A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with some local guys consuming copious amounts of alcohol to the backdrop of a varied playlist and it dawned on me that my opposite number were unaware of the caste titles they were fondly using as an address of endearment. “Choudhary” this, “Rajah” that, these were the sorts of titles thrown about as if the persons being addressed in this manner belonged to a background that distinguished them from those being addressed by their names. Not that I had any anxieties about the labels, how could I? I come from the same landed backgrounds. In Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, (we need to stop acting like cowards – Pakistan is militarily occupying Kashmir contrary to the wishes of the people), my clan members are commonly addressed as Choudhary whilst those living on the opposite side of the border in mainland Pakistan are identified as Rajeh. I speak of distant cousins from the same landed ancestral backgrounds whose great, great, great… grandparents would marry into the extended tribal networks, or at least those committed to preserving kinship ties and their sense of tribal honour. They would never marry out of the tribe except to landed tribes and clans with greater prestige within the same patronage system. As the landed groups grew progressively poorer this priority became redundant.
In my adolescent years I used to think of the distinguishing clan titles as rather curious but as I began to dabble in the history and historiography of the subcontinent, the latter of which was heavily influenced by colonial paradigms, I discovered the arbitrary nature of nobility titles within a fluid system of patronage greatly exaggerated by colonial ethnologists. This is a fascinating history if properly understood and would reveal how much colonial ethnographers and administrators influenced an entire nation’s attitudes, and it’s not necessarily positive. The caste identities they confronted, lineage-based and occupational, an entirely colonial distinction between the “high” and “low” castes, were categorised according to a system that fixed the boundaries of group identities and their corresponding social prestige. It was the colonialists who ultimately permitted entry into the illusory groups and not the later incumbents claiming proprietary rights over the older labels.
The irony of this is that the British colonialists created the categories, modern Brits debunked them: (academics, social activists and persons of conscience), whilst the colonised are still posturing through the old paradigms: the native clients and native informants, usually for self-affirming reasons. Colonialism may have ended but its legacy still lives on through mental occupation of the minds of the supposedly liberated.
Can ironies get more poetic?
Let me be crystal clear though. When I speak of the pervasiveness of caste attitudes I’m really speaking of feudal Pakistan of the old ancestral networks from which most of Pakistan and North India’s landed communities originate. Recruitment into the Pak Fauj, (Pakistan Army), is mostly restricted to these lineage groups. In the upper tiers of the Indian Military, the landed backgrounds continue to be overrepresented. It is the case that colonial notions of the martial race theory predetermine who gets recruited into the Military Establishment minus affirmative action policies that incorporate the occupational castes as some sort of equaliser within a deeply and structurally unequal casteist society. The caste system is very much alive in Pakistan and it permeates every sector of the society including religious institutions and marriage, something upwardly mobile Pakistanis in the UK want to deny masking their own past and anxieties. The idea that Islam did away with caste in Pakistan is a complete cack of shite. Those who argue otherwise are just peddling horseshit and I don’t think it’s appropriate to handle their falsehoods with decorum and courtesy.
In the domain of the upwardly mobile Pakistanis, the cities and their urban spaces, things are different and not necessarily better. In recent decades, western commentators taking their intellectual cues from Pakistanis with social aspirations of being middle class in the UK have started a trend of identifying Pakistanis as distinguishable social units of identification: ‘citified Pakistanis’ and ‘village Pakistanis’, all on the basis of ‘place of origin’. The dichotomy is, however, false.
Pakistan is one of the most least technologically and scientifically innovative societies on earth with low levels of human capital when compared to neighbouring countries. Since the emergence of international league tables, Pakistan does not rank anywhere in the top 100 or 1000 universities, whilst consistently ranking at the top for corruption and human rights violations. University degrees and other credentials can be purchased including passports and ID cards at the highest level and for the right sums of money. In fact, most of Pakistan’s development projects are funded by other countries and even the teams working on site are staffed by foreign nationals because of the deficit of skills within the cities. And so, the idea that Pakistanis from cities will somehow morph into the socioeconomically advanced groups in the UK has no analytical value except as a badge of self-affirmation for the interests pushing the narrative. Pakistan’s cities have never equated to socially liberated spaces either to appreciate how false narratives connected with a dominant ethnic majority in one part of the world can emerge for a fringe minority group in another part of the world, and this too in the presence of huge inequality between groups. The expanding size of cities with an ever increasing number of shanty towns, what Pakistanis call ‘Kachi Abadi’ (villages absorbed into cities), is linked with population explosions and not economic growth. With the expanding size of the cities and their lack of resources and economic depth, they become dysfunctional, overcrowded and euphemisms for what they’re not – advanced urban spaces.
But none of this matters for citified Pakistanis in the UK posturing through an origin myth, namely that of the city. The idea of originating from the ‘city’ will inevitably require the construction of the villager/city dichotomy and an enormous jigsaw puzzle that needs filling descriptively. The empty pieces become sociological chestnuts with little epistemic value other than the fact that the native informants from the cities are producing the insights, one set of “educated” Pakistanis describing another cohort of “unskilled” Pakistanis. It is a clear example of how the exercise of unjust power and systems of discrimination linked with prejudice, bigotry and scapegoating in one part of the world can become the basis of academic analysis on how two imaginary groups emerge outside their respective places of origin.
We are dealing with crude observations that do not reflect the social reality of Pakistan, a floundering nation that is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state in light of a demographic time bomb. Pakistan is a constant recipient of International Aid, loans and handouts – and that’s understating the claim. It is a violent and lawless society; bribes trump legal norms and elected politicians are frequently imprisoned at the instigation of the Military. The 7/7 British Pakistani suicide bombers were trained in Pakistan and the head of al-Qaida, Usama Bin Laden, responsible for the 9/11 attacks, was found sheltering and hiding in Pakistan most likely under the protection of the Army. The Pakistan Military had been receiving funds to locate him and to aid the so-called War on Terror. Both 7/7 and 9/11 are considered conspiracies by citified Pakistanis to appreciate the supposed levels of human capital that are being transferred to the UK.
Pakistan ranks number one for gender inequality. It continues to have a serious problem with honour crimes that police the moral conduct of wives, daughters and sisters. Divorcees have been clubbed to death outside courts in the cities, whilst crowds and the police watch on from the privileged position of neutral bystander – no one intervenes because that’s just not the culture. Ethnic, regional and religious minorities are persecuted by the majority ethnic Punjabis who are keen to be returned as Urdu speaking Pakistanis given their aversion to Punjab’s rural culture (the source of the alleged problems, they argue). Citified Punjabis are at pains to distinguish themselves from village Punjabis to appreciate the direction of their influences and what they approximate to – a form of identity politics.
Embarrassing as these facts may be for self-affirming citified Pakistanis in the UK, they are completely backed up by evidence of reputable bodies exposing human rights violations across the world. Pakistan is not being singled out and Pakistanis are not being demonised – it is not racist to make such claims. Pakistan is located firmly within the bulwark of authoritarian nation states that oppress their nationals with impunity. It has never been the bastion of progressive values but competing interests operating like proxies for more powerful countries that have never respected the interests of ordinary Pakistanis getting caught up in the ensuing conflagrations. Pakistan’s Military Complex entered the Cold War at its own choosing in order to gain parity with India’s Military only to become a disloyal ally to the West. Hiding the world’s most wanted terrorist isn’t exactly an act of friendship. Pakistan was no more loyal to the Saudi Monarchy given what we know of the Military’s alliances with Islamist groups that want to topple the Arab Monarchies and the Arab Republics.
Without remittences and foreign aid, Pakistan wouldn’t even be able to honour its balance of payments, funds that accrue from the toil and labour of village Pakistanis working abroad. Even the aid is procured in the name of the poor, whom I assume live in the villages and not the cities but which rarely reaches them courtesy of Pakistan’s notorious culture of siphoning funds. In fact, had it not been for the largess of the British Azad Kashmiris spanning 7 decades, Pakistan would, literally, be a lot poorer than what it is today. A lot of those British-sourced deposits were invested in cities across Pakistan, something missing in narratives that demonise “village Pakistanis” from the hinterland regions of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. To add insult to injury, Pakistan exploits Azad Kashmir’s natural resources and then has the gaul to preach to the world that it has somehow enriched the Kashmir it has disinvested. I’m not saying this, Kashmir’s activists aren’t telling us this, but western analysts who have written extensively about systems of oppression across the world. Again, Pakistan is not being isolated.
In spite of these demonstrable facts easily accessible to the most sloppiest of researchers, the pretensions of citified Pakistanis begin to make sense when linked to the priorities of upward mobility. The emotional impulses are predictable given what we know of blame-shifting across societies and the art of scapegoating marginalised and disenfranchised groups during times of social tensions. More crucially for the purpose of my analysis, it proves we are dealing with two distinct groups with a different sense of origin and memories, the one demonising the other and not vice versa.
So what are citified Pakistanis claiming in actual sociological terms? They argue that if you happen to originate from a Pakistani city (like them – the salient point) it’s just easier to be integrated within the urban societies of the West. But, if you come from Pakistan’s villages (unlike them) then you would lack the necessary human capital to navigate your new social terrain. You would also lack progressive values of co-existence with people that are different, racially, ethnically and religiously – that’s the basic gist of their argument.
Ostensibly, it would seem to be a value-objective observation until you start scratching beneath the surface to expose the subjective motives within its specific Pakistani context. The Islamism that has been indicted in much of the extremism and terrorism we see unfolding in the Muslim World and the West is a product of the city and not the village. You have less chances of being radicalised by Islamists if you come from a village, but again this narrative transcends the common sense truths being peddled by citified Pakistanis. Their associated claims are flawed and biased, based entirely on insecurities and anxieties of being upwardly outside Pakistan. Whilst distinguishing themselves from village Pakistanis and celebrating their own virtues, they never once mention the caste system – Pakistan’s dirty secret.
Pakistan’s Dirty Secret – the Casteless Castes
Originally comprised of humbler backgrounds, “the occupational castes” of the British colonial imagination, citified Pakistanis do what upwardly mobile people do everywhere and try to morph into the dominant social groups when they become educated, affluent and socially connected. These are aspirations much more than actual realities and one will hear anxious immigrants speak about their values and skillsets, contrasting themselves from the bad sorts of immigrants in light of their host community’s fears about ‘too much immigration’. ‘Good immigrants’ are destined to do well and are an asset to their host society whilst the bad sorts of immigrants become a drain on the host society’s resources and pose a security threat. The rhetoric is self-evidently far-right when the good immigrants countenance the closing of the door for immigrants “unlike themselves” now they’ve become secure in their new social personas, becoming a caricature of what we all know of social climbers. I’m keen to emphasis that I proffer my observations analytically and not pejoratively.
As a self-conscious group – akin to the satirical tradition of Mrs Bouquet: Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth “Bucket”; the identity in question is performative. It is rooted in the anxiety of wanting to present as urban and not rural to contrast oneself or a set of related people from the lessor Pakistanis – “the gaun logg” (the village people). The priority masks an older more troubling background rooted in a type of debilitating poverty linked with being landless and stigmatised. Some of the comedic themes in Keeping Up Appearances can help us unpack some of the anxieties discussed above.
Best of Hyacinth Bucket’s Name Mispronunciation | Keeping Up Appearances
There’s nothing Mrs Bucket hates more than someone mispronouncing her name, take a look at some of the many times she’s had to correct everyone. Subscribe for more exclusive clips, trailers and more. https://www.youtube.com/c/BritBox Get instant access to BritBox here: https://t.co/twQVv5eOG5 Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BritBox_US Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BritBoxUS/ Watch unmissable BBC and ITV shows, any time.
Mrs Bouquet fits the social profile of upwardly mobile Pakistanis and has become the basis of jokes and humour across Pakistan, a kind of unconscious inversion of the system by those feeling demeaned on account of being reduced to “villager” status fully cognisant of the word’s negative social connotations in their own societies (“pindu”). Likewise, the performative aspect of originating from a city continues to owe a lot to the insecurities and anxieties of a people who can’t quite shrug off aspects of their former lives, notably the low-caste identities of ancestral forebears.
Pakistan is a young country unlike its older neighbour, India, but in its nearly 80 years of existence, it has been a curse for the ethnic and religious minorities forced within its borders. In the wake of partition and the displacement of 13 million people, life opportunities for India’s former Muslims have not improved but worsened. The whataboutery of detractors to this line of reasoning, pointing out similar ethnic and religious conflicts in India doesn’t detract from the argument at hand – Pakistan supposed to have been a haven for Hindustani Muslims (Indians) all the while its nationals fare worse than Muslims in India.
