Dhol

Drummers, Identities, and Modern Punjab

Gibb Schreffler

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252053016
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

An icon of global Punjabi culture, the dhol drum inspires an unbridled love for the instrument far beyond its application to regional vernacular music. Yet the identities of dhol players within their local communities and the broadly conceived Punjabi nation remain obscure.

Gibb Schreffler draws on two decades of research to investigate dhol's place among the cultural formations within Punjabi communities. Analyzing the identities of musicians, Schreffler illuminates concepts of musical performance, looks at how these concepts help create or articulate Punjabi social structure, and explores identity construction at the intersections of ethnicity, class, and nationality in Punjab and the diaspora. As he shows, understanding the identities of dhol players is an ethical necessity that acknowledges their place in Punjabi cultural history and helps to repair their representation.

An engaging and rich ethnography, Dhol reveals a beloved instrumental form and the musical and social practices of its overlooked performers.

1 the short end of the stick

Strategies of Identification

The trope of land resounds in discourse about Punjab. Land is the literal and metaphorical terra firma that anchors the identity group Punjabi and makes the concept of Punjabi culture possible. Concerning economics, land is the source of Punjab’s archetypal wealth, its agricultural produce. Concerning politics, land figures in the disputes over national borders. And concerning ethnicity, land resonates with the identity of the most powerful citizenry, the land owners. It puts farmers like the Jatt at the center of any form of Punjabi identity that prioritizes land as its basis. Punjabis of this class, even when situated outside Punjab, remain tethered to the land of Punjab. Their families retain ownership of ancestral land. Land is a Jatt’s inheritance and it is said that for a Jatt to sell his [sic] land is a sin.

Despite the firmness that one might associate with this land, Punjab is also much associated with travel and migration. The Punjabi Canadian poet Ajmer Rode writes, “Panjāb des de pairīṅ cakkar”—“There’s rambling in the foot of the land of Punjab.” The association between Punjab and population movement would be formed through specific incidents and patterns of migration during the modern era. This is not to say, however, that Punjab has become any kind of Shanghai or New York. Punjabi society is yet characterized by parochial and rustic ways. Its diversity comes in spatial variety, exemplified by the adage that one encounters a new dialect with each river one crosses. This sentiment coexists, however, with the perception that, rather than a multicultural society, Punjab comprises a (mono)cultural region. Perhaps the reason we so often hear about migration in conversations about Punjab is that those people most inclined to talk about “Punjab” are those who have experienced migration. The very idea of a Punjab entity whose existence supplants both local formations and the influences of encompassing sovereign states (i.e., Pakistan, India) asks one to suspend the reality of always living in a politically, socially, and culturally particular space. To suspend this reality is easier for individuals whose life trajectories occasion them to experience living in multiple spaces and to configure salient differences as those occuring between a broader region and places outside that region. Thus, Punjab’s existence as a coherent concept scales to Punjabis’ mobility; its unity appears more as one zooms out. In this chapter, I emphasize movement and positioning in relation to Punjabi spaces. I argue that a “national” Punjabi identity exists precisely because of migration and I illustrate how that identity interacts with other, locally constituted, identities.

Punjabis’ individual identities are matrices that include belonging to an envisioned cultural region (Punjab) along with any number of other intersecting dimensions of identity. To be, for example, a male-identifying Punjabi or a female-identifying Punjabi is surely different. Does one start with the idea of one’s connection to Punjab in both cases, only after distinguishing male versus female? Or does the gender identity come prior to Punjabi? Both orderings occur in individuals’ situational practices of identification. Yet the identifications we often encounter in salient group representations are not so freely multidirectional and some orderings predominate. The Punjabi national identity construct is characterized by such a predominant ordering wherein types of citizenship, religious affiliation, gender, and ethnicity are prioritized after satisfying the ostensibly primary aspect, belonging to the Punjab region. As the Punjabi national identity comes to be represented as coterminous with Punjabi identity, it forecloses other orderings. Individual Punjabi identities have more or less power of expression and representation in relation to how closely their matrices align with Punjabi national identity.

