Shamlat is the village common land, held by the panchayat on behalf of the whole village rather than by any household. It was the grazing ground, the pond, the cremation ground, the threshing floor and the school site.
Under the Punjab Village Common Lands Act of 1961 shamlat vests in the gram panchayat, which leases it annually by auction. A third of the leased area is reserved by law for Scheduled Caste cultivators.
In practice that third has been routinely captured by proxy bidding on behalf of dominant-caste farmers, with a Dalit name on the paper. The Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee, formed in 2014 in Barnala and Sangrur districts, has contested the auctions village by village to enforce the reservation, and has faced police cases and violence for it.
It is the most substantial land struggle in Punjab since the muzara movement and it concerns a third of the common land of villages that are already small.
The shamlat is also physically shrinking, as ponds are filled, commons are encroached and land is sold for building.
The word means shared, and the record of rights in every village lists what is shamlat and in what proportion each landholder has a notional share, which is why disputes about it are disputes about the settlement papers.
Punjab's common land is a smaller share of its area than in most Indian states, because the settlement here assigned almost everything to individual holdings. What is left is contested precisely because there is so little of it.
Much of the shamlat has been encroached on, sold or built over across the state, and the record of what a village once held in common is in the settlement papers rather than on the ground.