Decades of failed policies, promises and socioeconomic reforms have exposed the nature of the parasitic elite that runs the country. Its cities have haphazardly grown within our own lifetime and the old landed groups continue to recollect how members of the non-landed groups migrated into the new urban heartlands becoming our upwardly mobile citified Pakistanis. At the time of its birth in 1947, 93% of West and East Pakistan’s landscape constituted rural areas. The areas that became West Pakistan were some of the least developed areas of British India.
These memories are still accessible to people less amenable to the changing identities mindful of their own socio-economic problems. The adoption of Urdu as proof of one’s improved social status is proof of these anxieties as is moving to urban spaces; claiming a Muslim origin to an older nobility class despite one’s ancestors being ‘low caste Hindus’, stigmatising the ‘village (landed) Pakistanis’, who are now being accused of being of Hindu origin albeit high caste ones. The landed Pakistanis continue to have a sense of their downward mobility and are not reconciled with being demonised for Pakistan’s failures. Their collective power has been greatly depleted which holds equally true for the landed lineage-based identities in India. Successive Indian governments have tried to address the scourge of caste-based inequality in India, empowering and disempowering certain identities to bring about equality in the society.
A good thing no doubt some would say. I have my reservations for different reasons.
In Pakistan, the upwardly mobile Pakistanis adopt Persian and Arabic sounding names (the Mrs Bouquet proposition), claiming newer titles to accommodate a fabricated social status that doesn’t exist outside their groups. It includes a middle-class ‘salariat’ class doing government jobs acquired mostly through nepotism – the incumbents always recruit from their small circles. Like their Zamindar (landed-peers), the newly constituted Pakistanis lack a basic familiarity with the older social norms that had never existed in the way the new identities are being instrumentalised socially and politically, which returns me to the original theme of the current discussion. Citified Pakistanis and their counterparts, the landed Pakistanis, are imagining their purported “backgrounds” in terms of how they see themselves, which in the case of urban Pakistan is becoming fractious.
Citified Pakistanis are trying to approximate to respectable backgrounds outside Pakistan because they want social status, something their forebears acutely lacked. In the process, they become distant from the actual memories of their parents and grandparents who sadly put them on this trajectory to escape their own traumas. The incumbents end up creating boundaries with otherwise closely related people, as opposed to extolling the past glories of a forgotten age which strictly speaking belongs to the downwardly mobile groups, not necessarily connected with the people now claiming that status either.
Looking back now years later at the lively conversations between my peers about their respective backgrounds, I laugh with such ferocity that you would be forgiven for thinking that I was high on some illicit substance. Nothing can get you flying through the clouds like the convictions of well-intentioned people passionately arguing about realities they’ve never probed once. Of course, they get offended when you tell them, “…it’s just not true. Just because you say you’re a ‘Rajah’ doesn’t mean that your ancestors lived in the Taj Mahal. And no, you’re not connected with the Royal Rajput families of medieval India because you said you’re a Rajah. How can you be when you keep saying that your ancestors came from Afghanistan, or was it Turkey now? You really need to get your story straight. I have yet to read about the Rajput Dynasties of Afghanistan which apparently are connected with Pathans, which is another fictitious identity you claim when it suits your evolving persona!”
Talk about being confused. Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby comes to mind.
Clayton Bigsby, the World’s Only Black White Supremacist – Chappelle’s Show
A journalist profiles Clayton Bigsby, a prominent white supremacist who doesn’t know that he himself is black. (Contains strong language.) About Chappelle’s Show: It’s not just a show – it’s a social phenomenon. Dave Chappelle’s singular point of view is unleashed through a combination of stand-up bits and street-smart sketches.
Conventional wisdom is a terrible thing if you’ve never had the occasion or willingness to question what people are telling you. Popular anecdotes are worse. Take the claim that Rajeh sold out to the British, a favourite past time of those who want to flog this dead horse. What about the similar charge against the Jat? They too ‘sold out’ apparently, happily being recruited into the British Indian Army. Numerous Princely Rulers across the British Indian Empire came from Jat and Rajput backgrounds. Being unfamiliar with how these identities came about and how diverse the groups actually were leads to messy conclusions. Not all Jat are Jat in the way a universal Jat identity is imagined on the Punjab Plains and likewise not all Rajeh are connected with the Tribal Confederacies of Ancient India that historians speak of as ‘the Rajput’. This is a particular formation that belongs to a particular region and period of Indian history not necessarily connected with the hills and mountains of Jammu & Kashmir and contiguous areas. The ‘Rajah’ label means different things to different people and is being used by divergent groups not necessarily connected with the original progenitors of that identity (‘Rajput’). It is a complex history that is contested and, oftentimes, emotionally charged. It is really difficult to understand, the terrain is hard to map and no one knows for sure how the group identities emerged.
And this was what I was up against when I said to a friend, “please don’t call me a Choudhary or a Rajah because I don’t feel like one.” There was a subtext here that my readers won’t understand until they’ve had the misfortune of growing up in a caste-conscious, male-dominated, patriarchy that has no sense of actual documented history. Without exaggerating the problem attitudes have massively changed here in the UK amongst a generation with different anxieties and priorities. The caste system is more or less dead for British-born Azad Kashmiris, which is a good thing.
British Kashmiris are effortlessly merging into different communities, marrying into different backgrounds, developing a sense of the endless possibilities the Free World can offer them; democracy, genuine freedoms denied to millions of Pakistanis under the yoke of a military regime, unfettered human rights, real personal autonomy for women, (freedoms are not freedoms if you can’t exercise choice – not even dissent); a genuine outlet for their aspirations and creativity. But the pervasiveness of Pakistan’s caste system (the elephant in the room) greatly exaggerated by colonial officers still linger in their conversations.
We know nothing of that past. And it is evident in the conversations we have in private among like-minded peers who think they are experts on the social stratification of regions because they have access to outdated colonial literature, published more than a hundred years ago, positioning their own status through the false sentiments cited in the books. They are conflating authoritarian politics with ethnology, confusing social class with social climbing, instrumentalising British colonialism as the archenemy of Islam, a supposedly natural state of affairs before the chaos and devastation. The religion of my forebears, (before I’m accused of being anti-Islam or an Indian agent), came into the frontiers of India through an invading army according to the ancient Arabs writing this history. The first Muslims were invaders and not liberators and I say this as someone of a Muslim landed background. The net result of being ignorant and then subsequently emotional and defensive because ‘strength’ eludes the fantasists, are deep seated insecurities about one’s place in the world. So many times I’ve had to say, “listen you idiots, there’s no such thing as a “Kammi” or lowborn caste, your mate is not ‘cheap’ or ‘miserly’ because he happens to come from the barber or labouring caste.
“What you’re saying is untrue and deeply racist! First learn how the words Ashraf and Ajlaf emerged before you offload the vocabulary into your new social settings because you chanced upon a colonial text.”
Ironically, upward mobility of the “low castes” is behind the new identities and it is not merely about getting ahead in life, as it is about escaping social stigma – the actual memories being suppressed – hence, the emergence of the ‘citified Pakistani’ – a deeply flawed and confused personality. The people doing the hating are overcompensating to belong to a nobler origin when they try to demean others in the hope of solidifying their social boundaries, proof that they were never of humble stock which they were all along.
It is a very different social and economic dynamic to downward mobility, the real story of the real Rajeh and the real Choudhary of the Western Himalaya, landed groups linked with patronage and not caste identities. The Western Himalaya was a place of refuge for Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and not a place of origin, or at least those connected with this documented past, a small number of identities connected with an old nobility class outside the region who refuse to shed their memories in order to get ahead in life by demeaning and degrading marginalised groups. The scions of this history ended up in various parts of the Western Himalaya – the mountains – because of conflict and war usually as vanquished tribes merging into the existing networks. The indigenous rulers, otherwise of less prestigious landed backgrounds, and their subjects took pity on them because of their own sense of suffering.
The refugees were exiled from more powerful regions, memories that continue to be passed down throughout the generations. I have been exploring this history for more than a decade now and it is at complete variance with the narratives being churned out on Pakistani websites and YouTube channels, Pakistani-Indian forums and blogs, that want to degrade the linear descendants of this past oddly by people claiming to come from the same backgrounds which begs the question, who is really behind the political propaganda? Nobilities are almost always linked with fictive lineages linked with the exercise of power and not socioeconomics which is proof of upward mobility (‘the rags to riches’ storyline), something lost on social aspirants who assume the role of historian when trying to reinvent their pasts.
The term ‘Kammi’ for identities outside this particular history is pejorative and offensive. It can mean “lowborn”, “low-caste”, “of low social status“, “peasant”, “of no independent means (lacking lands) linked with patronage” . The Arabic equivalent is “Ajlaf” which implies the same thing. Both terms capture the deeply dehumanising idea that people who belong to stigmatised backgrounds, the non-landed occupational castes, are somehow “less refined” or “gracious” in their dispositional habits and traits because they are bereft of resources and civility, “faqid ul-shay la u’ti”, to borrow an Arabic saying.
Just imagine for one moment someone arguing such a point displaying the projected traits, attending charitable functions because food will be served? Or someone paying for a buffet meal insisting that he eat everything in the restaurant because it costs a measly £20 or £30? Imagine for one moment “a self-appointed elite” amongst its circle, behaving sheepishly around others whilst claiming to have descended from ancient rulers with no genuine social status outside the one ascribed to themselves? You would hardly think this behaviour reflective of refined traits genetically inherited from a nobility class that built huge palaces which are still visited today by millions of tourists? The very memories we speak of, painfully.
If someone has anxieties paying the fee to enter such a venue, what’s the likelihood of the person descending from the people being celebrated? Norms that are celebrated are celebrated because they are valuable (valued = values). In my mind such behaviour is what is meant by the term cognitive dissonance. According to the theory, a person whose beliefs are inconsistent with his or her behaviour exhibits dissonance. He or she is other than what is being claimed. This would be akin to immigrant Muslims insisting on eating halal (permitted) foods and refraining from haram (prohibited) acts in non-Muslim societies – as the cost of their identity, whilst accruing haram income through impermissible (shar’i) professions, trades and criminal behaviour. In the Islamic ethical system the means must always justify the ends. They then donate some of the proceeds of their illicit activities to the construction of Mosques, ‘sadaqa’ (charity) being the motivating factor, they tell others. Means must always justify the ends, inconsistencies around this norm would not be permitted. It is precisely an example of cognitive dissonance, the acts in question do not flow from the values and core beliefs embodied in the celebrated identity.
There is a disconnect. The identity is not linked with values or convictions but a performance of what is deemed valuable to others.
To say someone is “cheap” or “lowborn” because of questionable traits, whilst the enlightened protagonist hides his favourite sweets, not sharing them out eagerly accumulating a stockpile from the largess of others, claiming to be highborn, is dissonance – apologies for the crude metaphors. Constantly being entertained at someone’s expense, turning up at someone’s residence to hang out with “equals”, would not have put you in good stead with the old nobility class. Aside from issues around lineage claims, the old groups knew who was who.
The Rajah and Choudhary of the past belonged to an established patronage network with a complex system of investiture both symbolic and material. We are speaking of honorific titles for people connected to potentates who were acutely aware of their vulnerabilities. They are not the residue of a distant primordial origin greatly imagined by upwardly mobile Pakistanis inventing their pasts and then blaming village Pakistanis for their society’s woes. The old feudatories were linked to a nobility class on the basis of military or tax collecting services (reciprocation) rendered to the overlords. There were of course many other functions that included a literate class of governors. The titles varied. Sometimes, they were dropped in exchange of other titles. The more a nobleman (nawab) surpassed his competitors, the weightier his title. A particularly ambitious Rajah would be awarded more land as he pushed the frontier of his master’s realm into the lands of enemies. The larger his landed estate the greater his social prestige, all of which was in lieu of cash payments. For obvious reasons the King wasn’t handing out salaries to his Feudatories with accompanying P60s and so land had a special significance in the minds of the people living during this period.
Not only was it a source of income, it proved who the nobility class were.