Movement is significant to this process. Punjabis who travel and take up residence in cosmopolitan spaces are the privileged actors who most advance and formulate the picture of Punjabi national identity. Movement by the ethnic and class demographics represented by dholis has not been as frequent nor has it taken the same shape. The example of dholis is thus an acute case of the phenomenon wherein smaller communities’ and individuals’ particular identities—the orderings they prioritize—are minimized or erased by a national one. While dhol becomes ever more deeply inscribed as a sign of Punjabi identity, and as more Punjabis are compelled to adopt the national matrix, we must ask: whose Punjabi identity is this?

identity, culture, ethnicity, and nation

Before proceeding further, I must specify my usage of four recurring analytical concepts: identity, culture, ethnicity, and nation. Each refers to a phenomenon that is theoretically amorphous while, in practical deployment, recognizes patterns in the behaviors of individuals situated in society. Turino provides the helpful idea of habits to negotiate the dual need for theoretical fluidity and practical ascription of categories. Habits may be defined as behaviors, inclusive of action and thought, that tend to be repeated. Their repetition suggests stability while the notion of tendency, rather than fixity, allows for thinking about such behavior as mutable (2008, 95). Turino grounds the discussion of habits of identification in the concept of self, defined as “a body plus the total sets of habits specific to an individual that develop through the ongoing interchange of the individual with her physical and social surroundings” (ibid.).

Identity may then be defined as the representation of the self, in dialectic fashion, by both the self and others (Turino 2008, 102). Whereas the self is the totality of habits and the body, identification entails a partial selection of habits and bodily attributes that are used for representation. Which aspects of the self are selected depends on what is relevant to foreground in a given situation (103).

Culture, which is separate from the body, comprises habits shared among individuals (Turino 2008, 95). Because borders of culture are indefinable, the use of cultures to denote bounded entities is theoretically incongruous despite its currency in colloquial discourse. Turino rectifies this issue through use of the adjectival form, cultural (109). When the need presents itself to affix broad, pervasive patterns of shared habits to groups of people who share a majority of them, we may refer to cultural formations (112).

Whereas cultural formation, based on a cluster of shared habits, gives virtual shape to culture, ethnicity gives shape to a group of people on the basis of social boundaries. According to Barth, ethnicity is based on neither biological descent nor shared culture but rather the construction of boundaries that persist despite changes to the gene pool and cultural characteristics (1998, 9–11). Observed shared characteristics (biological, cultural) within an ethnic group are the result of the inclusion-exclusion dialectic that accompanies social organization into such groups (11). Ultimately, ethnicity is manifested in the dynamic ascriptions of classification of a basic identity by which actors “categorize themselves and others for the purposes of interaction” (13–14). Shared characteristics serve to articulate the ethnic identity, rather than constituting the ethnic group as such. As in Turino’s emphasis on a selection of traits in identification, it is not the sharing of traits in sum that mark the ethnic groups’ delineation of boundaries but only those traits that are taken to be significant. Amplifying significant points of affiliation and difference, as through the use of emblems, aids the maintenance of boundaries. Barth notes that in the South Asian caste system, boundaries between castes reflect ethnic boundaries (28). It is with this rationale that I shall treat castes and similar groupings in Punjab as ethnic communities.

Nation is a term I use in deliberate distinction from state. A state is defined as a sovereign territory with a centralized government within which membership is based on a system of citizenship (Baumann 1999, 30). By contrast, when I employ the term nation, I am referring to an entity lacking a sovereign territory and centralized government, for which ethnicity operates as the basis of membership. A nation is a people. The challenge here is to distinguish nation, insofar as it is formulated through the phenomenon of ethnicity, from ethnic group. I consider nation to be a superethnic group that subsumes salient divisions of (smaller) ethnic groups. As Baumann puts it, “The nation is … both postethnic, in that it denies the salience of old ethnic distinctions and portrays these as a matter of a dim and distant prestate past, and superethnic, in that it portrays the nation as a new and bigger kind of ethnos” (ibid., 31). I use nation to accommodate the perception that Punjabis, in total, are a people independent from (or indeed without) a state. While acknowledging the problematic nature of this concept of nation, I have adopted it precisely to highlight the issue at play: the ascription of national identity is ultimately arbitrary. At what level of ethnic division is it to be based? A nation must justify the grouping on the basis of some natural inclusion of what it deems to be significant attributes while ignoring others. In the case of a Punjab nation, ties to the land must be part of it. Yet, since there is no Punjab state (country) to confer Punjabi citizenship, and since there must be an ethnic basis, not all who happen to be located in Punjab can be Punjabi in the national sense, or at least not equally so. A broad cultural formation must also be sought to give representational coherence to the nation. Cultural nationalism is the ideology that serves to delineate a nation through the selective identification of shared culture.

