Karmuwala village history

01 · HISTORY

Gharka, Karmuwala and the Beas

Karmuwala lies on the Beas, south of Amritsar, in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district. Its story begins in the fields around neighbouring Gharka, but it reaches well beyond them: to river crossings and old maps, to a First World War register of local men, and to lives made far from home. ^{5, 16, 18}

Gharka’s own beginnings survive in more than one tradition. One tells of people coming from Buh to Gharka, and the village is also remembered as Būh wālā Ghaṛkā, “Gharka of Buh”. ²⁵

A second tradition tells of five brothers. Two of them, Gharka and Chamba, are said to have founded the neighbouring villages; the other three are remembered as Rurka, Varnala and Ghariala. ¹

Some Sandhu families from Gharka and Chamba also moved farther afield, accompanying Gulab Singh and Mehtab Singh, sons of Sardar Karam Singh, a leader of Misl Shaheedan, to a jagir in Hoshiarpur district, where the brothers settled around 1816. The family account names Pathial among the villages established after this move. ⁴³

Village memory traces Karmuwala itself to families settling near their fields. Those whose land lay on the Dhunna side of Gharka moved closer to it. Families with land in Karmu di Patti made their homes there, while some others sold their holdings. The inhabited settlement became known as Karmuwala di Abadi, associated with Patti Karmu. Home had moved out to meet the land. ^{5, 18}

02 · HISTORY

Crossings and neighbouring settlements

For travellers, the Beas was something to cross. In 1598, the Mughal emperor Akbar, travelling from Lahore towards Agra, crossed the river at Gobindwal on an elephant while his troops used a bridge. ²

In April 1615, two English travellers, Richard Steel and John Crowther, were passing through this river country on their way to Lahore. On the 22nd, an eleven-coss stage brought them to Chiurmul, with a boat crossing of the river they called Vian, understood as the Beas. Beside the river stood the encampment of a royal ambassador bound for Persia. Two more stages, of seventeen coss to Chan Channa Sera and seven to Lahore, completed the journey. ³⁷

Chiurmul turns up again on European maps. Blaeu’s Atlas novus, in a volume dated 1645, marks it beside an unnamed river near Sultanpore and Can Channas. A century later, d’Anville’s map of 1751 marks the same place as Kiurmul, beside the Biah, with Fatiabad and Sultanpur nearby. Whether Chiurmul is an early form of Karmuwala remains unresolved. It is a tantalising possibility: a crossing on the Beas, named by English travellers in 1615 and drawn by mapmakers in Amsterdam and Paris, may be the earliest glimpse of the village. ^{38, 39}

04 · HISTORY

Land, water and work

Good water could not be taken for granted. The lower part of Tarn Taran had been known as Khára Mánjha for its brackish water; by the late nineteenth century, canal irrigation was changing cultivation and the look of this wider country. ²⁴

Gharka’s land carried a different risk. The 1914 settlement report placed it in the Bet Bangar assessment circle and classed it as insecure for revenue purposes, reflecting the uncertainties of riverside land. ³⁶

In village memory, farming depended above all on water, and access to it was uneven. Wells served both households and fields, and some holdings had canal irrigation. Larger holdings could have several wells, while other cultivators managed with less. Barley, taramira and chickpeas were among the crops grown. ^{7, 19, 20}

Differences in resources showed in buildings as well as fields. Sunder Singh was a village landholder who had been in business in Singapore since 1894. In Karmuwala he was remembered for wells that served the village and its cultivated land. His family’s brick house was recalled as a tall building standing out among the mud houses, with water pumped to its upper floor. ^{5, 7, 9}

Living beside the Beas did not make water simple. River water was used for cooking, but the river could also divide farmers from their own land: fields on the opposite bank could be reached only by a crossing, and monsoon water could damage the crop. The village’s farmland did not stop at the water’s edge, even when reaching it was hard. ²⁰

Not everyone who worked those fields held them. In winter, labourers worked for a daily wage, while paddy work ran on seasonal contracts of varying length. Wages were settled through consultation between landholders and labourers, with the panchayat taking part. ²⁸

Land could also be bought, or kept, with money earned far away. In the Sirhali area in the late nineteenth century, men mortgaged land while serving abroad and redeemed it from their savings on return. A later Karmuwala family memory is simpler still: “My uncle used to send money from abroad, and my father would buy land here.” ^{24, 27}

From the late 1960s, machines changed the work. Tube wells are remembered as arriving in 1968, followed by tractors and other machinery, and early owners of machines helped their neighbours. Together with canal irrigation, these changes gave cultivators greater access to water and eased some of the labour of farming. ^{19, 21}

Official land-use figures give a later measure of the change. The return for 2009 records 1,620 of the Gharka revenue estate’s 1,656 hectares as irrigated: 474 hectares by canal and 1,146 by wells or tube wells. The figures cover the wider Gharka estate rather than Karmuwala’s fields alone, but they describe a landscape almost entirely under irrigation. ³²

Across four centuries of records, the same questions keep returning: who had water, who had to cross it, and who went far from the river to earn a living. The family histories follow some of those lives further.