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ravichaudhary
February 28th, 2003, 06:32 AM
Nonica Dutta - Forming an Identity
Part I of 4 - Pages 1 to 5

Introduction

Inhabiting the western hinterland of the Yamuna river south of Delhi, the Jats possessed a rather fragile and inchoate sense of identity in pre-colonial India. As rural itinerants of inferior social status, they differed strikingly from their counterparts, the Bharatpur Jats, who inhabited the areas southwest of Delhi and were involved, following the decline of the Mughal Empire, in the gradual formation of the Bharatpur state in the eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the Jats living south of Delhi, mainly in the Rohtak-Hissar region, became a highly self-conscious, assertive and integrated community. During this period, which also coincided with the rise and phenomenal growth of the Arya Samaj, as also the Unionist Party, a number of prominent leaders and organizations emerged on the local and regional scene as representatives of, and spokesmen for, the Jat community. New ideologies also gave expression, perhaps for the first time with such consistency, to their notion of a specific Jat identity. This study tries to explain how and why such a consciousness emerged, and what its tangible manifestations were. How did the Jat leaders, some of whom gained regional prominence, perceive the world around them and how did they come to terms with it? And finally, what was the role of various institutions in the articulation and promotion of a specific Jat identity? In this respect, the part played by the gurukuls is examined in some detail.
This work analyses the different ways in which a Jat identity was formed and shaped in rural southeast Punjab (present-day Haryana), and the historical phases in its evolution. The focus is on popular religious traditions, the qaumi (community) narratives and the specificities of local politics which went into the making of this identity. Whereas most previous secondary works have concentrated on the economic and political history of this region, I have endeavoured to shed light on popular culture and religious

2 A Social History of the Jats
change in the local context. Using widely neglected and hitherto unexplored vernacular language material, newspapers and private papers, I have traced, perhaps for the first time, the strong ideological influence of the Arya Samaj on the region, and detailed, on the strength of much fresh materials, the ways in which local Jats came to understand and use its tenets to promote their own sense of identity during the final decades of the British rule. By concentrating on local community activists and moral leaders as much as on the better-known political spokesmen, I have attempted to uncover many aspects of the local social and political history. By challenging prevailing notions thatJat identity was a colonial construction, I try to offer a new perspective by reflecting on the complex process of identity formation in modern India.
The endogenous Jat cultural identity has been largely neglected by a number of historians, many of whom focus on changes in political institutions, administration and the economy as crucial determinants in the formation of identities among the rural communities in Punjab and underline the decisive influence of colonial conceptions of ¡¥community¡¦. This focus, I argue, has been inadequate in many respects in explaining the formation of a localized identity. Addressing the question from the perspective of a religious, cultural and social world, I find a simplistic impactresponse schema problematic. Further, while recognizing the specificities of the colonial context, I try to demonstrate the historical process of identity formation itself. I argue that Jat identity was shaped primarily by the qaumi narratives which were constructed by its leaders and disseminated among the rural populace. If anything, Jat identity evolved within the religious paradigms of t~e Arya Samaj, particularly between 1880 and 1936. It was during this period when influential Jat leaders, inspired by the message of Dayanand Saraswati, cultivated and popularized the notion of a distinct Jat identity and carved out a public role for themselves in rural society. Such men entered public life as political actors, moral pundits, itinerant reformers, lawyers and popular scholars/historians. And their concerns, though wide-ranging, largely stemmed from their reading of and adherence to the Arya Samaj tenets. In southeast Punjab, in particular, they created an extensive network to preserve a way of life that was defined by Dayanand. They also sought to fashion a moral order consistent with the vedic principles. They were concerned with the social and economic uplift of the Jats, as also with cow-protection and shuddhi. And their vision of an ideal
Introduction 3
society encapsulated a number of trends and tendencies that were at the very heart of the Arya Samaj movement in Haryana. Finally, their responses to colonial rule and the nationalist forces were, in large part, influenced by their local experiences and the extent to which British institutions and western ideas impinged on their lives.
A number of historians have argued that certain identities were the products of the colonial state. Romila Thapar, for example, points to the Orientalist perception of India which was appropriated by the nationalist Indian middle classes for creating their modern identity.¡¦ Drawing on Benedict Anderson¡¦s pioneering work, Imagined Communities, she argues that there were no overarching religious communities in pre-colonial days where the sense of religious identity seems to have related more closely to a sect than to a dominant Hindu communitJr.2 The colonial era, however, ushered in a new phase and led to a new perception of religion. Furthermore, ¡¥the need for postulating a Hindu community became a requirement for political mobilization in the nineteenth century when representation by religious community became a key to power and where such representation gave access to economic resources.¡¦ A coherent identity was thus constructed by those who were part of the nationalist consciousness and for whom ¡¥community¡¦ became a central category of representation.
Sumit Sarkar, Gyanendra Pandey and Sandria Freitag have maintained, from their own perspectives, that identities became choate, focused and organized during the colonial period* By offering centrality to the colonial state, they have enriched our understanding of the specific contexts in which the dominant Hindu identity was constructed. C. A. Bayly, on the other hand, traces the historical formation of religious identities from the pre-colonial period* He points out that, ¡¥many forms of political and economic change in India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were accompanied by conflicts over religious symbols when social and economic groups temporarily perceived others as communities¡¦.5
¡¥ Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Search for a Hindu Identity¡¦, Modern Asian Studies, xxiii, 2 (1989), pp. 209-31. 2 Ibid., p. 229.
¡¥ Sumit Sarkar, An Exploration of the Ramakrtshna-Vivekananda Tradition (Shimla, 1993); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction ofCommunalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1990); Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence ofCommunalism in North India (Berkeley, 1989).
„h C. A. Bayly, The Pre-history of ¡§Communalism¡¨? Religious Conflict in India, 1700-1860 ¡¥, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 2 (1985), pp. 117-203.
„h Ibid., p. 203.

