This chapter turns to border crossing narratives of Hindu men who left their homes in Sindh, Pakistan, and moved to India in 1971, more than two decades after Partition. The migration of these men from the west, much like that of the “Bengali” women from the east, enabled them to forge new relationships of kinship and, in this case, nationality. These new forms of belonging were also premised on a reexamination of the efficacy of traditional forms of marriage. The chapter also shows us what it takes to “belong” to a social group, whether the nation, or a caste or a religious group. It shows how “insiders” and “outsiders” are evaluated and policed by the state on the one hand, and how they are received by the family. As in the previous chapters, it is not self-evident that the state and the family constitute similar axes of policing: they are not in direct opposition to each other, but they are not seamlessly allied either. The family is yet again not a space of interiority that may suggest that it constitutes a space of resistance to the state.
Building on earlier chapters that examined the work of belonging that is performed by “Bengali” women, this chapter asks, how do Hindu men who cross into Kutch from Pakistan stake their claim to belonging? As a demographic category, the two are quite distinct. Although the “Bengali” was hypervisible as a “stranger” to the state—language, dress, and skin color constituting a distinct form of “otherness” to the police, regardless of formal citizenship—it was precisely the fact of her being a stranger that allowed her to accumulate social capital as a desired wife within the Muslim family. Marriage within close kin, it was seen, could lead to a crisis of sociality within the family. The social glue and networks of care and intimacy that are believed to structure close-kin marriages (Charsley 2013) can also come apart when too much is known about one’s kin, upsetting the delicate balance of power between generations and affines. The management of secrecy, privacy, and the public secret are crucial to the maintenance of kin ties, something that threatens to break down when boundaries between relationships are rendered too transparent. In such situations, it is the relative stranger who is able to restore the balance in the family that may have come undone with too much familiarity. As such, a traditional and normative form of Muslim marriage—marriage between close kin—is being reconsidered in light of the availability of marriage migrants from the east.
The Hindu men of this chapter, on the other hand, are no strangers to the state, who welcome them into the fold of the nation as always-already citizens. The police and local administration abet their border crossings regardless of their formal legality, oftentimes granting permission for entry and residence that are at odds with explicit official orders they have received. Even though as “Hindus,” these Pakistani men are welcomed into citizenship by a state eager to manage its border demographics, they do not always meet with a similarly effusive reception among the family, for whom they remain strangers. For their Indian families, these men are kin but are connected through the maternal side: in strongly patrivirilocal forms of kinship, one’s mother’s kin are not usually the source of political capital. Despite the state’s abundant patronage, the stigma of being “from Pakistan” or the corrosion of trust through suspicion of their being “traitors” (desh drohi), informers (sources), or “double agents” makes it much more difficult for these border crossers to be seamlessly accepted within the family or the wider society. Further, their acquisition of citizenship is premised on a reconfiguration of traditional patriarchal—and patrilineal—norms of honor which now have to be rescripted through maternal kin. Mothers, rather than fathers, become the conduits for political and social mobility for men who are at pains to emphasize their patrilineal “Rajput” heritage, laying claim to masculine pride, valor, and staking nationality as Hindu men. Even though the Hindu women viranganas resisted the paradigm of national belonging that was offered to them—through the trope of the sacrificing mother—men from Sindh hold on to elements of Rajput valor and pride as a way to claim belonging.
Through the narratives of three Hindu men who crossed the border from TharParkar (southern Sindh) in the shadow of the 1971 war, the chapter reflects once more on modes of policing that operate through the family and the state, arguing that the difference is not merely one of scale.1 The state does not merely amplify forms of policing that operate within the family, making them more rigid (Das 1995), nor does one necessarily act in collusion with the other (Baxi 2006). “Visibility,” “intimacy,” or “strangeness” is calibrated differently according to the context. The chapter will argue that Hindu men could cross the border illegally and successfully convert this illegality into legal residence and citizenship because they checked the right boxes for a state that has increasingly sought to legalize non-Muslim migration from its neighbors (as seen in the Citizenship Amendment Act [CAA] passed in December 2019).2 The chapter argues, however, that the grant of citizenship is not the successful closure of an aspirational border crossing. Vir Singh’s words stayed with me long after he had uttered them: “After coming here (yahan aane ke bad), we received nagarikta (citizenship) and nothing else (aur kuch nahin)” (emphasis added). The chapter describes how political belonging and social capital are not necessarily forged in congruent ways, neither for the Bengali wives of earlier chapters nor for the Hindu citizen aspirants from Pakistan.
