PANICKED from its nest, a quail scuds low across a cotton-field. The hunters spin round and blast away. As the bird drops from the sky, a gang of poor boys in plastic flip-flops races through the mud, fighting to pick up the kill. This vignette of feudal life has hardly changed in a century, except for one thing, says Ehtehsham Laleka, a puckish 30-year-old, whose family owns 7,000 acres of land in this southern region of Punjab province. “In my grandfather’s day we would have had hundreds of beaters like them.”

Feudalism, a curse that has lingered since independence in 1947, is often seen as the biggest blight on Pakistan’s development. In the old days the zamindars (landowners), empowered by British rule, lorded over great tracts of land, housing serfs and often abusing them in return for sharecropping and other forms of menial labour. Whereas independent India rid itself of much of that feudal class, Pakistan’s feeble attempts at land reform were ruled un-Islamic by its Supreme Court in 1990. The landowners turned their economic power into political authority, coercing their tenants to vote for them. In 1970 feudal landlords held 42% of the seats in the national parliament.

Modern feudals like to portray themselves as benevolent paternalists, but this does not stretch far. Feudal areas have the lowest literacy in Pakistan. On the estate of one family, many of whose members were educated in the West, the village children’s teeth are black and rotten. Families like the Lalekas, and 101 others listed in one catalogue, still pop up frequently as villains in soap operas.

Yet their power is wilting. By one count, feudal representation in parliament has dropped to around a quarter, drawn mainly from rural areas in south Punjab and the province of Sindh. On a stroll through his family stables, Mr Laleka shakes his head at the cost of maintaining dozens of buffalo and horses, on which little more than status rides. “You can get cheaper milk in the markets,” he sighs. “And you don’t have to clean up their shit.” This shows how the economy is changing. Agriculture’s share in GDP has dived from 53% in 1947 to 20%. Rapid urbanisation is drawing millions away from areas like south Punjab.

Meanwhile feuding has become a pastime of the feudal class, as Islamic inheritance laws requiring an equal split among male heirs fragment estates. “Eighty per cent of my friends have taken out loans,” mourns one landowner, himself indebted, to keep themselves in the finery to which they are accustomed. In 1960 farms smaller than five acres made up 19% of the total. By 2010, that figure had soared to 65%.

The landlords’ power over labourers is dwindling, too. Cash is replacing the old informal system of payment in kind. Erstwhile serfs are now paid around $170 a month at harvest time. Violence against them has become harder to get away with. When a feudal lord threw a ten-year-old boy into a thresher in 2013, severing both his arms, the outcry on social media led to his arrest, although not his conviction. Allahdad, a landlord built like a giant, fondly recalls the days when he beat lorry drivers and shaved their moustaches as a punishment. “If you cannot beat them, they steal,” he says, laughing. But a neighbour whispers that Allahdad can no longer retain a cook or guard, as the staff he used to slap around can now use their cash wages to escape.

Feudal politicians also have to work harder for their constituents’ votes. A young politician from a landed family glumly describes his view of the job. “Poli means many and tics means bloodsuckers,” he laments. When he is not glad-handing the masses at weddings or funerals, he must badger local administrators on behalf of his voters. Despite his help, he says, “they may have to bribe a policeman, but not as much.”

Nonetheless, the feudal rump in parliament has been able to prevent the extension of the minimum wage to agricultural labourers, among other things. Imran Khan, a leader of the opposition, blames feudalism for the country’s “grossly unfair social system”, but is now wooing the feudal barons in his bid for power in next year’s election. And even feudalism’s slow death may not lead to much change.

Though the power of the landlords is fading, more than half the members of Punjab’s assembly have inherited their seats from relatives, more than twice the rate in India’s parliament. The canniest “feudals”, says Badar Alam, editor of a current-affairs magazine, have long since morphed or married into the rising industrial class. These new rich families may not differ much from their landed predecessors. Noting how they like to copy the old feudal style, with big cars, browbeaten servants and brazen tax avoidance, Mr Laleka calls them “pseudo-feudals”.