Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan

Gender and Caste, Borders and Boundaries

Virinder S. Kalra, Navtej K. Purewal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350041776
• Edition: 1

Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.

1

Introduction

Our entry into ‘the field’ in contemporary Punjab was in 1995 when we lived in Amritsar, a city which was just emerging out of a decade or more of militancy and state repression following the attack and ambush of the Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star. We lived in an area off the Grand Trunk (GT) Road directly opposite Guru Nanak Dev University called Kabir Park, a veritably named locality. There were a few social encounters which introduced us to the area and, on reflection, to the questions which we subsequently raise in this book. The first was with our neighbours who, on appearance, seemed ‘Sikh’ in that the male head of the household tied a turban, had uncut hair and beard, and wore a karha (bangle) on his wrist. We were admittedly confused by the fact that on a number of occasions the family held all-night devotional music functions (jagraataan) in praise of the devis (goddesses). The loudspeaker-amplified chanting of Jai Mata Di penetrated the night and kept all awake. We were regularly invited but attended only a few of these gatherings; yet, as marginal participants, we were always invited to partake in langar (communal food). Our perplexity arose due to our respective upbringings in Punjabi diaspora households in the United Kingdom and the United States, where the boundaries between Sikh and Hindu, and Sikh and Muslim were seen as eternal and absolute. Discernible levels of inter-community solidarities and alliances existed in these postcolonial migration contexts, but they were temporally different types of negotiations with boundaries compared to those we were exposed to in the Punjab milieu. Indeed, boundary-breaking seemed the norm and challenged our limited imaginary. While we were in Amritsar, in this era, the crude mapping of the further reduced polar binary of Hindu/Sikh and Muslim mapped onto the geographical separation of India and Pakistan that circulated all around us. Even though our respective elders came from what was now demarcated as West Punjab and our passports gave us access to both sides of the border, the perception of an impassable geographical boundary mirrored firm religious binaries. Just as our neighbour caused us confusion, the examples of national border crossings were equally puzzling.

A second social relation that exemplified the porous nature of the Indo-Pak border and tested our understandings was with a mother and daughter, named Sheila and Asha respectively. Sheila knocked on our door the first day we arrived asking if we would employ her or her daughter to clean our house. Asha, Sheila’s daughter, who was eighteen years old at the time, worked a few hours each morning and began to spend longer time with us, as we would teach her typing and basic computer skills. She had gone to school until the age of sixteen and was fluent in written Hindi and Punjabi and was able to read and write basic English. She was interested in gaining employment beyond domestic work, the fate of most dalit women in Punjab.¹ During one of our conversations with Asha, she mentioned, in passing, that her father’s ‘other family’ would be visiting from Pakistan. This other family was Muslim, she reluctantly revealed. Her father’s second wife wore a burkha and came with their children at least once or twice each year. Her father also visited them in Pakistan occasionally; she revealed this with some hesitance at first, but more openly when she met our friends from the UK who had just crossed the border at Wagah to visit us from Pakistan. We discovered that Sheila’s father and his second family did not cross the border at Wagah, but slipped across without dealing with passport and visa controls. The impenetrable geopolitical border and seemingly firm religious boundaries all seemed to fragment and dissolve in Asha’s story.

We are also aware of the limitations of the idea of border crossing. A close friend, Ishaque Virk, whose family were split across the border in 1947, refused until recently to cross the India–Pakistan border on the basis that it legitimated the existence of the two nation-states. His argument was: why did he need to cross a border to visit his family in what he considered the same land? On our visit to Islamabad in 1995 and subsequently for the past twenty-three years each time we have met, Ishaque has shared stories of how both sets of his grandparents had nominally (or performatively) converted to Islam in order to stay in West Punjab to retain their land; how his nani (maternal grandmother) had taught him the Gurmukhi script; and how their cognizance of a dissonant identity persisted despite the tides of religious nationalism that swirled around them. Ishaque wears a karha and has children and grandchildren whose names are ambiguously placed in terms of religious identification. In this case, ‘border crossing’ is only a useful concept in that it opens a conversation about the permeability of borders, the subjectivity of the people who navigate them and the acts within which they articulate agency.