Although “Bengali” women are subjected to specific forms of policing in Kutch, I have argued elsewhere that it is important to situate present-day “cross-region marriage” within the larger landscape of cross-border marriage migration in this particular borderland. In colonial times, Kutch was a princely state governed by the Jadeja dynasty. They originated from Sindh and traditionally married Sodha Rajput women from the Thar region whom, it was said, they could intermarry “without offence to their pride of caste” (Postans 1839, 52). The Sodhas were remarked upon by colonial observers for the marriage alliances they were able to secure. Marianna Postans wrote of the Sodha that they were a “tribe who inhabit the great desert of the Thurr [sic], and are remarkable for the surpassing beauty of their women” (52); they “find their principal source of riches in the beauty of their daughters, for one of whom rich Mahomedans will frequently pay ten thousand rupees” (136). Raikes (1859, 3) wrote in his memoir of Thar and Parkar, “The Soda ladies of the Desert are esteemed amongst the most beautiful women of the East, their virtues and beauty being the theme of many a song—the subject of many a story—and in former days the cause of many a fatal conquest.” The princely state of Kutch received royal brides from Hindu Sodhas in Sindh and from other princely states in the region such as Kathiawar or the state of Rajasthan. The uncle of the last crowned maharao, whom I last interviewed in 2003, had a wife from Kathiawar; the rao of Sirohi (1925–1946) married a daughter of the maharao of Kutch, while the Kutch ruler married the rao of Sirohi’s sister (Plunkett 1973, 72). Similarly, Sodhas married their daughters into Rajput royal houses farther east that were considered socially superior to them, in order to maintain forms of honor associated with elite Rajput marriage (Raikes 1859). The discourse of honor was central to policing the traditional Rajput family both in terms of managing its gender codes as well as its political ambition. Political expediency dictated the shifting boundaries of the permissible marriage alliance over time. As Ramya Sreenivasan (2004) has argued, marriage practices defined the changing boundaries of the elite Rajput family. Thus, unions between Rajput women and non-Rajputs—particularly Muslims—once accepted as politically expedient, by the nineteenth century gradually came to be redefined as dishonorable, reflecting altered political exigencies. Such narrations, argues Sreenivasan, “must therefore be seen as strategic, seeking to mobilize for their Rajput audience the norms of ‘honorable’ conduct essential to the maintenance of this political and moral order” (68).
The recourse taken to “honor” in contemporary Sodha narratives must be viewed in this light. In colonial accounts, the Sodha are referred to as a dominant landowning and administrative Rajput caste in TharParkar “where, in the wilds of this almost unknown region, they constituted themselves landed proprietors, acknowledging the Rana of Oomerkote as the head of their tribe, but paying tribute to nobody” (Raikes 1859, 3). As a “superior” social caste, the Hindu Sodhas of TharParkar typically intermarried hypergamously with other “Rajput” lineages to the territories east of them. The border between TharParkar and Kutch was frequently traversed as marriage alliances were sealed throughout the princely period. In contemporary times, the cross-border marriage strategies of the Sodha from TharParkar continue and are explained in terms of the dual constraints of clan exogamy and the need to maintain marriage alliances that would be considered “honorable.”
Thus, constrained by hypergamy and unable to marry within their close territories, they typically broadened their search for kin across the border between TharParkar and Kutch-Rajasthan where they had more “marriageable” clans to choose from. These marriages continued after Partition and until 1965 when the border became more rigidly policed in the aftermath of a war with Pakistan. The period 1965–1971, when the next war was fought between the two countries, witnessed a growing restlessness and insecurity among the Hindus in TharParkar due to the heightened militarization of the border; as a result, many of them wanted to cross the border permanently into India. A heavier deployment of border police on both sides of the border and a general climate of fear and distrust of Hindus as being “sympathizers,” “informers,” or “spies” for India led to strained social relations within TharParkar. This period, which led to the gradual production of insecurity among TharParkar’s Hindus, has been described in detail by Sadia Mahmood in her doctoral dissertation. She writes, “The landed and political elites of the Hindu communities were driven out sometimes under the pretense that they were Indian citizens and sometimes under the pretense that they were enemies, opponents of the Pakistani state, or Indian agents. An ecology of fear was also produced and installed among Pakistani Muslims about the Pakistani Hindus” (Mahmood 2014, 123).
