The Punjab Alienation of Land Act of 1900 barred the transfer of agricultural land from members of designated agricultural tribes to members of non-agricultural tribes. In effect it stopped land passing from cultivators to urban moneylenders through mortgage foreclosure.
It was drafted because indebtedness had reached a level the administration considered politically dangerous, with land passing steadily out of the hands of the peasantry who filled the army.
It also wrote caste and tribe into property law. Whether a person could buy land depended on which list their community was on. The lists were drawn up district by district and disputes about them ran for decades.
It protected cultivating castes and it entrenched them. Landless communities, mostly Dalit, gained nothing from it because they had no land to protect and were now barred from acquiring any.
It stayed on the statute book in Indian Punjab until it was struck down after independence, and its effects on who owns land in a Punjab village have not gone away.
The moneylender did not leave. He went on lending and took the land as a mortgagee for a term of years rather than as an owner, which the Act permitted, so the debt and the effective loss of the land continued with a different word attached to it.
Chhotu Ram built a career on it. The Unionist legislation of the 1930s, the registration of moneylenders, the relief of indebtedness and the restoration of mortgaged land, all extend the same logic, and they are why the rural voter stayed with that party until the end of it.
The lists are the part that lasted. A notified agricultural tribe is a colonial administrative category, and the same names turn up afterward in recruitment, in reservation arguments and in the politics of who counts as a farmer, seventy five years after the law that drew the list was gone.