In 1906 and 1907 three measures hit the canal colony peasantry at once: the Punjab Colonisation of Government Lands Bill, which tightened the conditions on grants and gave officials power to fine and evict; a rise in the water rate on the Bari Doab canal; and a rise in land revenue.
Meetings were held across the colonies through the spring of 1907. At Lyallpur in March, Banke Dayal, editor of a paper called Jhang Sial, recited a poem with the refrain pagri sambhal jatta, hold on to your turban, farmer. It became the name of the movement.
Ajit Singh of Khatkar Kalan, uncle of Bhagat Singh, and Lala Lajpat Rai organised the agitation. Both were deported to Mandalay in May 1907 without trial.
The bill was withdrawn in May 1907 by the Viceroy. The agitation is one of the very few in colonial India that reversed a piece of legislation outright, and it did it in about four months.
The song is still sung. It was sung again at the Delhi borders in 2020 and 2021.
The colonists were neither tenants nor owners. They held on a grant with conditions attached: live on the land, cultivate it, plant trees, keep the watercourse clear. The Bill would have let an official fine or evict for a breach without a court, and would have imposed primogeniture on the succession to a grant.
The colony districts were full of former soldiers, because grants had gone to men who had served. The government was arguing with the class it recruited from, in the districts it recruited from, and it knew what that meant. That is why the Bill was withdrawn in four months.
Ajit Singh's society and the papers around it were the organising apparatus, and Bhagat Singh was born in the year of the deportations, into that household. The line from the colony agitation of 1907 to the revolutionary politics of the 1920s runs through one family at Khatkar Kalan.