The following sections are based on interviews conducted with three Sodha men in Kutch. Each of them has a different migration story and a distinct way in which they interfaced with the military-policing infrastructure, casting themselves variously along the spectrum of the legal or illegal border crosser. They also reflect different classed experiences of border crossing.
Gulab Singh was a middle-class, educated young man who negotiated his own border crossing. He crossed alone, using his connections with a childhood friend who connected him with a border guard along the Sindh-Rajasthan border. He knew the risks involved: this was a betrayal of his country (Pakistan), his home (in TharParkar), and his father (whom he could not take into confidence)—a betrayal of his patriline. Gulab Singh crossed under the cover of the strong winds that whipped up the desert sand into a blinding opacity during the day to slip into Indian territory. Yet, once on this side of the border, he had a hard time convincing his relatives of his good intentions. Border villages are tuned to people coming and going; trust is a scarce commodity: Why would they trust him? Was he a spy? An agent for the Pakistani military? Gulab Singh learned that trust is not easily earned; disheartened with the less-than-enthusiastic reception he received from his kinsfolk on the Indian side, he decided to turn himself over to the Indian authorities in order to claim citizenship and recognition.
Vir Singh migrated with his extended family and caste brethren while the Indian armed forces had established temporary control over TharParkar. His first few years in Kutch were in a refugee camp, in a liminal stage of citizenship as he did not have identity papers of either country. In the camp, police suspicion dogged them as “Pakistanis”; this was a less entitled mode of border crossing than Gulab Singh’s had been. However, these masses of migrants still found ways of appealing to administrators in Kutch in ways that the latter found hard to refuse.
My third example is Ram Singh Sodha, the most recent migrant who decided to migrate to India permanently only in 2010, having made approximately five or six visits to India from the 1980s onward. At the time of my interview with him, he was still awaiting his citizenship papers even though it had been almost seven years since he had moved to live in Kutch with his sons. He was among the more high-profile citizenship seekers, having been an active politician and member of the legislative assembly in Sindh. He used his relative influence and political ability to bargain in order to help other potential citizens in limbo in India.
Although these examples indicate the differentiated experiences of border crossing based on the uneven distribution of economic and political capital among the Sodhas, I also stress the point that the specific meaning that migration has for them is not necessarily the same. Notwithstanding the theoretical facilitation of their citizenship by a state that differentiates among Hindu “refugees” and Muslim migrants or “infiltrators,” even the most entitled of the recent migrants had not formally received Indian citizenship. Yet, for all practical purposes, he lived in some splendor in Kutch. Even though local police were deputed to maintain strict surveillance and monitoring of his activities as he was still formally a Pakistani citizen, in practice they deferred to him much as they would to a local political leader or strong man. Gulab Singh still struggles to read the Gujarati script; it is Urdu that he can read most fluently: an everyday reminder of his “otherness” with respect to national language and identity. These three Sodha stories highlight the connection between their view of themselves as a socially and demographically entitled group whose marriage practices were closely connected to the maintenance of collective honor for the community and that marked them out as distinct from other groups in TharParkar, and how this honor structured their negotiation of Indian citizenship for themselves. Although narratives of harassment by the Pakistani military and border guards that made the conduct of everyday life increasingly difficult in the years following 1965 should not be discounted, the chapter argues that the relationship between Sodha migrants and the military-security complex of the border does not play out only in terms of a Hindu-Muslim or state-versus-community axis. Even though the Indian state may have found it convenient to approve grants of citizenship based on factors that would be demographically expedient for them, the translation of political citizenship into social capital is much harder to do.
