ਮਰਲਾ

Marla (ਮਰਲਾ), pronounced MUR-laa, is a traditional unit for measuring land in Punjab, still used daily for houses, plots and fields. One marla is 272.25 square feet, or 30.25 square yards, in the standard Punjab measure: 20 marla make one kanal, and 160 marla make one killa, a full acre.

What is a marla in Punjabi land measurement?

A marla is the small working unit of the Punjab land system. It is built from the karam, the surveyor's measure of 5.5 feet: one square karam is a sarsahi of 30.25 square feet, and nine sarsahi make one marla. Land records, known as jamabandi, state a holding in kanal and marla, and a patwari reading out a family's record still counts land this way.

How many square feet are in a marla?

In the standard measure, 272.25 square feet. One honest warning matters here: a few older pockets of Punjab once used a shorter karam, which made a smaller marla of 25 square yards, and some modern housing colonies use their own plot sizes. So when money is involved, always ask which marla a seller means and check the figure against the land record.

How is marla used in everyday Punjabi?

Marla is the language of homes. A family builds on a five marla plot, a town house is sold as ten marla, and a big kothi stands on a kanal or two, which is simply twenty or forty marla said the larger way. In villages the same unit sizes the house plot inside the abadi, the village settlement area, while the fields around it are counted in kanal and killa.

What is the difference between marla, kanal and killa?

They are steps of one ladder. Twenty marla make a kanal, eight kanal make a killa, so one killa holds 160 marla. Small things, a house plot, a shop site, a courtyard, are counted in marla; middling plots in kanal; and farmland in killa. The metric figures sit behind them all: a kanal is about 506 square metres and a killa about 4,047.