Hutchinson explains cultural nationalism as a response to crises of identity and purpose (1987, 3). Its goals reflect the distinction between nation and state, where the nation’s idiosyncratic traits are considered to be and respected as natural, while the state’s supposedly arbitrary policies are accidental (13). Cultural nationalists, therefore, do not aim to achieve and support a state as political nationalists but rather strive for moral regeneration of the national community (9). Historical memory is important to cultural nationalists (29), as revival of and education in common heritage contribute to the myth of the nation. For this reason, scholars and artists play key roles in cultural nationalist movements, for they are responsible for creating historicist ideology and cultural institutions (9).

To summarize, identity is the phenomenon whereby individuals represent themselves and are represented by others through selected traits of the self. Types of identity include cultural, where recognition is based on a surfeit of shared habits, and ethnic, where recognition is based on signification of customary social boundaries. Ethnic groups, while tending to share cultural formations and draw on their signs to signify their boundaries, are not coterminous with them. A larger grouping of people based on a social us-versus-them dialectic is a nation. Just as ethnic groups select from traits taken to be significant to construct the boundary between us and them, the nation does so in such a way as to include multiple smaller groups in its fold by emphasizing some traits shared between them. In the case of the Punjabi nation, origin in the Punjab region is the foundational shared trait. Cultural nationalism additionally prescribes a broad cultural network as the nation’s shared trait in preference to sharing membership in a political state. The formulation reconfigures ethnic boundaries and downplays cultural diversity to unify the idea of the nation and, in the process, minimizes or erases other ethnic and cultural identities.

divided punjab

Cultural nationalists promote the idea of Undivided Punjab, a Punjab as it was before the region’s division between Pakistan and India and in which different faith communities coexist(ed) in harmony. Their vision gives the impression that Punjabis are one people and that the unfortunate rifts—which active remembering of shared heritage shall overcome—lie with capricious boundaries created by states and religions. At the heart of this book’s subject is a conflict between a modern vision of Punjabi people’s cultural unity and the past—signifying lived reality of traditional dholis within a society sharply divided by ethnicity and class. The trouble for cultural nationalists is that to discuss such divisions disintegrates their picture of social unity. The trouble for dholis is that ignoring ethnicity and class does nothing to elucidate their continuing lived reality.

Talking about musicians—not music, but musicians—compels us to talk about ethnicity, class, and a construct that lies at their intersection, caste. As Sherinian points out, by ignoring caste, which remains an operative construct despite its fluidity, we risk ignoring the relationship between social identities and music (2014, 15). Caste is a sensitive topic for Punjabis, however, and more so, I observe, among the higher socioeconomic classes. Middle-and upper-class individuals, who associate freely with people of other castes within their same class, follow the conviction that caste does not matter, as it were, because it should not matter. The difference they experience, between themselves and people of the lower classes, appears precisely as a class difference. This appearance belies the recognition that class differences largely correspond to caste differences. To be clear, it is the implied hierarchical dimension of caste that makes its consideration most distasteful. Thus, discourse from the perspective of upper classes neglects caste as ethnicity (or ethnicity, as such, at all). Punjabis occupying the lower classes most acutely feel caste’s effects and, in reverse fashion, project caste onto the difference between themselves and higher classes. While the upper classes talk about their Punjabi identity, the lower classes talk about their ethnic identities. Yet, for lower-class individuals, who tend to be most conscious of communal identity, hierarchies are not the focus but rather particular group identities in distinction from others. Their communities function like extended family units in which members focus energy on helping their closest kin to survive. Because those with fewer economic choices must rely on their (ethnic) community in this way, they in turn fight for its distinction to the same degree as one would fight for the ownership of one’s property. One cannot appreciate what is at stake for musical property without acknowledging the preeminent importance of ethnic community for the economically disadvantaged.

In discussing Punjabi society, the familiar term caste has some utility in reference to the phenomenon of ethnic communities being ascribed social statuses. In reference to groups of people, however (as opposed to the phenomenon that ascribes their relationships in society), more useful is a native term, qaum. A qaum, as I reasoned earlier with provisional reference to caste, may be considered as an ethnic group on the basis that its people draw a boundary between theirs and other such groups. Differentiation between qaums is reinforced through endogamy, identification with select professional and cultural practices, and, to a greater or lesser degree, social segregation.