Twelve years later, having moved to Lahore to carry out our fieldwork, our older daughter, who was then eight years old, was asked innumerable times, particularly at school, whether or not she was Indian with each new introduction made. For Lahore Grammar School in the posh locale of Defense at the heart of the national and army elite of Pakistan, this was not surprising. A year later and across the border in Chandigarh, at an equally elite international school, the classroom register was given to the children on the first day of school which listed not only the names of the children but also the names of both parents, supposedly for the benefit of organizing after-school activities. The interest which the children and their parents took in ‘the list’ seemed to be directed towards the last names. On the first day of school, our older daughter was asked by classmates what her caste was and again a few days later, once the list had been absorbed and discussed by parents with their children at home. It had been pointed out to her by her classmates that her parents had two different last names, which in their casted-patriarchal framing they viewed as either incorrect or in need of correcting. Names were clearly perceived by this dominant-caste school community as signifiers of acceptability to this community intent on building social capital, through new networks, though ironically framed by the rigidities of caste normativity. If a border-crossing gendered, young body can unsettle understandings of caste and religion in India and Pakistan, then the potentiality of an analytic that dethrones patriarchy and Brahminism is surely a necessity.

As researchers who are products of the diaspora, our positionality is continually being shaped and questioned whilst in India and Pakistan. The literature and archives are replete with writings on Punjab and Punjabi society coming from a range of knowledge production regimes, predominantly the colonial record, but also South Asia–based self-publishing. Our own mission was, in many ways, to redress and address the ways in which positionalities shape narratives. Coming from dominant caste (in the Punjab context) backgrounds with the privilege of US/UK passports but of minority religious groups in both India and Pakistan, in a heteronormative relationship, with each of us differently positioned within the gendered hierarchies, the knowledge that we have generated reflects each of these subject positions. In that sense feminist knowledge production informs our overall project. As Ann Oakley (1998) in her multiple interventions states, it is out of social engagement that we generate social knowledge. Our own subject positions were read in specific gatherings differentially, but our overall experience of living at the margins in Lahore (as religious minorities) and at the centre in Chandigarh (as members of dominant castes), within an overall Punjabi patriarchal social context, notwithstanding our elite class position in global political-economy terms, is a constant refrain to the narratives presented in this book.

An outline of a field across borders: People, places and institutions

Our interest in Punjab as a site for intensive and extensive fieldwork has from the start been framed by its internal and external boundaries and bordering logics. The most obvious dimension of this is the Radcliffe Line, the international, colonially-mapped divider which splits East and West Punjab between India and Pakistan. It is a border that requires visas, visas which are becoming increasingly unattainable as the religious majoritarian agendas within the respective national governments continue to impede and obstruct people-to-people contact. This physical border has been fortified and militarized most noticeably over the past two decades, whereas up to the mid-1980s it had been more porous for local residents than was commonly known. While the physical frontier has now become so difficult for ordinary people to traverse physically and formally, the effect of bordering processes on the internal dynamics and structuring of society on both sides of the line is perhaps more entrenched and pernicious. The patrolling of the boundaries of religion is an integral part of this, though this may not seem odd in the context of the Islamic republic of Pakistan, where it is assumed that religion is policed and guarded. However, the ascent to power of Hindutva in India exposes how thinly drawn the veneer of religious freedom and tolerance were drawn in the once so-called secular republic of India.² The demarcation of physical and symbolic borders can be seen in the othering of people through communal discourse, constructed notions of culture and practices across the line officially drawn only seven decades ago. This gulf between people, on both sides, seemed colossal during our earlier visits in the 1980s and 1990s with a dualistic rhetoric of curiosity/longing and stereotyping/xenophobia framing the public discourse of the two nations which was reflected across Punjab. There has been a substantive popular counter-discourse shaped by desires to reconnect across the India–Pakistan border accompanied by a cynicism around political uses of religion, not least of the backing of political candidates and leaders by spiritual leaders and religious bodies, who amass followings for their own purposes. Public opinion on the state’s role in religion is both astute and varied.

