id anyone ever hear of such a thing? Did anyone ever disgrace a grave? People have sold graves for greed – it is all about money now,” says an elderly woman from Heera Singh.

A door to heaven seemingly opened for peri-urban villagers living around Burki and Bedian Road in south-east Lahore in 2000s. Elite housing developers arrived circa 2002 with a lot of money to buy farm land for new housing schemes.

The hectic market in land thrived till 2018. The land continues to command prices unimaginable for these lands just two decades ago.

Today, some of the peri-urban villages that had the most productive soil – Lehna Singhwala, Heera Singhwala, Klas Maari, Hudiyara and Harpalkay – have sold their agricultural lands. Some, such as Heera Singhwala, have sold even their homes, schools and graveyards. Not a trace of the settlements remains.

The loss of farm land to elite suburban development is a manifest destruction increasingly condemned by environmentalists. However, the trend continues. Less visible than the loss of greens is the cataclysmic social change under way in the urbanising settlements.

This scribe had a chance to observe and interact with the villagers for almost a decade as part of MPhil and PhD research.

Village graveyards are community land, harder to commodify and sell, unlike ready parcels of agricultural land. However, the developers found ways – by deceit and brute force – to prevail upon the villagers and managed to buy or simply whittle away graveyard land.

Graveyards traditionally serve multiple purposes in rural settings. Besides housing the dead, they were the sites for the many annual festivals tied to local shrines and grazing land for livestock. These shrines, usually adjacent to graveyards, had open areas where annual fairs took place. The space was also used to get together when an occasion demanded. Almost every village had an annual festival.

The graveyard provided the space needed for this communal activity to take place. Having a graveyard gave the villagers a permanent claim to a piece of land and a sense of belonging.

Charrar was among the first villages where farm land was acquired for developing. The people of Charrar resisted. Some of them proudly showed their walled, well-maintained graveyard. Christians, too, have a separate graveyard in the village.

On the other hand, graveyards in Heera Singh, Natha Singh, Mota Singh and Bhangali (where Shia and Sunni communities share graveyards did not receive much attention until some Christians were lured into selling graves from their own separate graveyard).

The glamourous appearance of some elite gated communities hides unpleasant histories… A process of violent dispossession has been recorded as a picture of gain, prosperity and progress.

Some villagers say selling of graveyards is tantamount to selling one’s faith. Those who took the money felt guilty and described any subsequent ill fate as revenge by their angry ancestors. The developers are aware of the sensitive nature of the matter and generally avoid such deals. However, some of them have been doing it in a deceptive manner. They have funds and can wait till they can win over people or for resistance to wear out.

The practical reality of a need for burial space is a real worry for poorer villagers. They want to secure a piece of land for their own burial.

An old couple who sat desolately in their new home in one of the many gated communities off Burki Road said, “We often wonder where we will be buried. It’s all about fate. It can take one anywhere. But our burial could have been a simple matter had we remained there (in the village).”

The small Christian communities sprinkled in these peri-urban villages are even more vulnerable. In an interview in 2022, a lawyer from Durgpura, who is arguing the case for his community graveyard, said that “the graveyard was walled. However, the developers wanted to acquire it. If legal action had to be taken, they wouldn’t hesitate.”

“The unfortunate bit is that people get divided into groups. This makes it even more difficult to work things out,” he added.

The lawyer said that the cemetery was known as Mariyanwala (a place where Sikhs used to burn their loved ones). Once they left, other people in the vicinity started using it. It is a graveyard shared by Christian residents of Bhart and Durgpura. This parcel of land was given by people of Bhart to their servants. “My grandfather was the first to be buried in this God’s acre in 1980. The Christian community was able to save this graveyard. The developer gave a written undertaking not to touch their graveyard.”

“The document says that it cannot be used for court proceedings,” he added.

There is also widespread silent resistance, the village graveyards being sites where there is an assertion of village identity. Many villages have walled their graveyards. Local leaders, realising the sensitivity of the matter, have taken lead to raise funds to get the graveyards walled and build covered spaces for burial prayers. It is now a new landscape with hardened boundaries and identity politics. While nostalgia for the lost land remains, it is difficult to recreate the lost social landscape.

The glamourous appearance of some elite gated communities hides many unpleasant histories. It has been a process of violent dispossession recorded as a picture of gain, prosperity and progress. The disappearance of community, the greatest of all wealth and the mainstay of the landless, has gone unrecorded. Life and death, the two worlds were held together more gently at these sites. The graveyards today are walled and devoid of life.

Listening to the villagers, especially women, the elderly and the weak, comparing their experiences, is revealing of recent social and ecological histories of Lahore. The less commodified village life has disintegrated; the commodified neoliberal ways have taken hold.

The writer is pursuing a doctoral degree in Germany