The situation was fluid and patrons would demote their clients often. Wars were a liability for existing feudatories required to fight with their men or tribally-linked mercenaries whenever the Emperor summoned them. With limited prospects for booty, a troubling proposition in its own right, (humans were being enslaved during a period of history that normalised chattel slavery), most chiefs were reluctant to heed the call “get ready for war!” Ask any modern General, he’d tell you war is horrible and death-bestowing. Ambitious people are usually in the business of living and not dying. It’s usually self-appointed patriots who never do the fighting, their own sons and daughters comfortably lodged at boarding school, eager to send the sons of the poor into battle because the lives of the latter are expendable.
“Fight for Queen and Country!” “Fight for your honour”.
It is always the naive and impressionable who fall for propaganda to quell some deep disquiet in their own persons – akin perhaps to the upwardly mobile looking to reinvent themselves because they feel ashamed of their past, “their village parents and socially backward grandparents”. Political or ideological manipulation of such insecurities isn’t just a racial or religious supremacist problem, it’s a global problem. The people engaged in war-talk rarely venture into the death-bestowing arenas they worship. Casualties and fatalities – usually women and children, are always collateral to the actual firebrands spearheading the patriotic acts of national glory. The hyper-masculinity on display is a performative group identity and not a lived experience of suffering, it’s borne of insecurities and anxieties.
Think of it this way, why would people with money sing about money? Why would HipHop rappers sing about women, wealth and fame – of being strong and independent, if there wasn’t an insecurity on account of a past we should all find disturbing? And what is the identity of the people who buy into such narratives, feeling that they too can occupy a similar space? The upwardly mobile of otherwise impoverished backgrounds, whether it is in the realm of fashion, media, social status or some other illusory plane, become receptive audiences and can approximate to the new narratives.
The elites of colonial India weren’t dissimilar to elites in any other part of the ancient world, where we have documented history. They belonged to lineage based groups, what historians and anthropologists call fictive lineages borne of very old patronage networks linked with the actual exercise of power. They could separate the rhetoric of their propaganda from actual priorities especially in life and death situations. And they weren’t deluded by hype. The power-structure could and did change, new aspirants would enter the patronage networks adding themselves to the older fictive lineages for legitimacy purposes, others would be ejected from it by having their heads chopped off. It was brutal.
Then there was the old age problem of sibling and family rivalries, bitterness and resentment: brothers trying to topple brothers: nephews trying to undermine uncles: ambitious rivals jostling for position, whilst others watched on sneakily – “like a fox” from the sidelines to take advantage of the internal chaos. The old nobility would chastise themselves for allowing themselves to be played by the “pretenders”. This is a system that has been documented long before the colonialists started to write the books and then quote the pages. Whenever we speak of the clan based tribes of a lineage system in our ancestral regions, we are speaking about a particular entente and not necessarily a caste identity rooted in North India purportedly dividing millions of people into a four-fold idealised scheme of castes with corresponding notions of ritual purity. Unlike the Muslim Caste System which distinguishes between landed and non-landed groups linked with fictive lineages (the Ashraf), the Hindu caste system operates out of a different social and cultural ecology not necessarily linked with migrations, but similarly exaggerated by people now claiming to be Brahmans.
What is today Jammu & Kashmir, or at least the south western regions of Kashmir State and the neighbouring regions, were predominately Buddhist areas and not the locus of a Hindu group consciousness which emerges in documented history centuries later. When the invading Muslims, whether as Arabs of the 8th century CE or Persian speaking Turks of the 11th century CE, first encountered the region which incidentally included the Buddhist region of Afghanistan (the supposed graveyard of Empires) and other areas of Central Asia, they spoke of Buddhists and not Hindus. The Invading Muslims co-opted lots of Buddhist converts to Islam within their ranks and when speaking of the Jat they would refer to them as Buddhists and this can be extracted from 9th century Arab texts written during the Abbasid Period. The idea that the Muslim Jat converted to Islam during the 17th century following agitations against the Mughal is a reliance on colonially produced texts of the British Indian Empire, ideas that are still in circulation amongst Indian and Pakistani circles usually to demean and degrade the Jat (who supposedly escaped their “low caste” by becoming militarised and taking up arms against the Mughals).
The New Brahmans
I’ve often heard from individuals purporting descent claims to Kashmir making ahistorical and self-affirming claims about their ‘Kashmiri backgrounds’ not realising that they are imagining the past from the vantage of occupational caste anxieties. The overwhelming majority originate from the Punjab Plains and not the regions of Jammu & Kashmir (the site of contested identities because of political occupation), self-affirming Kashmiris from mainland Pakistan Punjab claiming to have originated from the real Kashmir in India on the strength of an adopted surname which should not be confused with Azad Kashmir’s (caste) Kashmiris who, I remind my readers, are indeed Kashmiris on account of originating from erstwhile Kashmir State! That’s how geo-ascriptions work across the world except when detractors try to deny the connections for political reasons.
By the sheer ingenuity of adding a surname to their birth names, Punjabi Caste Kashmiris have miraculously become Brahmans, “because every primordial Kashmiri was a Brahman before he was forcibly converted to Islam” according to the Hindu Nationalists pushing this propaganda. They are aware of the anxieties of the Punjabi Caste Kashmiris and the stigma of the Muslim Caste System that revolves around landed backgrounds and lineage claims but not the ritual purity of Brahmans.
To redeem my brothers and sisters who are obsessed about returning themselves as ‘Kashmiris by Zaat’ (caste essence), I would like to point out to them that Hindus have always been a minority amongst Kashmiris, that’s just a fact of history mindful of how actual identities emerge and are subsequently documented. The old books exist and they should read how Kashmiris emerged in the full light of colonial history when the castes were being documented (‘constructed’) by colonial officers dividing and ruling their native Indian subjects. One cannot divorce the emerging Kashmiri caste backgrounds from the existence of the Princely State of Kashmir. Without the ongoing existence of the Kashmir Conflict, the Kashmiri caste identities would have become redundant. The fact that no one speaks of the ‘Punjabi Caste’, the ‘Gujarati Caste’ or the ‘Bengali Caste’ shouldn’t be lost on any of us when we’re being told of the existence of the ‘Kashmiri Caste’.
Be that as it may, the term Kashmiri was first invoked during colonial times for an imagined sub-section of a wider group of people from Jammu and Kashmir State. When Kashmir became the land of Kashmiris, it implied “Muslim” and not “Hindu” and usually people who were poor, landless and of occupational backgrounds – ‘the low castes’ (the Ajlaf). There’s a reason why Hindu Pandits were keen to add the word Pandit to Kashmiri giving us the Kashmiri Pandit alternative.
If you’re a Kashmiri on account of your identity being simply taken for granted because that’s just how you’re identified, why would you be keen to add the word “Pandit” to your name? And to prove what social status exactly?
Kashmiris were of course Muslims. When the Kashmiri group identity was invoked historically, the persons saying this were saying that they were Muslims without stating this fact of association. It’s akin to someone saying he or she is Turk, which would then lead a Turkish Christian to point out that he or she is actually of Christian faith because Turks are of course Muslims. In Europe, ‘to turn Turk’ historically implied someone who had converted to Islam. Think of the indigenous ‘white British’ and the ‘English’ categories, and how ‘Black Britons’ and ‘Muslim Britons’ use the respective juxtapositions to affirm their layered group belonging to a geo-national ascription that pre-dated their membership into the group. This is the norm across the world and it is simply taken for granted on account of how power has been exercised historically impacting diverse regions and peoples. No group identity is singular – the ethno-nationalist position.
Ethnonationalists in India, the Hindu Nationalists, are telling everyone on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their domestic ‘News’ audiences and even Wikipedia that Hindus have always been the “real ethnic Kashmiris” since the beginning of the human race. Muslims are thus imposters to a Kashmiri identity apparently because they were forcibly converted to Islam. Real Kashmiris are thus of Hindu origin. The claim is simply not borne out by any historical evidence. It is nothing more than propaganda that is adopted by upwardly mobile Punjabis claiming to be Kashmiris beefing with Azad Kashmiris unaware that they are pawns in another people’s conflict. The impetus is linked with anxieties of wanting to belong to a more respectable caste background (“Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein: India’s integral part – 86000 thousand square miles of territory”) than the one ascribed by the wider mainstream society. Caste Kashmiris in the Punjab are linked with occupational castes and not landed backgrounds.
Punjabi Caste Kashmiris in Pakistan frequently deploy the Hindu Nationalistic claims unaware of what is really being argued, namely Kashmir belongs to Hindus and not Pakistan because the real Kashmiris were Hindus, the descendants of Kashyap Rishi, a Hindu sage, who apparently has Brahman descendants in Tamil Nadu too, which means a random person in South India can lay claims to Kashmir’s Territory on account of a fictitious Hindu origin myth but not the majority Muslims (and non-Muslims) living in Kashmir on the basis of a presiding reality of suffering. The desperation is such that even genetic data of commercial companies is deployed to somehow disconnect Kashmiris from Kashmir all across the State by arguing that their ancestors really came from South India tens of thousands of years ago! These are not Indian machinations but Pakistani ones, which makes the sense of betrayal even worse especially when the latter than claim to be Azad Kashmiris doing Pakistan’s bidding.
The sheer cynicism of the false narrative is apparent to anyone who understands political propaganda masquerading as lineage and ancestry; caste, religion, ethnicity, etc. Fortunately, we do have genomic data to prove and disprove which people descend from which people (clusters) but even these scientific claims are misrepresented by nationalist interests weaponising false narratives through the mystique of DNA. It is only a matter of time the authoritarian ideologues will be purchasing the rights to ‘genomic research’; I therefore have my reservations about the usefulness of using genomic data against fascist-type narratives. If authoritarian regimes can take over democratic electoral systems in the name of populism whilst eroding democratic traditions, what stops them from taking over commercial DNA companies and then determining the correct labels for ‘genetic clusters’ in accordance with their ethno-nationalistic worldview? The fact that Pakistan has ‘murdered history’ according to professional Pakistani historians like Kurshid Kamal Aziz doesn’t bode well for the death of democracy and truth in India.
One merely need visit Quora, Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the other interactive digital spaces dominated by the anonymous accounts to see the journey of false narratives. Pakistan’s ISI are currently trying to manipulate “real Kashmiris” of Pakistan Punjab Province against the “false Kashmiris” of Azad Kashmir. More than 70% of Azad Kashmir’s native population want Kashmir to become an independent state, not just from India but Pakistan too. Contrary to what Pakistan preaches at the United Nations, Azad Kashmir’s indigenous Independence Movement is diametrically opposed to Pakistan. There is seething hatred in the region for Pakistan.
Younger elements of the Azad Kashmir population, sick and tired of the brutality and hypocrisy of Pakistan’s exploitative practises in Azad Kashmir are now silently moving in the direction of a secular and democratic India. They accept Kashmir will never become independent, not least because Pakistan had always undermined the cause of Kashmir having betrayed the Indian Kashmiris. By embodying this position, they are not seeking alliances with the ruling Hindu Nationalists in New Delhi who have been striping Muslims of their Indian citizenship in places like Assam “because the Muslims are not Assamese but Bangladeshis” – the modus vivendi of ethno-nationalism; the hatred of the “other”. Both Hindu Nationalists and the Pakistan Army work together against Muslims fighting for independence.
Moreover, Punjab’s Caste Kashmiris buying into the confirmation bias of a Pakistan nationalistic identity that weds Kashmiris with Pakistan are unaware of the sensibilities behind the politically constructed memories. There was no idyllic Kashmiri Identity in the Kashmir Vale before their “ancestors” ended up on the Plains of the Punjab as refugees from the real Kashmir. Aside from not being connected to a Kashmir heritage through linear descent, there was no Brahman priestly order of any sizeable stature in the region (areas converted to Islam) that existed centuries earlier on the outskirts of an established Brahmanical order.
One can extract this history from the works of highly reputable Indian scholars who are being chastised as being Marxists, Liberals and Muslims. In ancient times if history counts for anything, the Gandhara and Kamboja regions where modern-day Kashmir is spatially located was described by Brahman writers as ‘Mleccha-desh‘, “the land of the barbarians/foreigners”. The area was home to a thriving Buddhist heritage that was considered outside the pale of the ‘twice-born’ upper-caste Hindus in what is today North India. I am speaking of a documented timeline that spans a thousand years.
In North India, the people subscribing to brahmanical norms were subject to the patronage of Kshattriya rulers only later identified as the ancestors of the Rajput. The Buddhists of the region before Islam swept across the region after 1000 CE didn’t care an iota for the self-affirming prejudice of Brahmans and this could be seen in the writings of the latter. The Buddhists were far more affluent than their Brahman rivals courtesy of the Silk Road.