While this all corresponds to some of the connotations when speaking of a caste, qaum avoids certain popular associations with the former. First, because in Punjabi history the ethnic communities, qaums, have been dynamic, use of the term avoids the notion evoked by caste of a set of fixed groups. Second, while hierarchical relationships between ethnic communities are important for the analysis of Punjabi society, use of the word caste risks readers transposing familiar hierarchical structures gleaned elsewhere in South Asia to Punjab. In Punjab, the ethnic communities do not relate hierarchically on the basis of an ancient Hindu schema that supposes, for example, that the priestly caste (in Punjabi, Bāhmaṇ) resides at the top of a celestial order. In rural Punjab, landowning farmers, though they toil with their hands, are situated as the highest-status group. Departure from familiar hierarchies might be explained by the fact that, although the phenomenon of caste is seen to have emerged in the subcontinent along with the diverse beliefs collectively known as Hinduism, in Punjab it encompasses a substantial number of individuals of other religious faiths. Both Islamic and Sikh theology reject the notion of caste. Still, the practices that realize qaum differentiation also exist among these religious groups (I. Singh 1977, 79; Jalal 1995, 216), as do prejudices between communities.¹

Third, whereas popular discourse on castes tends to emphasize occupational exclusivity, and even though that phenomenon is characteristic of many qaums, a more salient basis for the cohesion of qaum is kinship. It is organized into an endogamous set of exogamous clans that supports economic objectives. Although a qaum’s occupational specialty may be more or less exclusive with respect to other qaums, in all cases kinship regulates sustainability by nurturing members’ career development and keeping those outside the kin network from oversaturating the local markets for an occupational service. I must reiterate, however, that neither ancestry nor occupational specialty can be considered the defining basis of qaum. People related by kin may split into new qaums, the ultimate basis of which is the socially constructed recognition of group identities, ethnicity. We will see in Chapter 3 how a kin-related people previously known as Dum have shed that identity and reformed under such separate qaum identities as Jogi and Mahasha, as well as how previously unrelated people came under the label of Bharai.

A final reason for using qaum is to include a continuum (see Jalal 1995) of different types of ethnic community formations. At one end of the continuum is that type best evoked by caste—ideally, one of numerous closely interdependent groups assumed to perform particular, complementary functions in a social network (on this point, see Leach 1962, 5). Yet also well represented in Punjab, at the other end of the continuum, is a type called “tribe,” kabīlā. It may be defined ideally as a larger-scale, independent group of individuals who believe they are descended from a common ancestor and who, at some point, occupied common territory.² Within a tribe, the occupational choices of members are relatively flexible, as are their social roles. Punjab’s so-called tribal peoples, kabāilī lok, now live amid the larger society of complementary occupational groups, though in the past many lived peripatetic lifestyles, which remains a component of their identity.³ Characteristics of tribes have included unorthodox religious beliefs (often propitiating deities particular to the tribe), idiosyncratic rituals, and an independent court of elders with proprietary justice proceedings (Thind 1996, 42). The historical tribal groups existed outside “society,” and so their occupational practices, while intended to support themselves, were not integrated precisely into the caste network. Now that most tribes are participants in the social mainstream, it does not pay to overdistinguish ethnic community types along the continuum, and qaum accommodates all of them. Nevertheless, some value in retaining some distinction of caste versus tribe lies in the fact that tribes retain a sense of themselves as historical outsiders.

According to the social paradigm of qaum, an individual’s situation in his or her community has a bearing on a great many aspects of life. The tendency to marry only within and to associate mainly with others of the same qaum is strong, and many qaums possess a more-or-less distinct combination of lifeways, habits, religious beliefs, and dialect (Juergensmeyer 2004, 44). Such a close relationship between culture and ethnicity is not unique to Punjab, yet the relative exclusivity of social spheres engendere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Audiovisual Examples
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction: Drumming to the Beat of a Different March
• 1 The Short End of the Stick: Strategies of Identification
• 2 Dhol Manifested: Body, Sound, and Structure
• 3 Asking Rude Questions: Dholi Ethnicity
• 4 A Portrait of a Dholi and His Community
• 5 Becoming and Being a Dholi
• 6 Dhol Players in a New World
• 7 Return to Punjab, Turning Punjab
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index