Gulab Singh’s narrative subtly points to a price paid to belong: he crossed the border to negotiate an honorable marriage for himself, but in doing so, he left behind his male kin and patriline, central to constructions of honor in Rajput kinship. His father and brother remained in Sindh; the maternal home acquired political significance as he recrossed the border once traversed by his mother as a bride. Gulab Singh was twenty-five years old when he crossed the border into Kutch in March 1970, before the formal outbreak of war. The atmosphere was tense and uncertain; everyday life had become riven with fear and suspicion: “It was like war would break out anytime.” He had retired from a Gujarat government position a few years before I first met him and enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren in a house recently built with his retirement proceeds. As a young boy, he lived in Chachro, a town in TharParkar that came under Indian occupation during the 1971 war (Mahmood 2014, 165) where he was born and raised. His mother died when he was a young boy, and his older brother and sister had already established kinship networks across the border in Kutch: the latter had been sent “illegally” as a bride into a village in eastern Kutch.3 His older brother had also crossed over “illegally” in search of a wife from Kutch, and he had been able to smuggle her successfully back to Chachro. When I asked how he negotiated his own border crossing, he simply said, “I also came illegally,” a confession that surprised me with its candor. A Hindu man with valid citizenship papers, a former government employee, he did not have to worry about an act of “illegal” border crossing in his past; interactions with the anthropologist did not threaten exposure as they had done with Bano or the other “Bengali” brides.
Gulab Singh was thus already familiar with the landscape of border crossing without passports and permits. There was a well-established network of agents on both sides who worked closely with border guards on either end. Despite this, it was highly “risky,” Gulab Singh admitted, even back in the day when things were decidedly less dangerous than they were now. There was always a chance that a friendly “agent” was really an “informer” (“source”) for the other side. The best-laid plans sometimes fell through at the last minute, or people developed cold feet. Crossing illegally once was bad enough, he emphasized, “imagine having to go through the process twice.” Men who wanted to bring a wife back to Sindh had to undertake the risky crossing all over again on the return journey. Fully aware of the attendant risks, he hatched a plan: he would leave for India, find a wife in Kutch, and stay on. He did not want to take the risk of returning. Besides, the atmosphere of suspicion had wreaked havoc on daily life in Chachro. It was not easy being a Hindu in Sindh after the 1965 war. So he took the decision to cross the border without informing his father or his brother. I asked if it was difficult for him to have taken this step, and he replied, “I will tell you frankly, we had no problems in Sindh. We all lived peacefully, Hindus and Muslims both. But after 1965, things became much more communalized. The Indus Rangers, who are the Pakistani equivalent of our BSF, used to trouble us a lot. So I decided to cross over into India. I did not want to tell my father and brother of my plans because absolute secrecy was essential. But I was also afraid they would deter me from my plan.”
In Chachro, a childhood friend helped Gulab Singh up to the border. This friend, in turn, had a school friend among the border guards whom he approached for help in this clandestine operation. “The question was,” Gulab Singh explained, warming to his subject, “how to get me over to the other side. During the nighttime, there was a lot of vigilance and the police chowkis [posts] and border guards were very alert. In those months [March–April], the desert is known for its strong winds which whip up the desert sand [reti] when they blow during the day. So it was decided that I should cross over in the daytime to give me maximum cover. In this way, I crossed the border, aided by hot winds [loo] and sand into Barmer [in Rajasthan]. I remember clearly that I celebrated the Holi of 1970 [the Hindu festival that marks the end of spring in north India] in Barmer.” Once in Barmer, Gulab Singh decided to contact some of his relatives. Now that he was safely across the border, he wanted also to send a message to his father and brother, informing them of his next steps.
Generations of exogamous marriages with various Rajputs east of Sindh meant that the entire region (primarily Sindh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan) was dotted with kinship networks across various administrative borders. On the Indian side of the border, Gulab needed to enlist the support of his maternal kin; these were people he did not know personally, never having been on this side of the border, but they were not unknown either. Chachro had brides from Barmer, and some of its own daughters were married here; news and gifts traveled clandestinely through well-worn channels of border crossing over the generations. But to his surprise and disappointment, the trust and support of his relatives in Barmer was not a foregone conclusion.
If Gulab Singh thought that crossing the border clandestinely was his biggest challenge and, once in India, he would be welcomed by an extended family of maternal relatives, he was mistaken. In borderland communities, where frequent connections—of goods and people—are made across the border, there is also a high degree of surveillance and suspicion. It is not easy to trust people, regardless of whether they are your kinsmen, explained Gulab Singh. The police and intelligence officers are constantly combing these bordering villages. You can never be sure of a visiting “relative” from the “other side” posing as a bride seeker who may be a double agent, reporting to the secret services. When Gulab Singh made initial contact with his extended family networks in Barmer, he was given a friendly enough but wary reception. Although older women were excited to see him, gathering around and anxious for firsthand news of their daughters and nieces in Chachro, they were also restrained from talking with him. Tea was offered, but no further hospitality was encouraged. Gulab Singh was exhausted, hungry, and emotionally spent. The desert sand had caused his eyes to itch and water. The past days had been a whirlwind of activity and tension. Now that he was safely across the border, the initial exhilaration subsided into a knot of disappointment at the base of his stomach: why was he treated like a stranger? He explained to me that at the time, he was young and impetuous—had not his border crossing demonstrated this already?—but he was also nasamajh (naive) in the ways of the world. Soon enough, he realized what the problem was.
