Colonization Bill and the Pagri Sambhal Jatta agitation

Who: Cultivators of the Punjab canal colonies, above all the Chenab Colony around Lyallpur, which the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says was settled mostly by Sikh ex-soldiers. Their spokesmen were Ajit Singh, Lala Lajpat Rai and the poet Banke Dayal, editor of Jhang Sayal, with Ajit Singh's brother Kishan Singh and Ghasita Ram also named as organisers. They faced the Punjab government.

What: In October 1906 the Colonisation Bill, an amendment to the Punjab Colonisation of Land Act of 1893, was introduced in the Punjab Legislative Council and pushed through by its official majority (The Wire). It enforced strict primogeniture, so that if an allottee died without a direct male heir the land reverted to the government. It also barred the courts from stalling executive orders and tightened conditions on tree planting, sanitation and residence. It came as revised water rates were announced, amid plague and poor harvests.

Protest meetings were held in Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Multan, Lahore, Amritsar and Lyallpur, and Ajit Singh addressed many of them. On 22 March 1907 Banke Dayal recited his poem "Pagri Sambhal Jatta" (take care of your turban, farmer) at one of the largest meetings, at Lyallpur, and it gave the movement its name. The government answered with sedition charges and an ordinance limiting meetings. Lajpat Rai was arrested on 9 May 1907 and Ajit Singh on 2 June, and both were sent to Mandalay in Burma until 11 November.

Between those two arrests came the veto. On 26 May 1907 the Viceroy, Lord Minto, vetoed the Bill, calling it "faulty" and saying that appearing to surrender to the agitation was less dangerous than "insisting upon enforcing the unfortunate legislation" (The Wire). So the Council passed the measure and the Viceroy struck it down. A committee on the canal colonies followed; it advised that the ordinary law of succession apply and that primogeniture not be forced on any grantee, and a smaller one took up water rates. ThePrint and a 2024 piece in The Wire say all three laws were cancelled in May 1907; Agnihotri's essay specifies the veto of this Bill. Ajit Singh left for Persia in 1909 and returned only in 1947.

Where: The Chenab Colony and Lyallpur, with meetings across the Punjab towns, and the Mandalay jail in Burma.

Why it mattered: The Wire calls it "one of the most intense popular peasant agitations" in the province, and the Bill did not survive it. Its author, Professor Indu Agnihotri, ties the veto to the regime's fear of alienating the peasantry that supplied the Indian Army, and to memories of 1857. The slogan came back in 2020 and 2021 during the farmers' protests at the Delhi borders.