The region’s proximity to Central and West Asia, (without obsessing about race theories – a recurring theme on Pakistani internet forums; the claims are beyond cringe), meant that it was really a frontier to the Indo-Gangetic Plains of North India. It was understandably the first region to be settled by foreigners if indeed we imagine this vast expanse to be part of a primordial India which it wasn’t.
The India of the Hindu Nationalists is a fiction. It is akin to the Islamist fiction of the Muslim World.
It is akin to the fiction of ‘White Power’ of the White Supremacist imagination unaware that centuries before the Federal Courts conferred proprietary rights onto their supposedly ‘white ancestors’, the Irish, the Jews, Eastern and Southern European immigrants to America, were not considered white. They belonged to a non-white outgroup and were discriminated accordingly by the newly constituted WASPS, ‘White Anglo Saxon Protestants’, on account of not being ‘really white’ like the original settler population.
We are dealing with imaginary group identities that are constantly reimagined and realligned throughout the course of their existence. In this respect, I recall Will Self’s claim just after Brexit that not all “Brexiteers are racists but all racists are Brexiteers” to capture some of the ironies behind group identities posturing through anxieties. Some people exclude others from a shared group belonging not because they are separate groups but because they want to police the group boundaries to monopolise on economic resources for themselves.
We are dealing with anxieties and insecurities and not primordial ethnic or racial identities. The ambitious upwardly mobile always join the dominant groups (the majority) because they feel they have been given a stake in the new world order. History tells us a different story. It is the primordial outsiders who eventually get persecuted. Alliances based on such paradigms prove fickle and one merely need speak to Israel’s Eastern European and Arab Jews to appreciate the history I recount in this post.
Will Self and Dreda Say Mitchell debate Brexit
In a heated exchange authors Will Self and Dreda Say Mitchell clash over the implications for Labour supporters following Brexit.
The populations that settled the frontier regions of ancient India according to Western accounts were originally nomadic offering little deference to Brahmanical norms of ritual purity. The nomads consumed meat, fraternised freely with different people including women and worshipped a pantheon of gods, foreign, native, or otherwise. In time, they became sedentary, adopted the Buddhist faith and some became Hindu moving eastwards onto the Plains of India to join the emerging Aryan Confederacies there. But not in the way we would imagine a modern-day Hindu ethno-nationalistic identity.
The Hinduism of the past – a highly sophisticated system of thought with a beauty of its own – was a lot more fluid, more flexible than what it is today, outside the ideological rumblings of Hindu Nationalism, a political project that has usurped a Hindu identity, a bit like Islamo-fascists in Pakistan (Islamists) claiming to be Muslims. When we read the writings of the ancient Hindu Sages, we are struck by their enormous wisdom and their complete loathing for material power. The chap credited for founding Hindu Nationalism or Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was an atheist and quite a formidable intellectual to be fair to him.
The chap credited with creating Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was also in all likelihood an atheist to capture the ironies of political ideologues speaking in defence of “persecuted minorities”. The parallel between Jinnah and Savarkar stops with disbelief in God though. Unlike Savarkar who was openly atheist, Jinnah was a closet atheist and the grandson of a Hindu convert to Islam, colluding with British India to get his Pakistan. Savarkar was imprisoned on numerous occasions because of his beliefs, which is a good indicator of which interests approximate to power structures and which interests seek to overthrow them. Curiously Savarkar belonged to the landed backgrounds, whilst Jinnah belonged to the occupational castes to appreciate how the colonial enforcers of British India played populations against one another, empowering native clients against the older identities.
It is a fact of history that Pakistan was created by colonial Britain and yet we have ideological Pakistanis speaking ill of colonialism including those freely choosing to reside in Britain unperturbed by the hypocrisy of supporting Pakistan’s divisive ‘Two Nations Theory’. If Pakistanis couldn’t live alongside Hindus in India – their own kin – because they comprised two separate Civilisations having converted to the faith of Islam, according to Jinnah, the descendant of a “low-caste” family of Hindu fishermen, on what basis are upwardly mobile Pakistanis freely choosing to co-exist with non-Muslims in Britain?
This too is an example of cognitive dissonance. It reeks of hypocrisy and an unreflecting type of tribalism, the definition of tribal behaviours. It is the murder of history for people trying to get ahead in life with no sense of history and the bonds they destroy for others, poisoning the pond of reconciliation.
With the upheavals in our region and neighbouring areas, a power-structure emerged rooted in the patronage network I’ve described. It was power that defined privilege and status and not necessarily the sacred vocation of Brahman priests, who were keen to promote themselves to the top of their own caste-system, or at least this is how colonial writers described their behaviour. I’m more concerned with how groups were represented, (narrative-creation) as opposed to how actual power is exercised by elites; aspirants of social status usually approximate to the dominant groups. The rulers had real power, the Brahmans were subservient to the rulers and at the mercy of their largess. Although ‘lower-castes’ existed within the region (non-lineage based), what the British called ‘occupational groups’ courtesy of their own prejudices, there was little interconnection between brahmanical norms and an “untouchable class” of “outcasts”. The word “outcast” is related to the Portuguese word “caste” to appreciate how words are used in everyday speech mindful of the people who take such words for granted, unaware of how the corresponding ideas emerged in the first place.
The new Brahmans are unaware of how Kashmiri occupational castes (non-clans/tribes, i.e., non lineage-based) were treated in the wider region even in recent decades. I encourage them to speak to their grandparents, the majority of whom were not Brahmin and whose forbears neither identified as ‘Bhat’, ‘Dar’, ‘Khawajah’, ‘Mir’, etc., – terms wrongly associated with the social stratification that emerged in the Vale precisely because of unjust social norms and how the castes were categorised by colonial officers.
As I’ve already explained, the invented caste titles projected through surnames were adopted later by “descendants” projecting backwards and imply different things to different people. They carry different levels of social prestige for unrelated groups not necessarily connected with the landed-backgrounds. Crucially, they are not the exclusive property of “ethnic Kashmiris” with supposed roots in the Vale of Kashmir, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, let alone the property of the landless refugees settling on the Indian Plains because of famine and poverty. Many groups outside the Vale use these titles without necessarily making claims to a primordial Kashmiri background. One will come across ethnic Gujarati Bhats, ethnic Punjabi Dars and ethnic Sindhi Mirs, belonging to a variety of different landed and occupational caste backgrounds.
As a side note, some ethnic Kashmiris converted to Sikhism but because Sikhism is connected with the Punjab it as if every Kashmiri Sikh migrated to the Vale from the direction of the Punjab and not the other way round. I cite the Sikh example to show how false narratives emerge around ethnicity and conversions, instrumentalised later to include and exclude populations for political reasons.
The overwhelming majority of caste-Kashmiris in the Punjab were being identified as Kashmiris (i.e., Kashmiri by “zaat”/caste as separate to nation, “qaum”) by a power structure creating the categories and then subsequently discriminating the newly constituted identities. It was officials who ended up inadvertently creating the caste Kashmiri identity for Muslims and not an ethnicity rooted in a particular cultural ecology. The majority of the outbound Kashmiris were not from the Vale of Kashmir in the sense of originating from a boxed-off and delineated ethnic.
“Kashmiris” came from all over the Jammu & Kashmir State with large numbers coming from the Chibhal region – as it was called during the famines, a Pahari speaking area of Jammu & Kashmir. Azad Kashmir is located entirely in this space but even this innocuous fact of history is being contested by Pakistan and India who want to locate Azad Kashmir in some primordial Punjab region and not the contemporaneous Jammu & Kashmir region. The Pahari speaking region of erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir is situated on tectonic plates that have caused numerous earthquakes in the region, the Muzaffarabad earthquake being the most recent in 2005 leading to destruction of settlements and population dispersals.
“Kashmiri” refugees were fleeing famine ending up on the Plains of Panjab and further afield in India precisely because they were landless and poor – nothing tied them to land from which social status was traditionally accrued and ascribed. They were treated poorly on the Plains because of being landless, “Kammi”, “Ajlaf”, (“Arzal”) , to use the corresponding and dehumanising labels. It was much easier for the census takers in Kashmir State and British Punjab Province to subsume the outbound migrants within a generic “Muslim Kashmiri” category. The census compilers explicitly mentioned that the majority of “Kashmiris” returned in Punjab and Kashmir State censuses were actually from Chibhal and not the Vale of Kashmir. These official writings predate the Kashmir Conflict to appreciate the skewed narratives one encounters on Wikipedia about ethnic Kashmiris in Punjab and oddly Azad Kashmir from Punjab.
Who exactly are “Kashmiris” in Azad Kashmir if not the 4.5 million Azad Kashmiris? More pertinently, who exactly is writing the Wikipedia posts on Azad Kashmiris? Who is producing the social media posts and why are the handlers of the accounts almost always anonymous with the same tell tale signs? For instance, the English does not sound native to the UK pointing to political interests operating outside the UK (Pakistan?) whilst targeting British Azad Kashmiris on the basis of intellectually dishonest ethnic narratives.
Outside Kashmir State, Kashmiris were treated poorly on account of being landless. It was because of colonial practises that rendered an incredibly diverse population from the Western Himalaya from numerous Valleys, “Kashmiri”, and not because of a primordial ethnic “Kashmiri” identity that had supposedly existed for thousands of years. In fact, there was no ethnic Kashmiri language associated with the ancient Rulers of Kashmir – that honour belonged to Sanskrit and Persian. The fact that I have to say ethnic primordialism is a ludicrous idea on the grounds that ethnic identities are social constructs linked with nation states, just shows how far simplistic ideas can spread in communities with low levels of human capital. Again, I make this observation analytically and not pejoratively.
To reiterate, ethnic group identities are modern-day inventions. They are fictions when linked with some inherent ethnic truth that tells us something about people outside their agency; they are the product of power structures and their legacies. No one with a modicum of intellectual integrity and common decency would deny this fact except for the ethno-nationalists policing identities – that’s the academic consensus across the world even in places like China and Russia.
Kashmir State was Territory, not Ethnicity
Before the emergence of Kashmir State as 85, 86000 square miles of territory, the landmass traditionally connected with the idea of Kashmir (a place on a manmade map) was much larger than the exponentially smaller Vale of Kashmir (2500 square miles) now imagined as the exclusive locus of an ethnic identity called Kashur. The Kashmir of Antiquity was larger than the Kashmir of the ethnic Kashmiri imagination and it had historically extended westwards into the Pothohar Uplands and the Hazara Hills of today’s Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province. It had expanded and contracted throughout its existence like lots of territorial polities.
The Mughals at the time of Akbar reconfigured areas traditionally associated with Kashmir and added them to their expansive Lahore Province but some of Ancient Kashmir’s adjacent areas remained connected with the Mughal’s Kashmir Subah (Province). These areas continue to be part of Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Jibhal or Chibhal is one such example, having been ruled for a short time by the Sikh Confederacy. Sikh Rulers had their own definitions of the Punjab which, revealingly, excluded the Pothohar Uplands and the Hazara Hills from a Planes-centric definition of what constituted Punjab proper.
The Panjab definition was not merely geographic linked with ambiguous 5 rivers but a descriptive term. It implied flat fertile lands situated in Central-Eastern Punjab, conterminous with the Alluvial Plain that goes by the same name geologically speaking. In the strictest possible sense of the term, the Punjab celebrated by Panjabi writers comprised a geological plain from which imagery derives sentiments of a rural Punjabi identity rooted in the idea of farming and lush harvests. This definition excluded what is today Azad Kashmir (dissected countryside) from notions of a Punjab-wide identity except flat fertile lands. The fact of having fertile lands in Azad Kashmir does not make Azad Kashmiris “Punjabis” – that’s an extrapolation of an origin myth.
