After annexation the British recorded the customary law of each district: rules on inheritance, adoption, marriage, land alienation and succession, taken by asking village elders and written down as the Riwaj-i-Aam, the record of custom.
Those records then had legal force. A dispute was decided by what the district's customary law compilation said, and the compilation said whatever a group of men had told an officer decades earlier.
The effect was to freeze practice that had been fluid and to write male-line inheritance into law for agricultural communities. Women's rights to land under customary law were narrower than under either Hindu or Muslim personal law, and the compilations locked that in.
Custom was progressively displaced in the twentieth century, and the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 and its 2005 amendment changed the position on paper.
In practice women in rural Punjab very rarely inherit agricultural land. Daughters are asked to relinquish their share in favour of brothers, and the paperwork for it is routine.
A colonial recording exercise, a set of statutes and a village custom have produced a situation where the law says one thing and the revenue record says another, and the revenue record is what governs.
The British recorded the customary law of each district in riwaj-i-am compilations, on the principle that Punjabi agricultural communities should be governed by their own custom rather than by religious personal law.
That decision shaped inheritance in the province for a century, and it generally favoured the male agnatic line over daughters and widows, because the men being asked said it did.
The compilations are a huge body of ethnographic material collected for legal purposes. They are also a record of what the landholding men of each district told a settlement officer was the custom.