Despite having familiarity with and experience of doing research in Punjab, we began our fieldwork for this particular project in Lahore in 2007.³ This book has thus been more than ten years in the making. Our explorations began with an attentiveness to seeing what people do in the every day in relation to the backdrop of postcolonial, post-Partition, post-Zia, post-militancy Punjab, a series of ‘posts’ which do not signal the past but rather a perpetual unfolding.⁴ In particular, our preliminary observations were somewhat bewildering. We witnessed meticulous policing of the formal observation of religious boundaries and identities; meanwhile we also saw a tremendous amount of spiritual openness by way of an underlying perseverance and desire to sustain practices which did not necessarily ‘fit’ in accordance with formal religion. Thus, our attention to ‘what people do’, rather than ‘what they say they do’ from the onset, informed our analysis (De Certeau 1984). It was often unclear how to disentangle the complex processes at play at a shrine or in a case study and the lengthy time taken to write this book reflects the necessity for slow absorption as well as revisits to the field in order to trace and track change. Ultimately, what we realized was that boundaries are continually being erected and dismantled, made and remade, asserted and resisted. Our empirical chapters trace these dynamics as a means of demonstrating how borders are in motion (Konrad 2015), despite the existence of mutually exclusive nationalisms, a geopolitical border, and established, differentiated religious identities.

In taking ‘borders in motion’ as an organizing principle, our project not only set out to explore practices, sites and figures in Punjab across the Radcliffe Line, but it also endeavoured to examine how other exclusionary logics such as religious categorization, state intervention and naming or labelling practices operated across the various sites and contexts. We set out to resist the straightjacket of methodological nationalism from the onset by not taking labels or categories at face value which was made possible only because of our access to both sides of the border. Our privilege in holding non-Indian and Pakistani passports, but perhaps equally relevant was that we were identified as Sikh, meant that we were able to traverse the border as pilgrims to Pakistan and as diaspora when returning to India. We became quickly aware that subsequent to the 2014 election victory in India that such mobility became increasingly difficult and that the environment for privileged border crossers was intentionally being made more difficult.⁵ Challenging methodological nationalism, however, does not merely relate to the ability to access and cross the physical border; it also refers to the ability to imagine or construct a field which is not reliant on the framings or frameworks tied to bordering processes. South Asia area studies has for too long cast an India-centric view on the region. This is not merely a product of the proportionally larger population of the region which resides within India’s national boundaries or of India’s hegemonic geopolitical position vis-à-vis its neighbours. State-driven boundaries are also tied to a range of hegemonies and framings that close off certain possibilities for analysis. The lack of cross-border research and enquiry sums up the quandary we are faced with. We have continually been surprised to see how few researchers consider fields across national boundaries as epistemological and methodological interventions. Certainly Punjab in the borders of India has been reduced to the formation that came into being in 1966, with a topography that is flattened not only in geographical terms, but in relation to the diversity of its cultural formation. Even the counter to this, the Punjabi nationalist position, draws a boundary in some or other historical moment, most often at that of Ranjit Singh’s kingdom (1809–1849). Our field sites⁶ were spread across the Punjab province of Pakistan and the Punjab state of India, with one site in Himachal Pradesh with references to Sindh and Kashmir. This is not to fetishize or romanticize about a grand geographical or cultural Punjab, but rather to indicate that the borders of what we call Punjab are neither fixed nor refer to any geographical or political time. Indeed, the borders of Punjab have been drawn and redrawn so many times that no map would be able to depict the layers of movement and change. Our methodological approach, therefore, has been an attempt to engage with the layering of temporal and spatial movability, mobility and change which mark the region so distinctively. The fact that Punjab does not exist as a political or geo-spatial entity but is rather split offers a critical starting point to question all boundary-making processes that take its name. Thus our heuristic use attempts to subvert a romantic notion of Punjab as a counter to Sikh, Hindu and Muslim identity formations, by recognizing that all identities are produced on the basis of the concealment or suppression of others. In the context of caste exploitation and patriarchy/misogyny, the noun Punjab refers to a dismal sex ratio (Purewal 2010) and persistent dalit exclusion (Jodhka 2009). It is this recognition that motivates us to develop an approach which recognizes boundary-making and -breaking processes as coterminous.

