Abstract
Yogesh Snehi and Lallan Baghel’s ambitious volume brings together a rich variety of interdisciplinary work on the social, cultural, economic and political histories of the region. For the first time, this volume brings together perspectives on Punjab, and its usually neglected but no less important cousin, the present-day state of Haryana. The editors offer a unique perspective on modernity and the region. Building on Joshi’s work on the ‘fractured modernity’ wrought by India’s middle classes during colonialism, Snehi and Baghel also suggest that we view modernity ‘as an ideology’, instead of a fixed destination. The editors argue the need to capture the quotidian experiences of modernity, through choices drawn from a complex scale of ideas … juxtaposed with individual (self) and collective (State) anxieties and redefinition of the past’ (3). They further foreground the necessity of studying those left behind as ‘the unwanted residue of the meta-narrative’ of modernity (19).
Part I of the volume excavates the ‘landscapes of modernity’. Sanjay Singh’s first essay appropriately pre-figures some of the deeper theoretical stances explored in the case studies making up the rest of the volume. Delving into Nehruvian-era understandings, Singh privileges ‘modernist practices’ over ‘modernist discourse’ to outline the contours of the alternately tense and supportive, but constantly shifting, relationship between ‘nation-state’ and ‘region’ in India. Navprit Kaur’s essay discusses the ‘modern’ city of Chandigarh through a historical lens, but also isolates the mythic tropes around it in modern Hindi literature and popular Punjabi music. Mahima Manchanda explores the gendered embedding of modernity in the production of ‘feminine’ curriculum, but also the setting up of girls’ boarding schools at Ferozepur’s Sikh Kanya Mahvidyalaya—marking a first for Sikh education in Punjab (79, 81). Manchanda’s discussion of ‘creating ideal Sikh girls’ connects to the volume’s larger concern with ‘modernity’, refracted through the gendered lens of ‘honour’, domesticity and chastity, revealing the limits, or the ‘fractured’ nature, of the modernist project.
Part II discusses ‘caste hegemony and the question of the self’. Linked to issues of gender and honour in Manchanda’s essay is Ajay Kumar’s article on the khap panchayats, which, in part, explores the impact of caste-based conjugal norms on women’s lives. Kumar offers a historical overview of this system prevailing amongst the Jats of Haryana. Kumar argues that a transformation in agrarian relations is the only way to curb the violent excesses of this alternative system of sociopolitical power in Haryana (119). Part III evaluates the rather dismal reality of land, labour and agrarian relations in contemporary Indian Punjab.
Part IV of the volume looks at inheritance rights in the context of different state institutions. Chowdhry’s article on patterns of land inheritance among the women of Haryana stands out. She locates the changes in the inheritance patterns for daughters in Haryana in the context of the state’s shifting political economy. In her analysis of the imbrications between women’s land inheritance rights, notions of community honour and khap panchayats’ role, Chowdhry’s article speaks directly to the other essays in this rubric and the previous one (i.e. Parts III and IV), but also to Kumar’s and Manchanda’s essays.
The largest numbers of essays make up Part V on migration, diaspora and identities. Chopra investigates the racial violence in and social transformation of London’s famous South Asian-dominated neighbourhood of Southall, analysing the discourse of her respondents recalling the riots of 1979 through the framework of apna-paraya. Linked to the British Punjabi diasporic experience is Gera Roy’s article on Bhangra in 1980s Birmingham, which reveals the projection of Jat musicians as ‘representative’ of the form, in a silencing of lower caste performers like the mirasis, who helped popularise it in the first place.
Caste looms as a major strand in the two final essays. Paramjit Judge examines Dalit protest and the shaping of exclusive identities through the mobilisation of the chamar community after the murder of a saint of the Ravidassia sect in 2009, intersecting between the scene of the crime in Austria and the location of protest in Jalandhar. Squarely connected to the issues of Dalit identity is the final paper by Diepiriye Kuku-Siemons, which offers a stimulating perspective through ethnography of same-sex sexuality amongst rural Punjabi adolescents. The author demonstrates the impact of homophobic sexism on the ‘feminized young body’ of his respondent, but also the larger societal violence that enacts these heteronormative positions. Tracing his respondent’s journeys from a village to the metropolis of Delhi, the essay is a larger reflection on the politics around urban gay social spaces—both physical and virtual—in ‘modern’ India. Perhaps the most thought-provoking essay in the collection, it covers a range of examples from psychoanalytical readings to misogynistic bhangra pop music, and also a vast theoretical ground. In drawing parallels with race and homophobia in the USA, Kuku-Siemons theorises the cultural ‘mulatto’ to critique heteronormative symbologies and expectations in Punjab, ending by advocating Kakar’s articulation of ‘empathy’.
Despite the remarkable disciplinary range of essays in the volume, the editors’ Introduction successfully manages to pull the threads together to argue that several answers to questions around caste/class/race/gender hierarchies lie in ‘the materiality of contemporalities’ (19). The only quibbles one can have with this excellent volume are first, the lack of an engagement with Punjabi and Haryanvi cultural and ancestral connections across the border in Pakistan; and second, the placement of Kuku-Siemons’ pioneering research as the last essay of Part V, instead of perhaps, the first, which would help mainstream it in the academic discourse, a location its subjects struggle to find in the social discourse.
This volume sits well with other anthologies deliberating on the region (Malhotra and Mir’s 2012 volume Punjab Reconsidered) and will appeal to all those interested in the figurations of South Asian modernity in its localised regional contexts. It offers a unique entry point into the myriad ways in which modernity—understood in its multiple meanings—transformed a crucial region of North India, revealing the intersections of region and nation with questions of representation, livelihood and identity.