The British had neither the soldiers nor the clerks to govern every hamlet. So they invented the Zail . A Zail was a cluster of 10 to 40 villages, usually linked by kinship or tribe. Over this cluster, the British placed one man: the Zaildar.

But the role has rotted. The old Zaildar was a mediator; the modern Wadera is often a gun-runner. The old Zaildar knew the price of wheat; the new one knows the price of a police officer’s bribe. In a village near Faisalabad, I met Muhammad Akram, aged 82. His grandfather was a Zaildar under the British. He still keeps the staff, wrapped in a dirty cloth, in a trunk filled with mothballs.

In return, during the Mutiny of 1857, the Zaildars of Punjab kept their men loyal. They did not join the rebels. They sent their sons to the British Indian Army. This bargain—loyalty for local tyranny—defined the Raj. Partition in 1947 was the Zaildar’s slow death rattle. In Pakistan, the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s viewed the Zaildar as a feudal parasite. The Zail system was formally abolished in 1972 under the Land Reforms. The silver staffs were snapped. The Zaildari (the office) was replaced by the Numberdar and the Patwari —bureaucrats, not chieftains.

And that is why we cannot bury him. We can only rename him.