless? But the scheme begins by hiding the ground from which the plot is cut. Before the plot becomes apna, the rakh must cease to be saanjha.

In Rohi and Thal, the programme reaches into grazing commons that the provincial record treats as state property or its catogorisation of protected/grazing/range lands. It draws boundaries, identifies individual recipients and turns a moving landscape into a collection of conditional holdings. The applicant is verified. The lot is numbered. The common relations that passed through the land are not asked to appear.

We should name this clearly. This is not land reform. Land reform confronts concentrated power. It breaks the estates of landlords, corporations and military institutions. It restores land and political authority to those dispossessed by them. Apna Khait Apna Rozgar leaves the great concentrations of land standing and redistributes the shared security of poor pastoral and communities which are rendered as landless.

The landless are not the architects of this enclosure, and they are not its enemy. Their dispossession is being used as its moral cover. Punjab has created a cruel arrangement in which one poor household is offered security through the fragmentation of another poor community’s commons. It turns the applicant and the commoner towards one another while the estates of the powerful remain outside the frame. This is the very land which comes  under the land colonisation by canal colonisation and settlements from outsiders. This transform the demography and through this the very way of being, living and seeing this land.

This is why the scheme’s language of welfare cannot settle the question. A parcel may be placed in one person’s hands, but the loss travels beyond the boundary stone: into a blocked grazing route, a weakened herd, a longer walk for fodder, a toba separated from pasture, a neighbour converted into a competitor, and a community made less able to survive the next drought. The shared loss has no name and language in the scheme.

Punjab was made through Enclosure

The present scheme does not arrive upon innocent ground. Punjab’s celebrated agrarian landscape was made through colonisation. Surveys, canals, settlement laws and revenue categories reordered entire ecologies. The colonial state called the Bar, the Thal and the Rohi (Part of Bahawalpur State) waste because pastoral, riverine and mobile life could not be fitted into its preferred form of property and taxation. The straight field became the measure of civilisation. The settled cultivator became the proper subject of progress. Through that waste-landing, the moving grazier was reduced to jangli, backward, trespasser, obstacle. The canal did not simply bring water. It brought a political order in which one way of living with land was authorised and others were pushed outside law.

The emergence of new Nation-state did not dismantle this machinery. The postcolonial hegemony of the colonial Punjab inherited the record, the offices, the settlement imagination and the appetite to govern the Wasaib from Lahore. The Sutlej Valley projects, the Thal Development Authority, the Green Revolution, corporate farming and now Apna Khait Apna Rozgar belong to different moments, but they share a direction: the land of the periphery is repeatedly reorganised by a centre that does not live with the consequences.

Rohi and Thal are not the same landscape, nor do they carry identical histories in a very methodical sense. But both have been treated as unfinished agricultural frontiers – places waiting to be corrected by the canal, the plough, the plot and the outside investor. The state’s maps fragment the Siraiki Wasaib when its people demand political authority, yet gather it into a single land bank whenever land is to be allotted, leased or extracted.

This is internal colonialism not as a slogan, but as a material relation. Decisions travel outward from Lahore. Land, water and sacrifice travel inward from the Siraiki Wasaib. The centre keeps the power to name the land; the people of the land are asked to prove themselves within names made elsewhere.

The Monoculture of the Green

Vandana Shiva reminds us that monoculture begins in the mind before it appears in the field. One form of knowledge becomes so powerful that it makes all other ways of living appear unproductive, backward or empty. In Punjab, the irrigated green field has become not one ecology among others, but the image of life itself. Land is recognised when it is fenced. Labour is recognised when it produces a market crop. Water is recognised when it moves through concrete. People are recognised when they remain fixed, documented and inspectable. Under this gaze, the rakh appears barren. This is all what the state and colonial machinery and imagination of Punjab inherited.

But barren is not an ecological fact. It is a political judgement against forms of life that do not produce sufficient rent. The rakh produces pasture, milk, meat, manure, mobility, drought refuge, soil carbon, water relations, women’s subsistence labour, Bhakti traditions, collective risk-sharing and knowledge of limits. It is declared empty only because its abundance cannot be easily separated, priced and accumulated.

A green field is not automatically an ecological gain. In a desert or dry rangeland, greening can itself be violence. It can mean ploughed soils, groundwater mining, salinity, monoculture, blocked movement and the disappearance of plants and animals adapted to aridity. The desert does not fail because it refuses to resemble central Punjab. Development fails when it refuses to live within the desert’s limits. Monoculture is not that one crop occupying all the field. It is one idea of life occupying every landscape.

Part -4 

Boundary and Enclosures

A plot looks modest in a file: a few acres, four sides, one beneficiary. But the rakh does not live in pieces. A grazing route joins one season to another. A toba depends upon the pasture around it. A herd survives a failed patch because another remains open. The boundary does more than divide the ground. It cuts relations.

It first encloses movement. A path known across generations becomes a trespass through somebody’s lease. The herd that follows rain becomes an intruder in a cultivated field. Pastoral bodies are disciplined into fixed addresses, fixed claims and fixed futures. Yet the desert survives through flexibility because rain, fodder and water do not obey the map.