Eventually, the term Punjab geographically speaking became conterminous with the idea of the Lahore Province as it expanded to include the old Mughal Multan Province and many other areas. It continued to exclude areas of Jammu & Kashmir State. Moreover, Western Punjab, (I speak of the British Punjab Province), was never really considered part of Punjab Proper to use the correct colonial terminology. Throughout their writings, colonial officers would constantly distinguish between the Punjab Province that included Rawalpindi Division or the Salt Range Tract and the Punjab Proper
But that’s just the nature of changing power-dynamics and how identity-labels subsequently emerge and then change again. It has nothing to do with what dialect a person speaks, which has become an Indian-Pakistani ploy to render Azad Kashmiris “Punjabis” to delegitimise them as stakeholders of the Kashmir Conflict. Some Azad Kashmiris do extol a Punjabi identity on account of the Pakistani circles they move in, thinking they’re Punjabis because they listen to Punjabi music. Revealingly, they also listen to Hindi and Urdu songs but curiously don’t go about their business self-affirming as Hindustanis, or Urdudan, which just shows the illogicality of Occupation Narratives. When forced to pay bribes at Islamabad Airport, their Urdu and Panjabi identities seldom proffer them any relief if we ever needed reminding of the incoherence of identity politics.
In fact, some dam affectees of Mirpur’s Mangla Dam in 1967 were resettled in the Punjab Province contrary to their wishes, where they complained about discrimination from “Punjabis”. The “Kashmiris” as they were identified by the natives had none of the supposed “ethnic” dividends that came by way of a shared Punjabi group belonging. Of course, socioeconomic factors have always overridden ethnic delusions irrespective of the propaganda pushed by Occupying Powers.
Rich Kashmiris will always be treated better than poor Kashmiris in the Punjab.
Rich Punjabis will always be treated better than poor Punjabis in Kashmir.
On the Plains of India with little material prosperity and non-landed connections, refugees from Kashmir State worked as tailors, barbers, shoemakers, labourers, etc., and this had enormous implications for how they were perceived by the landed groups who had traditionally dominated the Plains. Colonial writers described the various colonies associated with Kashmir’s refugees (“the Kashmiris”) disparagingly, calling them “scavengers” – hardly the hallmarks of a Brahman identity!
I speak of painful historical realities that are attested facts in the literature and by which term I do not imply the wishful thinking of people with zero intellectual investiture in the ideas they espouse courtesy of Wikipedia and Quora posts spreading disinformation about real and false Kashmiris. Experts studying prejudice and stigma and the political instrumentalisation of negative sterotypes are aware of the psychological tendencies involved in the process. They are also aware of how corrupt ruling interests try to manipulate societies with reduced levels of human capital by empowering native clients to do their bidding, giving legitimacy to the Occupation Narratives.
It is at this point that I would like to speak up for the bona fide Kashmiris in the Punjab, whether as caste-Kashmiris, landed-Kashmiris or ethnic Kashmiris, who never speak about real or false Kashmiris because they understand how the word emerged within the context of injustice, oppression and cruelty. Genuine Kashmiris have always supported the right of Kashmiris to decide their own future on their own terms, which means independence (Azadi) for millions of Occupied People out of a deep sense of shared suffering. Such attitudes contrast sharply with India and Pakistan’s narrative on Kashmir.
Zamindari and the Patronage Network
Owning land was a distinguishing social marker in this system, it symbolised something more profound than possessing hectares and hectares of land. It was about patronage, proof that you were connected. The Zamindar, or the landed-nobility, would use the term to highlight this aspect of the network. The Mughals would use the term universally to describe feudatories that included Hindu Rajputs or those originally connected with the older identities. The Rajput were encouraged to convert to Islam and their descendants would drop their Singh titles for Khan, begrudgingly holding onto the Singh title as long as they could if they had been forced to convert through compulsion. At the instigation of the Mughals they would stop using the term Rajah and other related titles of this heritage. To illustrate hypothetically speaking, the formally Raja Chand Singh would be now described as Mirza or Mir Qamar Khan. Suraj Singh would become Shamas Khan. Different titles were also deployed. The Mughals preferred Persian-sounding titles as opposed to Indic ones. But as I said the system was incredibly fluid. Whenever Muslim rulers were ousted, the Hindu rulers would reassert themselves and the titles would change again.
Khan or Mir “so and so” would revert back to being called Rajah “so and so”.
Being a “Khan” is not proof of a Pathan background or more correctly speaking proof of a Pashtun or Pakhtun ethnic heritage. The fact that some “Pathans” maintain this today, aggregating the title for themselves just shows how far false narratives can spread within an unsuspecting population. The protagonists are unfamiliar with the actual history of Afghanistan, historically an ambiguous frontier between Iran and India that had always been an ethnically diverse place with a myriad of evolving social groups. Its poverty today on account of so much engineered conflict, one of the poorest countries on earth because of the insistence of the Free World to keep the Soviets out of the region, makes claiming an Afghan identity within the context of our region’s tribal structure a rather curious move.
The New Khans Vs the Old Khans
One comes across individuals emphatic that the original Khans were Pathans. The term Khan does not originate with the ethnic Pashtun speakers but has its origin in the folk nomenclature of the Mongols from whom Turkic groups adopted the title. The Mongols and Turks although separate groups shared the same Central Asian Steppes, the one pushing the other into the direction of the Iranian Plateau and further afield. The emerging Turkic groups adopted the Persian language after having converted to Islam, some of their number centuries later settled neighbouring regions. They eventually crossed the Khyber Pass to settle India and they began to use titles borne of this historical baggage. The great Mongol Genghis Khan was actually born Timujin. In the native language of his peers, ‘Chinggis Khagan’ simply meant ‘Ruler of the World’, the Persian equivalent being ‘Jahan-gir Khan’. The Indian Mughals having descended from a Turkic branch connected with Tamerlane where also descended from Genghis Khan on their maternal line, or at least this is how they presented themselves contrary to more recent claims that Babar, the founder of the Mughal Empire, was not a descendant of Genghis Khan.
It was clear by evoking descent from the “Great Timujin”, the Mughals were keen to connect themselves with an older lineage. They didn’t care that their alleged pagan ancestors had destroyed Baghdad’s Islamic heritage and wiped out Muslim populations everywhere. We are talking about the wholesale destruction of ancient cities, the murder of entire populations and mass rape of women and children. The Mongols would pile the skulls of their victims to make heaps of skulls out of a macabre desire to frighten opponents, or at least these were the sorts of eye witness testimonies we read from Arabic and Persian writers alive at the time.
None of this mattered for the claimants of a Mughal-Muslim identity in India ironically in the name of Zahir ul-Din Muhammad Babar, (1483 – 1530)! Babar despised the Mongals, making his aversion known in his writings. The wrongly identified Sultanat-e-Mughliya should have been identified Sultanat-e-Turkiya but for the fact that numerous rulers of Turkic backgrounds never identified as Turks either. Turk implied the common Turk (nomadic) and not Turks of respectable lineages like the Ottoman or the Seljuk. Pakistanis love romanticising this past from the perspective of a warped nationalism that connects “them” fictitiously with Muslim Rulers – the obsession of the cosmopolitan Pakistani, upwardly mobile, with no sense of Muslim history and the ordeals ordinary Muslims embodied. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the majority of Pakistanis descend from Hindus of non-landed backgrounds, whose forbears were murdered, raped and, at times, enslaved by the new Muslim rulers. The frontier regions of India, what is today modern-day Pakistan, were highly susceptible to the Muslim raid. Entire populations were ransacked and sold into chattel slavery but again this history is too painful and nuanced for people reinventing their pasts.
The Mughals wanted to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies and so the identity labels they used had a completely different meaning to the ones upwardly mobile people are using today. The feminine equivalent in the Persian language for ‘Khan’ is ‘Khanum’ (‘Khatun’), and was used as a title of nobility for women connected to this heritage. It’s similar to the Turkic term ‘Begum’, the female equivalent of ‘Beg’, (nobleman), which has become a popular surname for women outside this history. And yet one would rarely come across people arguing that the Khatun and Begums were of Pashtun or Turkic origin. This would be akin to someone arguing that the original Singh were Sikh males despite the title, a popular surname for Sikh males today, having originated centuries earlier before the birth of Guru Gobind Singh (died.1708 CE).
The Singh title is connected with India’s medieval Rajput houses and can be dated even earlier to the regional Kingdoms the Rajputs vanquished. The ancient Rajput were upper-caste Hindus in the Hindu Caste System. They did not simply convert to Islam but Sikhism and it was on account of Rajputs becoming Sikhs that the word Singh was conferred onto all Sikhs. The Sikhs wanted to create equality amongst their followers. Equality is deeply hardwired in the Sikh Scripture despite the failings of Sikhs to live up to this great and noble expectation. Sikhism is closely aligned to Sufism to understand the shared currents of humanism in both traditions.
The Colonial Ethnologist; Reinventing the Older Identities
Like previous rulers to India, English and then British merchants were integrated into the system through the patronage network. Successors of the Mughals awarded the English East India Company its own Jagir (estate). It was through the aegis of a Mughal Nawab that the Company first got a territorial stake in India. The English East Company started out in the early 1600s as an inoffensive trade mission but gradually morphed into an aggressive military presence with its own private armies comprised of Indian Sepoy (soldiers). Over the following decades and centuries, the East India Company moved from its coastal bases in the North East of the subcontinent to the North West finally overthrowing the last of the great regional bastions of power, the Sarkar-e-Khalsa, the Sikh Confederacy.
It was no idle boast of the Sikh Rulers whose feudatories included Muslims and Hindus (‘Rajeh’, ‘Choudharies’, ‘Sardars’, ‘Nawabs’, ‘Mirs’, ‘Khans’, etc)’ that they were a formidable fighting force and the British respected them for it. The East India Company tried to contain the expansionism of the Sikh State, what they would call the Lahore State. Had Sikh power not imploded after the demise of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, ‘the Jat’; others have ascribed a different background usually to disparage him, the regions in the North West of the subcontinent would not have fallen into British hands.
The entire landmass of the subcontinent with the help of Britain’s new feudatories, the Native Indian Princes, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, was firmly in check. But unlike previous rulers, the colonial Brits were far more resourceful and far-sighted. Inadvertently, they were in the business of statecraft (nation building), whilst extracting the resources of an India that was being exploited with the help of native clients. They wanted to buy and sell products that they had manufactured from the natural resources of the numerous regions they had colonised. They wanted to find global and local markets for their products and connect frontier lands with interior lands all over the place. They built an impressive railway system in India that gave their notion of India a coherent veneer. They liked to map and categorise their territories and ‘subject peoples’. They wanted to understand the cultures and dialects of “the natives”, many of whom didn’t see themselves as belonging to the same ethnic, religious or national fraternities. Colonial linguists produced groundbreaking research, the Linguistic Survey of India being a good example – human endeavours to be celebrated.
It was colonial linguists who wrote the first grammars on Indian languages. It was because of colonial policies that inadvertently made Urdu-Hindi, an amorphous Indic dialect of native North Indians spoken around the Delhi area and that had been gradually evolving into a literary standard, the official language of British India. Muslim and non-Muslim elites of India spoke Persian in their courts and not Hindi-Urdu, which was greatly influenced by Persian. Hindi-Urdu writers would emulate Persian writers. It was also colonial policies that rendered Punjabi, “a most barbarous tongue” not fit for sophisticated thought, demoted to the language of “uneducated village folk” to appreciate how bad ideas evolve in the first place and which constituencies become impacted by the corresponding ideas afterwards.
New Myths – “Race”, “Language” and the formation of “Social Class”
Pakistanis unfamiliar with Urdu’s history exaggerate the importance of Urdu to the emerging Muslim power-structure in British India. In this respect, native Urdu-speakers who used to be identified as Hindustanis were stigmatised in the Panjab by the Zamindar clans as being salaried personal, (officials from non-landed backgrounds – “the Salariat” or “Munshis” of the colonial British usually in junior and clerical roles.
The term Munshi carries connotations of social prestige in India but in Pakistan it conveys a different sense on account of the sentiments I explore here. It is used negatively. The material prosperity of the Salaried Class, what became the Punjabi Salariat, was not comparable to the wealth of the richer land barons who had little to no inclination to speak the language of the emerging administrative elite, Urdu-Hindi. The newly constituted Urdu speakers of Punjabi backgrounds, not to be conflated with native Urdu speakers whose identity has been problematised unfairly I believe by Punjabis ironically speaking Urdu natively, went on to assume power in Pakistan all the while the power and social prestige of the landed-groups was diminishing.
