This essay traces the changing contours of a Panjabi state during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. It focuses on the Kalsia principality founded by a family of rural warlords who had
transformed themselves from village elders to the rulers of a distinct principality within a
generation. Using a chronicle left by a retainer and scribe of the Kalsia administration it
studies a handful of the chiefly lineage's dependents (tabe in) to try to understand what
their position within the ruling household was what rendered them dependent and what kept
them loyal. It argues that jural status was of some but not determinant importance in
creating deeply hierarchical bonds just as important was the value that patron and client
master and slave alike attached to such unequal relations as a source of honour status and
influence. This value was moreover shared across and attached to a range of relationships from
kinship bonds to servitude blurring the distinction between family and service. This began to
change at least in law in the wake of colonization as the British sought to impose fixed
boundaries on the household to progressively strip ruling houses of their land.