Given his age, marital status, and gender, it was assumed that he was a “temporary” visitor in search of a bride from India, like his brother and countless others had been before. These “temporary” border crossers are a dangerous demographic for local residents to befriend “because you have to negotiate the border police twice, you may even be arrested as an informer on either side of the border. It is usually not worth the risk, yet many people did so.” The Barmer family preferred to not undertake the risks attendant upon helping out with these temporary border crossers who were chiefly “bride seekers.” “Once they became convinced of my intentions (niyat), that I wanted permanent migration and that I was not there only temporarily in search of a wife, only then their minds began to ease and some of them agreed to help me.”
But it was not easy, Gulab Singh maintained. He constantly felt under watch and felt that although they were his relatives, there was nothing stopping them from turning him over to the police. “If I felt that the father was softening, the son began to have doubts about me; when I managed to convince the nephew, the uncle would put his foot down.” Gulab Singh realized there was only one way forward: to convince them that his migration was not “temporary” in nature and that he wanted to settle in India “permanently,” he needed to make a firm statement. The only way to escape the suspicion of being a desh drohi (traitor) was to indicate he was here to stay.
Having convinced his relatives somewhat of his long-term intentions to reside in India, Gulab Singh stayed with them but realized it was too dangerous to continue like this, the stain of “traitor” never quite leaving him. So “within a few days,” he submitted an application to the collector (the most senior administrative official at the district level) in Barmer stating, “I want to stay in India, in Kutch, and I would like to apply for citizenship.”4 Although he had landed at Barmer, his eventual choice of destination was Kutch because it was where his nanihal (home of one’s maternal relatives) was. Within the month, he “relocated to Bhuj, got an allotment of land from the government, a job at [a government agency], citizenship papers arrived from Delhi.” By his own admission, the process was smooth and easy, and he did not have to suffer the indignities of camp life like those who started fleeing TharParkar for India in larger numbers during the war. It had been so risky to initiate any contact with “home” (i.e., Chachro) while his intentions were being evaluated by his Barmer kinsfolk and while he was trying his best to avoid the tag of desh drohi. Thus, he realized that he had not once contacted his father or brother to tell them he was safe. Once he settled down in Kutch, Gulab Singh decided to write to his father to let him know that he was well and that he had decided to move to India where he had now acquired legal citizenship status. The following year, 1971, he further cemented his ties with Kutch by becoming engaged to a woman from Kutch. His mother’s family arranged the match for him, and the young couple met for the first time at the wedding ceremony in 1972.
Gulab Singh was never to see his father and brother. The closest he allowed himself to go back to his childhood home was during that liminal phase during the 1971 war “when the Indian Army had taken over [qabza kiya] TharParkar.… I went up to the village boundary but then turned back. I never returned to Pakistan after that.” Perhaps it was not easy to contemplate the emotions that might have assailed him when faced with his father. The guilt of leaving to make a better life for himself but leaving his father behind. Besides, the tag of “traitor” was not an easy one to shake off. Writing letters to family members left behind in Sindh was a risky operation in the period after 1965 with heightened suspicion on either side of the border. Another Hindu migrant from TharParkar said how difficult it was to stay in touch with relatives in Sindh. If you sent them letters from India, they were harassed by the Pakistani police. If they wrote to you, their letters were confiscated by the local post office, opened, and screened before they were delivered to you; sometimes they arrived in tatters and always weeks or months later.
Trying to blend into the new environment was not easy for these migrants from Sindh; it was best to avoid suspicion among neighbors and coworkers and thus easier to shun all contact with Pakistan. For all migrants from TharParkar, written language remained a problem, especially for the educated middle class. Gulab Singh may have avoided the trauma of being in a refugee camp, but he struggled with his lack of ability to read the Hindi and Gujarati script. Gulab Singh had studied in Diplo where he learned Sindhi and Urdu. In the Gujarat government job that he was assigned to after his move to India, it was frequent practice to issue notices and circulars in Gujarati. Although he “tried as much as possible to get by in English,” he had to teach himself to read Gujarati through a daily reading of the local newspaper, not unlike I had done when I first began my fieldwork.
