Between 1885 and 1940 the British cut nine colonies into the bar country between the rivers of western Punjab, irrigated by the largest canal system built anywhere in the world to that date. About four million hectares of grazing land became arable.
The colonies were Chenab, Jhelum, Lower Bari Doab, Upper Chenab, Nili Bar and others. Their centres were new towns: Lyallpur, Sargodha, Montgomery, Okara.
Land was allotted on conditions. Peasant grants went to cultivators from the crowded central districts, mainly Jat Sikhs and Muslim Arains and Rajputs, on terms requiring residence and cultivation. Yeoman and capitalist grants went to larger men. Horse-breeding grants required brood mares.
Villages were numbered, not named. A chak number was an address, and it still is on one side of the border and a memory on the other.
The colonies made Punjab the granary of India and the most heavily commercialised agricultural region in the subcontinent. In 1947 the colonists on the wrong side of the line lost everything they had built in two generations, and the boundary put nearly all the colonies in Pakistan and most of the headworks in India.
Between the 1880s and the 1920s the British irrigated the bars of western Punjab and settled them with cultivators brought from the crowded central districts.
The allotments were made in squares, the villages were numbered chaks, and the settlers were selected by community, by caste and by whether they were considered good farmers.
It was the largest planned agricultural settlement anywhere in the world at the time. All of it went to Pakistan in 1947 and the families in it came back east with nothing.