4 A Social History of the Jats
Social historians have also explored the formation of specific caste identities¡¦ With their focus on institutional and economic causation, their writings underline the importance of exogenous factors and, more specially, the colonial context. Recently, this debate has developed into a colonial discourse analysis which draws inspiration from Edward Said¡¦s Orientalism. Mainly concerned with the problem of agency of Indians, Ronald Inden points out that the influence of ¡¥wild fabrications of the nineteenth-century European imagination was to give preeminence to caste¡¦, through its search for essences¡¦ This Indological discourse was part of the imperial project whereby European discourses separated their ¡¥Self from the Indian ¡¥Other¡¦.*
Ironically, Inden¡¦s perspective locates agency within the strategies of officialdom. Similarly, Nicholas Dirks observes that ¡¥under colonialism caste became a foundational basis of Indian society¡¦.¡¨ He considers caste a colonial invention in which indigenous discourses or ¡¥native actors¡¦ had little scope to play. Said and some other historians deny the agency of the colonized by focusing on ¡¥colonial discourse¡¦. The history of ideas and mentalities, however, shows a prominent representation of communities. Caste does not operate as an autonomous, rigid construction alone, but reveals a pre-colonial presence.
¡¥ On the political mobilization of Nadars, see R. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamtlnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley, 1969); on the caste identity of Saraswat Brahmans, see F.F. Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans 1700-1835 (Berkeley, 1977); on the corporate identity of Kayasths, see K.L. Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayastbs of Hyderabad (Berkeley, 1978); on caste as a manipulative category, see D. ¡§B~shbrook, The Development of Caste Organization in South India 18801925¡¦, in C. Baker and D. Washbrook (eds), South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 1880-1940 (Delhi, 1975), pp. 150-203.
¡§ Caste may have been, and-however much we soften our language in the postindependence period-still is the main ¡¥pillar¡¦ of Indological constructs. It was, however, not the only one-..The effect of (the] wild fabricatons of the ninteenthcentury European imagination was to give pre-eminence to caste, the type of society epitomizing at once both constraint and excess, as opposed to the freedom and moderation of Western civil society, and to the lone renouncer rather than the individual-in-society. The result was not, as scholars often claimed, to depict India ¡¥as it was¡¦ [Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990), p. 4].
¡¥ Ibid., p. 3.
¡¥ See Nicholas Dirks, ¡§The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India¡¦, Social Analysis, 25 (1989), pp. 42-51; ¡¥Castes of Mind¡¦, Representations, 37, Winter 1992, pp. 56-78.
Introduction 5
In tune with recent anthropological and historical approaches, scholarly writings on Pun)ab explore the formation of ethnic and communal identities, with special reference to the colonial structure, as the fountain of Punjabi community consciousness. Richard Fox shows the manner in which the British integrated the Sikhs into the world economy and created a class of petty commodity producers and traders in both rural and urban Punjab.¡¨ The British invented and assiduously cultivated a Khalsa identity which was readily appropriated by this class. The argument is well taken, though Fox tends to overlook the role of myths, symbols, rituals, older cultural traditions and linkages which bound the Sikhs in the 1920s with the pre-British past. Also, he pays inadequate attention to Sikh identity from within.
Harjot Oberoi, whose work is located within the paradigm of state-formation in eighteenth-century Sikh society, argues that the construction of Sikh identity had taken place before the colonial days, though he takes note of both pre-colonial and colonial endogenous and exogenous factors. It will not do to single out the colonial state as an instrument for stamping~Sikhismmm with a new consciousness and altered symbolic universe,¡¦ he observes. According to him, ¡¥no account of the evolution of Sikhism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is complete without reference to-the rahit tradition in the pre-colonial period.¡¦¡¨ What happened during the colonial period was the gradual transformation of Sikh identity from a fluid into an impermeable one. That is why, according to Oberoi, the sudden and striking expansion of the Singh Sabhas in the 1880s cannot be understood entirely in terms of the internal dynamics of Sikh society. Therefore, one must reckon with several other factors, including the ¡¥Dalhousian revolution¡¦ in communication, the commercialization of rural economy, the rise of new market towns and trading networks, the decline of traditional cultural mediators, the rise of new elites, the creation of print culture, and a radically-changed system of education.¡¨ By focusing on the multiple meanings of Sikh identity, Oberoi makes a valuable contribution to the identity debate. What remains problematic in his analysis is the question of agency, for he tends to exaggerate
¡§ Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (California: Berkeley, 1985).
¡§ Harjot Oberoi, TheConstructwnofReligtousBoundartes: Culture, identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi, 1994), pp. 371-2.
¡§ Ibid., p. 303. Some of the questions of Sikh subjectivity have been dealt with by W.H. Mcleod, Who is a Sikh? The Problem of Sikh Identity (Oxford, 1989).
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