Between the rivers of western Punjab lay the bars: high, dry, scrub-covered uplands above the flood plains, unirrigated and lightly populated. Sandal Bar, Ganji Bar, Nili Bar, Kirana Bar, Neeli Bar.
They were grazing country. Pastoral communities moved herds across them, held wells and had their own law. The bar had cattle-lifting, a code about it, and a large body of oral poetry.
The canal colonies from 1885 took the bars, cut them into square chaks, and settled them with cultivators from the central districts. Within forty years the highest-yielding wheat land in Asia was on ground that had carried no crop at all.
The pastoral population of the bars was not given the land it had used. Some were settled on inferior grants, some became labour on other men's holdings, and their way of life ended within a generation.
The word bar survives in Punjabi as a place name element and in the poetry. The landscape it described no longer exists anywhere.
The bars were the high unirrigated tracts between the rivers, each with its own name, and together they were the largest open country in the Punjab.
They carried scrub, grass and a pastoral population with its own law, its own cattle and its own oral literature, and the settled districts regarded them as lawless.
The canal colonies erased them between 1885 and 1940. What had been open range became the most intensively farmed country in the province, and the society that had held it was not resettled anywhere.