The colonial Brits were heavily influenced by the racial theories of the time and wanted to distinguish the different “races” of British India and the Princely States, whose ruling class they surmised were foreigners just like them. They had merely overthrown the most recent of the foreigners, the ‘Persian-speaking’ “turkic Mughal” of Mongol origin. They expended every effort to study the various races of India and their ethnologists would go on to argue that the Jat race was originally of Scythian racial-stock whilst the original Royal Rajput race closely related to the Jat race, descended from the Scythian, Kushan, the Hun, the Hephtalite and other Central Asian Hordes entering India around the turn of the 1st century, CE. Other ethnologists had different opinions. It was all pie in the sky theorising with a smattering of historical truth here and there massively exaggerated to fit colonial priorities.
Where the ethnographers were correct was in deducing that some of India’s ancient rulers which included Hindus and Buddhists, were also of foreign extraction like later Muslim (Delhi Sultanate) and Christian Rulers. Hindu Nationalists consider such a viewpoint politically blasphemous and for obvious reasons too. They contend that Ancient Indians are being written out of their actual history. If there is some truth to this claim and I suspect there may be, it hasn’t stopped Hindu Nationalists engaging in similar tactics against Independence Kashmiris, writing them out of Kashmir State by arguing Muslims in Indian Kashmir are the descendants of Muslim Invaders whilst those in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir are not even Kashmiris but Punjabis.
Colonial ethnologists and race theorists weren’t just researchers though. They were ideological pioneers. They not only documented and categorised the various tribes that had been submerged within the system but added their own veneer of interpretation and eventually fixed the identities in question, which is quite a remarkable feat if you think about it. As they went about researching the caste-groups, measuring heights, body weight, distances between eyes and nostrils, the length of a nose, skull sizes, intelligence, facial complexion or ‘hue’, even facial hair, they created all manner of bogus social constructs. In effect, they became the gatekeepers for entry into certain sectors of society – (these charts/tables still exist and one can see how the British aggregated India’s population into illusory group identities).
Crucially, there was no corresponding fascination with ethnic or Kashur speaking Kashmiris let alone Punjabi caste Kashmiris to highlight the plight of Jammu & Kashmir’s natives today. Notions of false racial pedigree that should help explain the reification of Kashmir because of the Indo-Pak Conflict show how Kashmir is being instrumentalised by interests that want to police the Kashmir Conflict to their advantage. One frequently comes across self-affirming Kashmiris in the UK who have a tendency to point out that the reason why “they don’t look like other Indians and Pakistanis” is because “they are from Kashmir…”, and not the Kashmir in Pakistan’s backyard which is contiguous with Western Eurasia ironically – where “fair skinned people” live, but the one in India’s backyard – where “dark skinned people” live. Fully conscious of the stigma reserved for Pakistan’s Azad Kashmiris, they are keen to remove themselves from any such identification to appreciate their upward journeys to social respectability blind to the cameras fixed on their faces and their entire families and communities – the entire world is observing their “scam” and their approximations to power.
In simulated chorus, the Indians and Pakistanis approximating to the same colonial priorities, retort with resentment and anger that they too do not look like “ordinary Indians and Pakistanis” (the dark skinned South Asians from South India; “the Dravidians” – Dravidas). I’m merely repeating what we all know of upwardly mobile people who instrumentalise their group identities with zero commitment to the corresponding narratives. Indians and Pakistanis could learn a lot from the African American Civil Rights Movement.
It was colonial officers who had the final say as to whether someone was ‘lowborn’ or ‘highborn’. In their minds they were simply documenting, objectively they would say, India’s native “races”. But they weren’t. They were race-engineering. They noted that the higher castes were generally fairer than the lower-caste Indians, generally taller and not much darker if not of the same complexion as the Mediterranean Races of Europe. Being fair skinned within this social context was not proof of nobility though, it merely confirmed the British in their claim that the higher castes were not originally native to India. It was surmised that the “lower castes and untouchables” were dark-skinned if not outright “black” like South Indians and sub-Saharan Africans. In effect, all manner of false narratives about Dravidians of South India were weaponised to stigmatise minority groups prejudicially. South Indians are no more darker or less fairer, shorter or taller, than populations in North India.
The stereotypes have sadly stuck and one can see how they’ve been reinvigorated in the works of writers to appreciate how far false narratives spread. One can see the colonial narrative unfolding through North Indian and Pakistani Media platforms, Urdu-Hindi speaking ones, to appreciate where the problems lie; Bollywood and Lollywood. The identities deployed are fictions, exposing what is really being sought, social respectability through approximation of more celebrated identities.
In the case of Afghanistan and Kashmir, the social aspirants are climbing a falsely imagined racial hierarchical ladder that has no basis in truth but has become entrenched in the Pakistani and Indian imagination. Outside paradigms of race, the same Afghan and Kashmiris being celebrated for their physical appearances are then problematised by the same Indians and Pakistanis for being socially backwards and regressive in their values.
In terms of how Pakistanis are presenting Azad Kashmiris “from the village”, I encourage my UK-based readers to YouTube some of the videos to appreciate how the ISI is instrumentalising a degraded Punjabi identity for Azad Kashmiris to disconnect them from the ‘jugular vein’ that Pakistan supposedly celebrates. The Azad Kashmiris on display impede approximation for British Azad Kashmiris scratching their heads unable to recognise the people in the videos – perplexed, questioning whether their grandparents came from this region. There are no females in the videos and the people are almost all wearing the ethnic dress of villagers taking pictures of ridiculous mansions of expatriate Kashmiris to thereby create social distance between British-born Azad Kashmiris and Azad Kashmiris – which is what Pakistan wants. The point I’m making is the ‘Kashmir’ that is being ‘constructed’ with its heavy dose of Pakistani Nationalism has no appeal for British Kashmiris, almost turning them off from the stories they are seeing.
I concede that every region on earth has its own stories, landscapes, and cultural artefacts that are celebrated through a particular aesthetic but these can sometimes come at a cost to further isolate the very interests trying to reach out to their diaspora for vital support. Pakistan wants to disconnect British Azad Kashmiris from Azad Kashmir in the same way they want to disconnect British Azad Kashmiris from Jammu & Kashmir. Pakistan’s Azad Kashmiris are disposable, something that seems to be lost on the “Pakistani influencers” doing Pakistan’s bidding, happily volunteering their services to impede the Kashmir Independence Movement despite claiming to represent “Azadi” (the freedom struggle).
These elements have largely succeeded and one frequently hears British born Kashmiris referring to the cause of independence as the prerogative of “freshies”, a disparaging term for immigrants from the subcontinent who cannot speak English and harass women “dressed in skimpy clothing”. I do not condone the language and am merely trying to explain the divisions that are being orchestrated against activists who have failed to tap into a massive support network that could challenge Pakistan’s asymmetrical warfare against pro-Independence Kashmiris.
My readers should understand the biased subtext behind the false narratives. British colonialism, an otherwise inventive enterprise in many redeeming ways did indeed project its racial superiority onto the natives of India and the rest of Europe but there was a willing audience for such ideas amongst the colonised – the native clients, whose descendants have become “woke” because they live in the UK, poking fun of the “white” ‘working class’ now being returned as ‘working people’.
Colonial race scientists similarly categorised the peoples of Europe through the same schema. They presented themselves as Nordic Aryans. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, had no say in how they were being identified. The Nordic Race was placed at the top of the Race Tree. Ironically, the term Arya or Aryan, belonged to Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian speaking populations and not Europeans. It implied nobility and not racial superiority linked with a particular migration of nomads originating from the BMAC who had already merged with Central Asian Steppe pastoralists. The race scientists plonked the Slavic populations of Eastern and Central Europe at the bottom of their race fictions with a particular loathing for Jews, subsumed within the Semitic Race – a non-European race apparently. In other words, European Jews were not considered European despite being no less European than any other European peoples.
Of the latter prejudice, some Renaissance writers claimed that the ingenuity of Western Europeans or those of original “Aryan” descent had been sapped by the introduction of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in Europe at the hands of a much inferior Semitic Race. Other writers did not share such sensibilities. Ironically, the theorists as Nordic Aryans viewed themselves to be racially superior to the Mediterranean Race all the while claiming the Roman-Greco heritage as part of the European classical heritage.
This did not stop ambitious Europeans – the racially ambiguous ‘whites’ as the classifications were emerging – from seeking work in the British Indian Empire and similarly being affected by the race theories of the time. “Up-starters”, that’s how the emerging “lowborn” Europeans in the colonies were described by the Establishment Elite in “the mother countries”, came from modest backgrounds and eventually merged into a European nobility in India. In their home countries they lacked the sense of social prestige that they had been aggregating for themselves in Britain’s most lucrative colony – British India. They were acutely aware of their lessor British status when they returned to the UK. This held equally true for North Americans, South Americans and Australians visiting Europe for the first time. It became abundantly clear to them that they were not really part of a European elite and in many ways they were being excluded from the societies they purportedly originated from. Although their wealth became an equaliser in terms of opportunities, it didn’t automatically remove social stigma on account of the older prejudices.
The idea of the Nabob, (from the Persian word “Nawab”, nobleman), has its origin in such dynamics. “Bob has become a Nabob dressed in Indian Regal Attire!” “He’s become a Lord of the Realm. He can buy himself a peerage courtesy of all the loot he has acquired through the East India Company”. The word loot is of Indian origin to appreciate who was “looting” what and from where. There was profound anxiety on the part of “old money” towards “new money” and the latter were stigmatised by the former.
In India, if a person was identified as a ‘Jat’,, ‘Rajput’ or say, ‘Yusufzai’, ‘Afridi’ – Pashtun because of Yusufzai roots; Sikh because of Jat roots; Panjabi or Rajasthani because of Rajput, Jat or Gujjar roots; this is how the actual priorities moved, he was permitted entry into the ‘martial race’ category. Entry was permitted into the British Indian Army on the basis of these paradigms.
The Gujjar were an ambivalent group because they had participated in a number of rebellions against the East India Company during the “Mutiny” of 1857 and alongside some Brahman groups were demoted from the Martial Race classification. The East India company gutted entire Gujjar and Brahman villages to make an example of the mutineers, firing their bodies from Canon. Subsequently, the Gujjar would be described as “criminals” in the ethnographic literature. One can still see the remnants of these ideas on Pakistani Forums and YouTube videos where citified Pakistanis in places like Lahore poke fun of “milk-herding Gujjar”; the Gujjar Bakarwal of Jammu & Kashmir; “the nomadic Gujjar of Kashmir”.
Recalcitrant Brahmans were similarly impugned and erased from the new race narrative. There were also Muslim and Hindu Rajputs who participated in the “Mutiny” but because large numbers of Rajput Hindus and Sikh Jat fought on the side of the East India Company, their respective identities were not demonised. The Princely States were considered loyal subjects of British Colonialism. In fact, the Muslim Pashtun tribes of the North West Frontier Province volunteered their mercenary services in return for a share of the booty and they too were described positively in the colonial ethnography. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America instrumentalised a lot of the colonial sentiments to present the Afghan “savage” as a “freedom loving warrior”. After 9/11, the Afghans were demonised.
Landowners in general, again with illusion to the historical patronage network described above, were permitted to buy land because they supposedly descended from the “Agricultural Castes”. Colonial officers argued that this was to protect the agricultural clans from unscrupulous money lenders, the “Mahajan”, who belonged to ancestrally less distinguished backgrounds like the trading castes (Khatris). The race ideas were crude, the Rajput and Jat although strong and brave were incredibly unintelligent and simpleminded, almost child-like and easy to manipulate. The money lenders and traders were physically weak but crafty and cunning and a blight on their customers. They were also presented as being dishonest in their trading practises.
In effect, caste-groups were being pitied against other caste-groups.
Colonial writers it would appear from their writings were not enamoured by Brahmans in particular. Prejudice can be seen in how they described the Brahmans as being weak, scheming, prone to telling falsehoods whilst keen to promote themselves over above the more industrious castes, notably the ruling Rulers. It didn’t matter that the Brahmans had historically formed part of the same ruling class albeit as priests and assistants. Lots of Indian Rulers were of Brahman descent but this fact of history was simply tossed to the side.
Occupational castes, by far, didn’t even register with the colonial ethnologists. They were described as “aboriginals” and not originally of Aryan racial descent; note how some Pakistanis claim foreign Muslim descent to escape the idea of being aboriginal Indians. Occupational groups not part of the Agricultural Castes were proscribed from buying land or being recruited into the Army and this held true for the Arain caste which overtime sought to improve its caste standing. One today hears members of the Arain caste proudly claiming a Muslim origin on the basis of their “physical appearances” unaware of the large presence of Hindu Arain across the borders in India. There is also no similar narrative for the preponderance of dark-skinned Arain who are selectively removed from what passes as the Arain caste identity.
