DOI: https://doi.org/10.36347/sjahss.2026.v14i06.005

Pages: 245-249

Punjab came under British colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century after the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1849. The colonial administration was quick to recognise the province’s strategic and economic importance. Between 1885 and 1940 the British constructed nine canal colonies in western Punjab, converting arid and semi-arid wasteland into one of South Asia’s most productive agricultural tracts. This was also the world’s largest contiguous network of irrigation canals. Official narrative always framed this as a benevolent, paternalistic agrarian improvement. This paper tests that rhetoric against the colonial state's own administrative record for the Chenab Colony. Chenab Colony was the first and largest of the nine canal colonies. This study focuses on the Settlement Officer’s 1915 Final Report, the 1904 Gazetteer of the Chenab Colony, the Punjab Colony Manual, and the Colonization of Government Lands Act of 1912, and reading it alongside the existing historiography of Imran Ali, Neeladri Bhattacharya, and Indu Agnihotri. It finds that colonist selection, tenurial conditions, succession rules, and the state’s own memory of the 1907 Colony Bill agitation reveal an administration that managed consent as cautiously as it managed land and water. Any concessions like, full proprietary rights, a more favourable law of succession, statutory limits on fines, were granted only once authority was directly contested between 1907 and 1912, and organised grievance was officially read at the time as externally manufactured disloyalty rather than engaged as legitimate. Paternalism and extraction, the paper argues, were not opposed currents in colonial Punjab but two faces of one administrative project, and the 1912 Act that is usually read as a reform was, on this evidence, paternalism's most effective instrument of control.