It encloses knowledge. The herder knows where water turns saline, when a pasture must rest, which plant returns after a particular rain, and how far a weakened animal can travel. The file knows acreage, category, crop and inspection. Knowledge does not disappear; it is stripped of authority. Those who live with the land may be consulted, but the power to decide what the land is remains elsewhere.

It encloses care. When common fodder contracts, women’s labour expands. What was gathered must be purchased. Water must be carried farther. Milk is rationed. Animals are sold. The state records a land transaction, but the cost returns through bodies, time and hunger. As Silvia Federici touches, enclosure captures not only land but the unpaid work that repairs the damage and keeps life going.

It encloses relationships. The commoner becomes an applicant. The neighbour becomes a boundary holder. Shared risk becomes household risk. A society organised around negotiated dependence is reorganised as a queue of individuals seeking protection from the insecurity that the same political order has produced.

And it encloses imagination. People are taught that dignity can exist only inside private possession; that mobility is a remnant of backwardness; that land without a title has no future. The deepest victory of enclosure is not the fence. It is the belief that nothing outside the fence can be real.

Cholistani and Land Allotments

Across Cholistan, people have themselves asked for raqba – a piece of land they can defend as their own. It has been produced by a century in which pasture has contracted, routes have been blocked, water has been mismanaged and mobile life has been made legally precarious. Around 9,10,000acres of Rohi comes under Sutlej Valley Project and 12,00,000 acre under Lesser Cholistan corporate farming and 44,00,000 under Greater Cholistan Corporate Farming. That also caused the water of Sindhu being contested between Sindh and Punjab.

Private property begins to appear as refuge when the commons are no longer defended. The state first makes commoning unsafe and then offers the plot as the only available security. The applicant and the defender of the commons may therefore be the same person at different moments of dispossession. This is the trap. The plot is presented as an escape from insecurity, but it extends the order that created the insecurity. The commoner is compelled to ask for a boundary because every boundary raised around him has made open life more dangerous.

Defense for the rakh cannot tell landless people to remain landless. It must direct their claim towards the estates of those who have accumulated land through colonial grant, landlord power, corporate lease and military control. The answer to dispossession is not to redistribute the commons of the dispossessed. It is to confront the institutions that have enclosed both the commoner and the applicant.

Rakh as climate infrastructure

The international environmental establishment now admits what the revenue record refused to see: rangelands are not failed farms. They are living systems that store carbon, sustain biodiversity, regulate water and support pastoral economies. Herd mobility is not the failure of management. In variable drylands, it is often the method through which land is allowed to recover.

The rakh is part of the climate infrastructure of Rohi and Thal. Its soils hold carbon quietly. Its plants are adapted to heat and scarcity. Its openness allows herds to follow uneven rainfall and gives used patches time to rest. The toba stores shared water. Common access pools risk, so that one failed route does not become the complete failure of a household. Corporate and plot-based agriculture can dismantle this resilience. The plough disturbs soil. Irrigation binds survival to canals, pumps or declining groundwater. Uniform crops concentrate risk. Fences interrupt movement. In an arid region, visible cultivation is not automatically more resilient than the open rangeland it replaces.

Pakistan celebrates 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, yet in Rohi and Thal the commons of pastoralists continue to be entered into schemes as available land. The contradiction is complete: the pastoralist is honoured internationally and erased administratively. The grazier’s mobility is already climate adaptation – practised without a project, a consultant or a carbon registry.

The language of Green and credit

A second enclosure is gathering around the same landscapes. Pakistan has adopted a carbon market framework; Punjab is building green-credit mechanisms; corporate agricultural initiatives openly speak the language of carbon value. Apna Khait Apna Rozgar is the enclosure of land. The emerging climate economy prepares the enclosure of ecological meaning.

The old ledger saw the rakh as zero: waste, barren, unused. The green ledger sees tonnes, credits, restoration units and investable natural capital. This appears to be recognition, but it can repeat the same removal in a new language. The land becomes valuable only after experts measure it, certifiers approve it and institutions outside the commons acquire authority over its value. The practices that sustained the rakh become invisible background. A moving herd can be labelled degradation. Its exclusion can be called restoration. A corporation can claim credit for a measurable intervention while generations of unmeasured care receive neither authority nor recognition.

The deeper question is not what share of a carbon payment reaches the grazier. It is who has the right to turn the rakh into carbon property in the first place. Natalie Avalos’s language of relational sovereignty is useful here, used carefully and without collapsing different histories: authority can arise from participating in the relations through which a place remains alive. In Rohi and Thal, those relations have local names – Rakh, toba, Tarni, herd route, season, memory and saanjh.

Tarni matters not only because it can prove a claim to an office. It records a pastoral life that a fixed land register cannot see. The demand is larger than adding one more document to Lahore’s file. Pastoral communities must be recognised as makers of law and governors of land, with the authority to refuse its conversion into either private property or a green asset.