Gulab Singh was grateful for the fact that he did not have to stay in the “camps” that were set up for incoming refugees from TharParkar during the war. His comfortable middle-class life, bachelor’s degree, and a helpful administration on the Indian side of the border enabled him to negotiate citizenship and a new life for himself. The connection with Pakistan was now firmly in the past, interrupted only occasionally with glimpses of recognition embodied in linguistic scripts. Others were not so lucky, making the arduous trek across the Thar desert on foot or camelback, stranded for days without food or water, including women and small children. Although it was not easy for Kutch to accommodate all incoming migrants logistically, these migrants had their ways of negotiating with the administration which claimed to be left “with little option” in their decision to let them in.
Premji Haribhai Bhatti worked as an assistant in the office of the district collector in Bhuj from 1960 to 2003 and was personal assistant to the collector for some years from 1975 onward.5 During wartime, he recalled the frenetic pace of activity in the office. He was part of a team that was deputed on duty to Chad Bet during the 1965 war, and he traveled to many villages in TharParkar that had been temporarily “captured” by the Indian Army during 1971. In 1972, he recalled, there were scores of Hindus fleeing their villages who wanted to cross the border into Kutch. “They had crossed the border, and we had set up a temporary camp for them at Dhrobana. They had no papers, no permits; we could not let them in. We were under strict instructions. We told the men to go back, but we just could not handle the women. They told us, ‘If you want us to return, kill our children first.’ They were so desperate and had been suffering so much in Pakistan, what could we do? So we had to let them stay.” He was still haunted by these faces of women and their children. They had been told they could not let in people across the border, but this particular officer relented in the face of what he saw as a moral code of gendered kinship and valor apart from a general internalization of the narrative of “Hindu suffering” in Pakistan.
As I have argued above, these narratives of “Hindu suffering” allowed the state to flex their rules of entry and citizenship. However, narratives of military excesses in TharParkar did not always distinguish between the military forces of the enemy nations, both of whom ended up terrorizing the local population. Arif, a Muslim from Bhuj, was a soldier in the Indian Army during the war who found himself in TharParkar in 1971. As a member of the victorious force, he saw that people were terrified of the occupying Indian Army, which was able to instill fear in the local population. Although he felt proud as a member of the Indian force, as a Muslim, he was also troubled at what he saw as the behavior of his fellow troops. He saw them as the perpetrator of crimes against the Muslims in TharParkar who lived in mortal fear of the “invading” Indian Army. His daughter had preserved photographs of him taken at some of the grander mosques in the region that had fallen temporarily under Indian control. “People fled their homes, leaving young women sleeping at home as they decamped in the early hours of the morning; they were so scared of us.” In his opinion, soldiers used to often behave quite badly, looting and plundering the houses they came across. Arif brought back with him small mementos such as Korans that were lying scattered around in the melee of soldiers’ loot. He picked them up for safekeeping lest they came under someone’s feet.
Regardless of the narratives of military heavy-handedness on the civilian population of the Thar region, it was Hindus rather than Muslims who were permitted into Kutch in large numbers. Over time, a number of refugee “camps” sprang up across Kutch. Some of them lasted many years such as the one in Jura village; it is still referred to as Jura camp. Vir Singh is considered to be an elder of the community in a migrant community in eastern Kutch. He recalls that he was in his forties during the war. The collective appellation of Sodha was an important one for him: although all refugees from Pakistan are now called Sodha in Kutch, telescoping under the term a host of Hindu migrants from Sindh, Vir Singh reminded me in no uncertain terms that his family would count as Sodha even in Pakistan.
