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The city of Lahore, Pakistan inherited a colonial land bureaucracy in which land is owned according ‘rights in land’ rather than ‘rights to land’. Unlike the absolute ownership provided by state-backed titles, rights in land is merely a... more
The city of Lahore, Pakistan inherited a colonial land bureaucracy in which land is owned according ‘rights in land’ rather than ‘rights to land’. Unlike the absolute ownership provided by state-backed titles, rights in land is merely a presumption of ownership until proven otherwise, creating a permanent gap between ownership and property. These gaps are investigated by patwaris, or lower-level bureaucrats who confirm rights in land before property is sold. Against the backdrop of Pakistan’s booming real estate market, however, land has become Lahore’s most profitable financial asset, and the gap between ownership and property is increasingly exploited to wrangle control over land from others. In this context, ‘fraud’ has become a constant point of concern for both patwaris and residents, each of whom use fraud at various times to negotiate Lahore’s colonial-era bureaucracy with the present-day demands of living in the city. In this article, I argue that fraud mediates property relations in Lahore. In the city, all property is potentially fraudulent, and all fraud can potentially become property. Rather than a fixed relationship between ownership and property, Lahore’s land bureaucracy is characterized by continuously unfolding property relations as new loops of fraud are opened and old ones close.
The city of Lahore, Pakistan, has expanded by 20% in the past twenty years alone. Lahore's exponential growth is fueled by a speculative real estate market that incentivizes quick trades of plots of land rather than constructing... more
The city of Lahore, Pakistan, has expanded by 20% in the past twenty years alone. Lahore's exponential growth is fueled by a speculative real estate market that incentivizes quick trades of plots of land rather than constructing buildings. At the city's ever-expanding periphery, real estate developers armed with village maps and legal teams scout for cheap land, while agricultural landowners negotiate within extended families over whether to sell and demand higher prices based on their knowledge of market rates. In WhatsApp groups, overseas Pakistani investors carefully monitor land acquisition efforts by sharing news articles, personal photos and videos, Google Earth images, and copies of government documents to make their own assessments about the value of land. But although real estate is the most popular financial investment in Lahore, it is also extraordinarily risky. Developers sell land before they have acquired it; investors make high-risk, high-reward purchases in illegal projects; and even gains become losses due to an unstable national currency. On the basis of twenty-eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyzes how developers and investors navigate risk through the concept of rizq, or the Islamic belief that material wealth is provided by God. I show how rizq mediates the worldly economy of real estate and the otherworldly economy of Islam, dual economies between which all credits and debts are eventually settled. Reducible to neither Islam nor capitalism, I argue that rizq enables a uniquely audacious form of risk taking that is transforming the landscape of Lahore.
In 2016, the Government of Punjab (GoP) launched an effort to digitize land records in the city of Lahore. Recalling development economist Hernando de Soto’s view of land in the Global South as “dead capital,” at the heart of project was... more
In 2016, the Government of Punjab (GoP) launched an effort to digitize land records in the city of Lahore. Recalling development economist Hernando de Soto’s view of land in the Global South as “dead capital,” at the heart of project was the belief that local empowerment hinged on establishing modern property rights in land. Traditionally functioning as inherited wealth, land in Lahore is often entangled with colonial property regimes, undocumented transfers after partition, and generations of dispute and subdivision—issues that are magnified by the city’s dense residential settlements. By establishing clear ownership boundaries, the GoP project aimed to make land liquid, or an asset that could be leveraged for future profit. 

The centerpiece of the GoP project was the removal of the patwari, the traditional land revenue official. Patwaris maintain manually drafted spreadsheets and maps pertaining to landownership in a given area, records dated as early as the 19th century. In the eyes of the GoP, patwaris played a traditional but ultimately obstructive human role. Framed in official reports as “predatory middlemen,” patwaris were accused of reducing the liquidity of land. Under the GoP project, millions of pages of records were scanned, centuries-old maps were converted into GIS data, and new computerized land record centers were opened throughout Lahore.

However, the work of patwaris continues to be fundamental to the new digital database. Establishing the rightful ownership of land continues to require visiting homes, consulting with neighbors, and tracing kinship lineages, labor that depends upon the local and specialized knowledge of patwaris. In this paper, I follow the path of landed property from inherited wealth to liquid asset in Lahore. If the GoP’s digital database continues to rely upon its analog counterparts, then how are land records produced in the interplay between digitization and sociomaterial practices?