By not only creating race-fictions, the colonial officers created new forms of social discrimination. Ambitious individuals from the occupational castes jostled to get identified as Martial Races, or Agricultural Castes, to simply get ahead in life. To become soldiers and obtain a respectable income, or buy land and investments to obtain social prestige, they had to fabricate their caste-identities and many did exactly that. This dynamic strengthened the prestige of identifying with the empowered caste backgrounds, empowering identities that hadn’t existed previously in the way we imagine the identities today.
The colonialists created new norms of social interaction which we sloppily assume to have always been there. There is a wider point that I’m trying to get across to my readers. It was British colonial officers who fixed what was essentially a fluid social situation. In the past, the nobles had to physically demonstrate their nobility to their Overlords. But today one can simply download the latest version of H A Rose’s “A glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province” and prove he belongs to the old nobility. Originally compiled in 3 volumes in 1919, this colonial text with pages of racist and offensive comments about India’s diverse “races” has become the basis of understanding Pakistan’s caste system. Some Pakistanis continue to recycle the arbitrary insights of the author on their blogs, passing them off as academic and historically documented insights. In some instances, they are also cited alongside ‘genomic population data’ to appreciate how far some dilettante are ready to fall in the gutter of ‘race engineering’ desperate to connect maternal and paternal haplogroups that are tens of thousands of years old with their version of caste nobility – the self-affirmation of self. Frequently, the authors observations are misquoted.
Upward Mobility Vs Downward Mobility
Before the advent of the East India Company, the feudatory or ‘Jagirdar’, (synonymous with ‘Zamindar’, landowner) was the only patron in his lands. Occupational groups would service the needs of the landowning groups reliant on their goodwill, similar to how European serfs were in a state of bondage to the landbarons. It was the responsibility of the Jagirdar to ensure law and order and oversee disputes. How he behaved distinguished him from his equals and inferiors, carrying great symbolism. The Nawabs, (the ‘nobility class’), all manner of titles existed, had to behave in a dignified manner. They would not eat from people below their status, obliged to feed and help their subjects to show their largess. This is not bigotry but a public announcement of authority. How and where they lived was also a demonstration of power, ancestral forts were built on the summit of hills and named after ancestors. For instance, the Zamindar would never be seen tilling their lands, an insult and proof that they had fallen from the status of forebears.
Observing this phenomenon of downward mobility, colonial ethnologists coined the term ‘debased Rajputs’ and argued that many of the lineage-based Rajput clans that ended up on the Himalayan Hills having fled the Indo-Gangetic Plains in defeat were only later identified as Jat (‘farmers’). Revealingly, many of Azad Kashmir’s Jat identities continue to maintain a Rajput origin looking suspiciously to those self-affirming as “Rajeh” amongst their midst whom they accuse of siding with the older power structures – a completely unwarranted indictment if one understands how Pakistan’s Kashmir propaganda (‘Kashmir banega Pakistan’) is being instrumentalised in the region between various clans. It is simply an example of divide and rule, creating competition amongst ambitious native clients to do the bidding of the Pakistan Occupier for the personal gain of individual families.
The Jat of Azad Kashmir get frequently confused with the emergence of Jat on the Indo-Gangetic Plains following the implosion of Mughal hegemony after the demise of Aurangzeb. The Jat were of nomadic origin having moved from the direction of Sindh into the Gujarat, Rajasthan and Eastern Panjab regions centuries earlier where they became militarised if indeed the observations of scholars are correct.
In the 17th century, we are told that a cohort of Jat took up arms against the defeated Mughal rulers who had been exploiting them. Afterwards, they coalesced with a new emerging ruling class, the Sikh Confederacy, and the emergence of the Sikh Jat had its origin in these dynamics. Rajputs of the Chauhan lineage and others that included the Bhatti were actively involved in anti-Mughal agitations and uprisings. Historians explain how they captained and led the resistance because of grievances against the Mughal, who had misappropriated their lands. The Rajputs who eventually converted to Sikhism, today identify as Sikh Jat linked with various clans of the older Rajput to show the fluid overlapping nature of the Jat and Rajput identities.
This is not to say that the emerging tribal formations, Jat or Rajput, belonged to separate or distinct ancestral groups to somehow create new primordial myths. On the contrary, modern DNA studies have shown a common origin for various populations and many other communities that otherwise wouldn’t posture through such identities today. Ironically, the Pashtun and Tajik are closely related to the Jat to give an idea of this shared but distant past. Ethnicity like race is a social construct but linear descent to forebears is something altogether different which shouldn’t be conflated with corporate groups pushing newer origin narratives. Nomads have been some of the most successful groups to spread their DNA, which has been popping up in the most unlikeliest of places hundreds of years laters. Sadly, the history of nomadism is always problematised by writers celebrating the sedentary narrative of cities and urban spaces. The Empires of the Silk Kingdoms across Central Asia were linked to Nomadism. The Ottoman and the Safavid Rulers descended from nomads as did the purported ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, who are constantly conflated with the ancient Aryan. The Aryan of documented history postdate the purported migrations of the proto-Indo-Europeans by centuries and are linked with the BMAC population, from which site of dispersal they moved into the Iranian Plateau and North India. The Achaemenid Emperors, the ancient Zoroastrian Priests, and their counterparts in North India were all ‘Arya’ on account of this history.
Such have been the upheavals in the Western Himalaya and the wider Plains – giving form to the caste system I explain here and the insecurities and anxieties coming out it. It is a history that goes back centuries and involves diverse peoples who have left their mark on history and not just place names. It is a history mired in seismic events across North India. It is the complete opposite of the disparaging anecdotes of people who like to posture through illusory backgrounds demeaning those they think are somehow inferior to them because of an inadequate understanding of history and the nature of unjust power dynamics. Not understanding the actual backgrounds in question and even their own humble origins when exposed, they contribute to the very problems they want to eradicate in the name of equality and diversity. Rather than challenge the old inequities, they approximate to the newer incarnations because they now have a stake in the new fictions. They have been reborn in the very image of the people who used to oppress their forebears.
New Haplogroup Identities
Of late, I have noticed that some dilettantes have taken to deploying genetic categories like y-chromosomal and mitochondrial haplogroups, terms that deal with ancestral populations tens of thousands of years old to affirm or negate racial claims about the socially-constructed identities borne of the colonial legacy I’ve been discussing. Terms such as ‘ancestral ethnic admixtures’ and ‘autosomal DNA’ are being used to identify ancestral populations that are supposedly connected with their own forebears courtesy of false narratives. The writers of such posts are clearly affirming themselves. The crude ideas are incredibly flawed. The entire edifice of such an enterprise is based on flawed colonial ideas that have long been debunked by experts in the realm of biology, anthropology and history. Revealingly, western academia completely free of government interference is at the forefront of population genetics to understand the anxieties and insecurities of ethnonationalists in authoritarian regimes invoking the demon of European Colonialism conveniently.
If the West is not afraid to deconstruct its own racial myths, what’s stopping the countries evolving out of the colonies British Imperialism created to look critically at their own unequal social relations. One can see through the anxieties of Indian and Pakistani commentators leaving a huge trail on numerous social media forums speaking about real and false ethnic groups with the Pro-Independence Kashmiris at the top of the identities to be demonised. Others seek proximity to power. They have yet to wean themselves off debunked race myths. Even individual castes and ethnic groups (social constructs) are being identified through ancient haplogroups, a concept best deployed in the realm of genetics investigating migrations. Haplogroups cannot be used to understand socially or politically contrived identities for the purpose of political propaganda, the two considerations deal with different phenomena.
Sadly, this is lost on our social commentators who seek confirmation bias for their outlandish claims telling the diverse people of Jammu & Kashmir that they cannot self-affirm as Kashmiris because they belong to the wrong region of Kashmir: the wrong caste or landed backgrounds: the wrong ethnicity and language. But diversity seems perfectly okay for Indians and Pakistanis irrespective of the disjointed labels they use – the word ‘India’ has historical pedigree and was linked with the River Indus, at a time the ancients of this region did not consider themselves to form the same nation as those living on the Gangetic Plains or in the Interior of Peninsula India.
The Indus Region from which the word ‘India’ derives is situated entirely in today’s Pakistan and not modern-day India. To contrast itself from Pakistan, the newly founded Republic of India adopted the term ‘Bharat’, the name of an ancient and self-affirming ‘Aryan’ Tribe linked with India’s most famous epic – the Mahabharata. The ruling members of the Great Bharat Tribe were located in East Punjab, having migrated there according to Indian historians from the North West regions of the wider subcontinent. They would never have countenanced the idea that the tribes they were fighting against somehow belonged to the same parentage as them, proof of some shared nation state identity that has never existed prior to the rise of European Colonialism.
To reiterate the absurdity of such logic outside its intended propagandistic agenda, Indian Brahmans can become Kashmiris including the ones from Jammu so long as they both identify with Hindu Nationalism and claim the entirety of Kashmir State for a pan-India. Likewise, Pakistan’s Punjabi Caste Kashmiris can become ethnic Kashmiris so long as they claim the entirety of Kashmir State for Pakistan but Independence Kashmiris – the natives of the soil, who dare express a different opinion namely independence for their homeland must never lay claim to a Kashmir State identity for 17 million people, despite being the only legitimate stakeholders of the conflict.
What is even more ironic is the historical fact that the Founder of Kashmir State in 1846 was a Hindu and the overwhelming majority of his subjects were Muslims; he wanted to retain his State as an independent State but the colonial British refused to entertain such a possibility. When India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947, the then Hindu Ruler of Kashmir wanted to remain independent of both India and Pakistan and the political representatives of the wider State were in broad agreement with his wishes, only for the State to be invaded by Pakistan’s Military and irregular forces. Pakistan’s surreptitious involvement in the invasion occurred despite the existence of a Standstill Agreement between the Government of Pakistan and the Ruler of Kashmir to appreciate Pakistan’s insincerity on any number of internationally agreed treatise. Pakistan violated the terms of its own Agreement, which might explain why no major international company or conglomerate wants to do business in, or with, Pakistan.
For fear of his life, Kashmir’s Ruler was then encouraged, by the outgoing British, to accede His State to India in order to obtain military help against the Pakistani “marauders” despite the majority of the population being Muslim and having countenanced independence for the State. 70 years later despite numerous UN resolutions, Kashmir State remains divided between India and Pakistan, a religious football kicked between two ethno-nationalistic entities denying 17 million natives and its diaspora the right to self-determination, all the while commemorating the horrors of British Colonialism and Western European Imperialism hypocritically, and that most hated of evils – ‘white privilege’.
The Way Forward; Maintaining Humility
Fast forwarding to today, my peers who live in the UK have no sense of their own history of upward mobility. I have been exploring the history of downward mobility as it applies to the old landed groups to explain that approximating to power is the driving force behind a lot of our anxieties. From power comes prestige and the ability to participate in the fictions which we call privilege. Dominant groups have power, privilege and prestige – fringe groups lack these characteristics. If you are able to exercise all three components of the above identity, it can be said that you have power. If on the other hand you are unable to exercise power but you still want to be part of the dominant group, then you are aspiring to power. In other words, you are upwardly mobile which is where half your problems reside when you complain about being a victim of unjust power dynamics.
To conclude, in the absence of the patronage network, its vast proceeds, lands, upheavals, and symbolism, it’s bizarre to hear someone call another “Rajah” or “Choudhary Saab” (from Saahib/Sir). It would be akin to hearing someone called Bob (outside the context of the Nabob slur) living on a council estate in Rochdale calling his neighbour “Duke Dave” or “Earl Tim”, thinking nothing of it. Again, analogous to the people of the dispossessed villages of Azad Kashmir from Bhimbar all the way to Neelum calling themselves Choudhary, Rajah, Sayyid, Sardar or some other fanciful label despite the entire area being exploited by Pakistan.
Some Azad Kashmiri YouTubers want to show the entire world the terrible infrastructure blighting their villages, lack of jobs and opportunities in a location of ridiculous mansions – funded by Azad Kashmiri expatriates living abroad. These unsightly and out of place buildings add more insult to Azad Kashmir’s sense of outrage and frustration.
Empty mansions look out onto rubble and poverty stricken villagers unable to flee the cruelty of the Pakistan Occupier unlike the 1 million British Azad Kashmiris returning periodically in the tradition of the global tourist. They have no care in the world for how Azad Kashmiris are being treated by ethnic Punjabis feigning fraternity with the same Azad Kashmiris they abuse. It is not enough that British Azad Kashmiris get humiliated at Islamabad Airport but they want to add to Azad Kashmir’s collective humiliation. Some YouTubers do not understand how their “Punjabi” videos are contributing to Azad Kashmir’s powerlessness creating the divide that the ISI weaponise to disempower the Pro-Independence Kashmiris. If a region is presented negatively by its own natives why would its diaspora go there especially if they’re being told that they’re not ethnic Kashmiris but ethnic Punjabis?
Paradoxically, Azad Kashmir is capital-rich because of UK remittences according to numerous western academics and scholars. Western experts have been telling us for decades that the Pakistan Establishment has been diverting Azad Kashmir’s large GBP-based deposits to fund projects in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, deliberately disinvesting the region. They had even diverted Azad Kashmir’s earthquake aid into projects in Pakistan. What kind of fraternity is this that masquerades itself as Muslim Unity whilst gobbling up a people’s resources during their hour of need?
Whether my peer will heed my call to stop using outlandish caste titles that are now disconnected with their lives and there’s no proof that any of us was ever part of the past I’ve tried explaining, I leave to their conscience. We are all equals today on account of being human. We should redeem our humanity on the basis of universal human rights, the rule of law, and a fairness that characterises western liberal democracies – systems of governance that actually work. There are no Jat, Rajeh, Sardar, Malk, Ghakkar, Kashmiris by Zaat, Awan, Bhat, Bains, Arain, Gujjar, Tarkan, Lohar, Mochi, Darzi, Musali, Janjuah, high caste, low caste, no caste, in our communities.
This is “divide and rule” and it only benefits the Pakistan Occupier.
The old system of social stratification greatly exaggerated by British colonial ethnologists to their own strategic and material advantage I’m keen to reiterate has passed. The corresponding titles and backgrounds are throwbacks for a people who should identify on the basis of their actual lived experiences. To repeat a long accepted fact courtesy of observers who have not forgotten the evils of Nazi race science and Apartheid South Africa, the struggles and ordeals of our shared forebears connect us with human beings across the world. When we prioritise this aspect of our shared history, we are celebrating humanity for all human beings and not the ethno-nationalism of the 3rd Reich.
British Azad Kashmiris are from Kashmir State and not Pakistan
For those of us from divided Jammu & Kashmir and a particular cultural sphere now living in Britain we are British Kashmiris and not Pakistanis. Howsoever we want to label the ethnic space of our forebears, we need to understand narratives of disinformation and the identities behind Occupation. It was officers of colonialism who aggregated for themselves the role of official cartographer. It was they who mapped our regions and assigned its various parts to the evolving geo-administrative configurations they created. The British Indian Empire enlarged the British Punjab Province from the foundations of the smaller Mughal Lahore Subah just as the same colonial interest created the smaller Pakistan from the larger British India to appreciate how Imperialists manage their colonies. A cursory glance at the size of Canada and Australia should hit home this point all the while the same power structure was keen to create much smaller ‘nation states’ from the diverse ethnic groups that comprised, for instance, the Ottoman Empire. The ensuing configurations have never reflected the actual interests of people who end up living within the new ethnic polities, supposedly corresponding with the economic priorities of the natives, which for Azad Kashmir is linked with Occupation Politics. Azad Kashmir is Jammu & Kashmir and no power on earth can change this fact of history if indeed we’re going to speak truth to power.
Culturally speaking, our ethnic homeland is one uniform region known broadly and somewhat erroneously as the Pahari-Patwari Ilaaqah because it extends to the Pothohar Plateau and the Hazara Hills, Khyber-Pakhtunkwa. It is merely one cultural sphere amongst 5 cultural spheres that make up the landmass we call Kashmir. Over millennia, diverse peoples have been moving eastwards from a centre of gravity that used to be located in the Peshawar Basin and Swat Valley, as far as the Pir Panjal Mountain Range in what is today Indian-administered-Kashmir. The remnants of those migrations today comprise one ethnic population but for the fact that India and Pakistan want to separate the natives from the “dangerous idea” that they could somehow cohere (as Kashmiris of diverse backgrounds) and unite without having to resort to an Indian or Pakistani nationalistic identity. In other words, they must be returned as either Indian Hindus or Pakistani Muslims but never as natives of their own homeland.
In genomic population terms, this implies the movement of Western Eurasians (Europeans, North Africans and Near Easterners) from a north-westerly direction to a south-easterly direction into what is today South Asia, which is an area closely connected to Eastern Eurasians. The presence of Western Eurasian mitochondrial haplogroups that decrease exponentially beyond the eastern banks of the River Indus (‘where the West meets the East’) is a point in question and cannot be ignored by ethno-nationalists arguing that India is the only source for such dispersals (the ‘Out of India Theory’). More problematically for the detractors, the presence of Western Eurasian haplogroups in the higher castes and their rarity in the lower-castes isn’t something that can be conveniently brushed aside. By stating these scholarly observations that could possibly turn out to be incorrect, no one is saying that Europeans, North Africans and Near Easterners (West Eurasians) comprise a ‘high caste’, whilst indigenous Indians of Eastern Eurasian Hunter Gatherer descent comprise a ‘low caste’ – that would be an extrapolation of the facts and the misreading of what the geneticists are saying. We are essentially speaking about ancient migrations that occurred at a certain point in history giving form to the extant population now settled in the region, which may, or may not have impacted India’s highly discriminatory and persecutory caste system. We are all the product of the earlier migrations, every one of us.
Outside false narratives of caste, race, religion and ethnicity, our stake in this cultural sphere and history is located in Kashmir State. We should take the time to learn about the cultural heritage of divided Jammu & Kashmir, its languages, cultures and even religions as opposed to posturing through the false consciousness of a Pakistani nationalistic identity that wants to exploit and own Azad Kashmir by telling naive and impressionable people that they have no right to their homeland because they are not the real Kashmiris but ethnic Punjabis and Muslims, as if Islam saved East Pakistan’s Muslim Bengalis from West Pakistan’s murderous campaign against them simply for demanding their rights. Shockingly, the Army doing most of the killing was staffed by ethnic Punjabis and the Bengalis, at the time, were very keen to point this out.
So, let me illustrate the absurdity of not knowing history in closing.
I recall an incident in my youth, two individuals were arguing about their caste backgrounds. The one presented himself as a Rajah whilst the other puffed his chest out as a Jat. The Rajah stated that his caste was the higher because the Rajput are higher than the Jat and in previous centuries his ancestors were Kings! The exchange got incredibly heated when the Jat accused the Rajah of being a ‘Pittoo’ (‘stooge’) of British Colonialism.
This altercation happened some twenty years ago. The protagonists were older than me and I had no inclination at the time to question what I was observing, I just listened. I only know now how impressionistic their respective arguments were having spent more than a decade scrutinising the false narratives around caste, ethnicity and patronage from reputable sources, Western and Indian, and being able to contextualise such false narratives with reference to identity politics.
The Jat had maintained all along a Bhatti (Plains) Rajput origin whilst the Rajah for some reason claimed to have come from the Sudhan tribe that has never been considered Rajput in the classical definition and imagery of the term. He also used the term ‘Sardar’ and given the label’s association with the Sikh in the mind of the Jat Muslim, I think this may explain why he chose to self-affirm as a Rajah – lots of Sikhs are Jat. One can see the actual priorities of the identity labels we conveniently deploy when it suits our interests though the past in question is imagined. Moreover, the error on the part of the Rajah was to juxtapose his self-styled title, ‘Rajah‘ with the documented history of the Rajput, thereby conflating the histories of different regions and identities that he didn’t quite understand.
The Sudhan of Jammu & Kashmir have never been Kings but tribes of Hindu origin in a part of the world that was dominated by Muslim Potentates. Colonial writers explained how lots of tribes tried aggregating Muslim backgrounds, some of which claimed a Mughal Muslim origin (which would imply a Turkic-Mongol past). The Sudhan fell within this camp and there is no mention of Sudhan Muslim roots prior to this period in history which just shows the actual priorities being pursued – approximation to power (to be able to partake in a higher social status) and not the recounting of history (to locate one’s forebears in the annals of time whatever that social status).
The Sudhan are reimagining their history when they claim to be of Afghan Muslim descent, innovating the word Sadozai. An analysis of their genome by population geneticists will reveal what I am saying – they are related to Sudhan Hindus in Jammu. Sudhans converted to Islam at a particular juncture in history like the Ghakkar but unlike the Jat and Agnikul Rajput, their identity labels were never mentioned by earlier Arab and Persian writers to lend credence to the idea that such identities post-date the emergence of a Muslim presence in ancient India by centuries if not a millennium. The Jat for instance comprise some of the oldest documented converts to Islam, dating to the 8th century CE, which might explain why some Jat had a presence in the Iranian Plateau and Iraq unlike other caste and clan groupings now trying to approximate to that history retrospectively. Like I said, lots of upwardly mobile Muslims in Pakistan are trying to approximate to Muslim lineages and one can see this in the fanciful writings produced by Pakistan’s pseudo “historians”. Online, Pakistan’s ethnonationalists are behind a lot of the false Muslim narratives which are creating anxieties and insecurities on the part of otherwise closely related peoples. On this account of history, India and Pakistan should never have been partitioned.
Of course, not every Sudhan is a tribal leader. As for the Bhatti Jat otherwise considered Rajput on the Plains of India, he wasn’t aware that Bhatis, Jats, Sudhan (a much smaller regional group), and all the other fictitious “Martial Races” permitted entry into the British Indian Army were native clients of the colonial enterprise. It was these interests that inadvertently helped prop up and sustain the colonial order without which colonial rule would never have been possible. This is also how tribal groups survived, existing on the peripheries and frontiers of more powerful Rulers. It has nothing to do with treachery against one’s “nation” at a time when nation states didn’t even exist as concepts. Ordinary people had always been subjected to chattel slavery and the raid, prior to the advancement of human rights and personal autonomy that criminalised such wanton acts of violence. I am speaking of essentially European Enlightenment concepts that have shaped Modernity, facts that are callously rejected by tribalistic people with no grounding in history. Today, civilians and electorates matter in democratic systems and not patronage networks. Countries like Pakistan need division in the society for patronage networks to work through divide and rule tactics – without division and fear, there would be no role for the Pakistan Army and its cronies. Genuine democracies require the building of consensus on the part of all its sum-parts. Moreover, one cannot escape the inevitable conclusion about the collusion of native clients and the instrumentalisation of religion by ‘Establishment Imams’, which continues to be the reality in Pakistan.
History is a very disturbing Pandora’s Box and once it’s opened it cannot be closed. For instance Muslim Mughal Kings were married to Hindu Rajput Princesses to ensure the loyalty of their feudatories, many of whom were of prestigious backgrounds and had their own private armies. Mughal Rulers were partly descended from the Rajput, a reality that wasn’t lost on them when they were fighting intractable relatives. Conversion to different religious faiths within the context of this power-dynamic had never been based on religious convictions but out of the strategic desire to survive. Numerous defeated Hindu elites became Muslim precisely for this reason.
Upwardly mobile citified Pakistanis are completely unaware of this past.
Of course, I’ve tried to argue in this piece that none of us in Britain is a Rajah or Choudhary. We are Britons of Azad Kashmir descent. We can use a variety of labels that connect us with the place of our birth and the older migrations, having been born and raised in a western democratic country where human beings are treated much better than the “cattle” under the yoke of Pakistani Occupation. This is exactly how Azad Kashmiris feel about Pakistan’s control over their territory and resources and it behooves us to give expression to their grievances. We should discard caste titles and all the other fanciful titles some of us claim when imagining our past because we are buying into bullshit. Our heritage is one of dispossession and in the case of 4.5 million Azad Kashmiris, economic and political exploitation at the hands of an incredibly dishonest elite that has no qualms sullying the faith of Islam. We should never forget why and how we ended up in the UK to redeem caste titles that are in all honesty disconnected from our people’s experience of suffering.
It is folly of the worst kind to imagine one’s “celebrated” past disconnected from one’s present humiliations. It is an ugly kind of hubris that exposes us for what we really are.
In the words of Psalm 83:04, “Our enemies keep saying now is the time to wipe Israel off the map. We’ll destroy even the memory of her existence!”