Following through our commitment to conceptualize and design a means for analysing dynamics of gender and caste within the practices, sites and institutional processes we were observing was not a simple task. Much of our fieldwork was shaped around questions of inclusion, exclusion, margins, authority, power and borders. However, our own subject positions served as an advantage in some contexts, when wishing to explore gender for example, but a hindrance in terms of caste. In this respect, we found the spatial restrictions on women in the public sphere in Pakistan made shrines significant spaces of mingling and hence excellent sources for empirical access. Similarly, caste stratification that permeates sociality in India has meant that specific shrines have effectively become markers of presence in a public sphere which excludes dalits. These empirical openings and constraints further refined our approach, as it became clear that many of the sites at which we were carrying out fieldwork were imbued with historiographies that at some point began to exclude women and dalit devotees. Contested narratives around piety crossed borderlines of gender and caste in their contemporary elicitation but did not map onto historicized accounts of shrine formation. Thus whilst we gathered large amounts of historical material, it did not always read back to the interviews or ethnography of practice. Rather, it was in the Punjabi poetic-philosophical tradition, and most notably the names of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Piro spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, that synergy was found with present concerns. This is not to say that we treated these authors/figures as historical sources (though they no doubt can be considered as such), but rather noted how they their names and texts circulated in popular discourse to puncture the hegemonic forces of dominant caste ideology and patriarchy in a way that connected to the concerns of women and dalits. This may be seen as a crude set of juxtapositions in relation to our theoretical case, but this nonetheless reflects a broad popular culture and is thus relevant to our reasoning.

By remaining attentive to our theoretical perspective, we were able to design a research strategy, through mixed methods, which enabled us to access and amplify the rich and complex data we were collecting. These methods included ethnography, semi-structured interviews, devotee surveys at shrines, textual/inter-textual analysis and photography, and video recording of practices and performance at melas [fairs] and shrines. We found that the classificatory logics of names and categories were constantly at play in terms of the sites and practices we were observing. We were conscious of not creating new categories in our navigation, and even avoidance of religious categories or in assuming that certain practices could de facto be conjoined with a particular identity. This became most acute when training our research assistants who were students at Punjab University in Lahore, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Panjab University in Chandigarh and D.A.V. College in Amritsar who persevered in carrying out the surveys and in recording practice and performance in line with the sensitivities around labelling which we had indicated to them. For students in their early to mid-twenties, the initial prospect that the practices we were seeking did not have direct resonance with demarcations or labels was simply not commonsense to them, yet we saw how they too joined us in revelling in the field we were observing and in which we were immersed. Most of the interviews were conducted by the authors in Punjabi with a few done by two postgraduate researchers, one in Chandigarh and the other in Lahore. It was the field observations and interviews which presented the most bewildering and puzzling insights. Consequently, this book is written in the style of an ethnography for how it centres the human experience within each of the practices or sites being explored. We went into the field admittedly with certain conceived notions of ‘shared’ or overlapping boundaries and a perhaps naïve view of resistance to organized, institutionalized religion. However, these were refined by what the multiple sour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translation, transliteration and digital resource
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptual pilgrimage
• 3 Bordering logics
• 4 Sacred spaces and their limits
• 5 Openness and closure
• 6 Authority as religion-making and religion-breaking
• 7 Devotion, hegemony and resistance at the margins
• Appendix 1
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint