A century of upheaval
The collapse of Mughal authority after 1707 threw Punjab into a century of contest between Afghan invaders, local chiefdoms and the rising Sikh misls. For the Muslim Jutt clans of the western bars this was an age of fortified villages and shifting alliances. Clan accounts from Gujranwala, Jhang and the Ravi country remember it as a time when the biradari's own strength — the armed clan and its council — was the only real security.
Under the Sikh kingdom
Ranjit Singh's kingdom (1799–1849), itself built on Jat peasant soldiery of the eastern Punjab, brought the western clans under Lahore's rule. Heavy revenue demands fell on the Muslim cultivating clans, and clan histories of the period record both accommodation and revolt. Yet the era also fixed the clans ever more firmly in their lands: settlement records of the Sikh kingdom read like a directory of Jutt clan villages across the Rachna and Chaj doabs.
Memory of resistance
The bar country never fully submitted to any master. The traditions of the Kharals, Sials, Wattoos and their neighbours preserve a long memory of defiance — a spirit that would blaze out famously in 1857, when Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal of Jhamra raised the Neeli Bar against the British and died in the field, becoming one of Punjab's great folk heroes of resistance.