Punjab measures land in its own units and always has. A killa is an acre. A kanal is an eighth of an acre, 605 square yards. A marla is a twentieth of a kanal, about thirty square yards. A sarsahi is a ninth of a marla.
A murabba is a square of twenty-five acres, which is the unit the canal colonies were laid out in, and a chak was a set number of murabbas. Land in the colonies was allotted in squares and that is why the map of Pakistani Punjab's colony districts is a grid.
Weight was in ser and maund. A maund is forty sers, about thirty-seven kilograms. Grain, gur, milk and everything else was reckoned in them and older people still do.
Distance was in kos, roughly three kilometres, which is why the kos minars along the Grand Trunk Road stand at that interval. Some of the Mughal kos minars survive in Punjab and Haryana.
Metric units are official and marla and kanal are what a Punjabi property advertisement uses, which is the clearest indication of which system is real.
The revenue record, the jamabandi, is in kanals and marlas and always has been.
The bigha and the ghumaon are the older units the killa displaced. A ghumaon is roughly an acre and the word is still current in Himachal and in old deeds. The bigha varied by district and by whether the writer meant the pakka or the kachcha measure, which is why revenue figures from before the settlements cannot be converted without knowing which one was in his head.
The whole system is built from the karam, the surveyor's rod. A standard karam is five and a half feet, a marla is nine square karams, a kanal is twenty marlas, and eight kanals make the acre. Districts used rods of different lengths before the settlement fixed one, and a few local karams survived the fixing and turn up in old papers.
The ser and the maund for weight survive in the grain trade in speech if not on the scale, and a village conversation about land or grain is conducted entirely in units the state does not use.