The idea of a “Sodha majority” (bahumati) in TharParkar is an important aspect of community honor and status, as they see it. In Vir Singh’s words, “We had a bahumati [majority] in TharParkar and Umerkote.” He continued, “We were very happy in TharParkar; we had no problems there. Our work was kheti [agriculture] and mal [animal herding]. The main problem after the border came, when India-Pakistan happened [jab Bharat-Pakistan hua] was in terms of lagan vyavahar [the work of marriage relations]. All our brides used to come from Kutch or Rajasthan depending upon which border applied [jo border laga, vahan se bahuein late the]. [Umerkote families tended to bring brides from Rajasthan and TharParkar families depended on brides from Kutch.] Our daughters-in-law [bahuein] came from Chavan, Jhala, Jadeja, and Waghela clans in Kutch. After the border came, it was difficult to cross, and there were no matches available in TharParkar, so lagan vyavahar became very difficult for us.” I pressed him to explain the lack of marriageable options for Sodhas in TharParkar, and he spelled it out for me, not unlike Ram Singh Sodha would also do. “Every community [jat] has its own social standing in relative terms. We have to weigh our options and can only do len den [taking-giving, i.e., marriage] within a social group that matches our own status.”
Vir Singh spoke in Gujarati laced with what sound like Rajasthani words. “This is Thari,” he said, laughing at the difficulty I had in following his vocabulary, so he kept searching for the appropriate Hindi words for me to note down. When I asked whether they spoke the same language on both sides of the border, he burst out impatiently, “Yes, yes, our mothers were all from here, this side!” Like Gulab Singh, Kutch was the home of his maternal kin, who assumed a newfound political importance in the post-1965 period, as they—rather than the paternal side—became instrumental in the negotiation of marriage alliances and a passport to new forms of political belonging.
This comes through when he describes his border crossing after the 1971 war. They left all their lands behind because “zindagi [life] was important, not possessions.” “In 1965, during the war, Indian forces did not have the upper hand. But it so happened that the harassment of Hindus by the Pakistani military increased after 1965. They constantly accused us of being informers or of spying for India. Daily life became very tough during that time.” He clarifies that they had no problems with their Muslim neighbors, only with the “military.”
“We had already planned that we would break the chowki and escape into India, but as it happened, before we could execute our plan, war broke out in late 1971. The Indian Army took qabza [seized] TharParkar, and under their protection, we were able to cross into Kutch. During the war, India held the territory for a while. The collector [of Kutch] used to make frequent trips out into the Thar area.” Vir Singh appealed to the collector for a passage to Kutch. In the following conversation that he recounted with the collector, one gets the sense of the kind of meaning and emotion that was attached to the potential migration to India, where they had never been before, but where they had maternal kin. In traditional patrivirilocal marriage, maternal kin are the source of emotional rather than political connection; the nanihal is the space of love but not inheritance.6 In the 1971 migration from TharParkar to Kutch or Rajasthan, the traditional asymmetry between bride takers and bride givers, so integral to the maintenance of honor in marriage alliances, was reversed. It was the maternal kin, the home villages of their mothers and daughters-in-law, that became the “natural” choice of migration even though they had never been to these places. As they negotiated with administrators for passage, their hopes for the future betray this optimism, as indicated by this conversation reported by Vir Singh with the collector of Kutch on one of the latter’s forays into TharParkar.
Collector: |
So you want to go to India. Where will you live? |
Vir Singh: |
In Kutch. |
C: |
Have you seen [been to] Kutch [Kutch dekha hai]? |
VS: |
No, but our relations [sage wale] are there; my nanihal is in Ratnal. |
C: |
Your cheeks are red like a tomato [tamatar jaise gal] here [you look so healthy with rosy cheeks]; in Kutch, they will become black like a stone [Kutch is also known for its “black hill,” kala dungar]. Are you sure you want to go there? |
VS: |
(laughing) I don’t mind, we will go to our sage wale [relations]. |
Here, the collector is perhaps warning Vir Singh of the travails that lie ahead, of the uncertain life in refugee camps pending the grant of full citizenship. Although they had perhaps envisioned directly settling down with their relations in Kutch, they had to undergo a liminal phase in refugee camps that were set up specially for “Pakistani refugees”; in some cases, their stay in camps lasted as long as 1977. Vir Singh recalls, “We crossed in 1972; about 75,000 families must have crossed at the time, of which 15,000 stayed in Kutch. We chose our migration route based on existing marriage ties. Those who lived in Umerkote had relations in Rajasthan, so they settled there.”
In the refugee camps, mobility was restricted. They were guarded by huge police posts to “ensure that they did not run away.” They did not have Indian citizenship, and they had to be monitored and surveilled as “Pakistani citizens.” They were not allowed to work in waged employment, as they were not yet citizens. One of the oldest nongovernmental organizations in Kutch began to work informally with women at this stage, collecting the embroidery they did at home, and from these early steps, the soof embroidery characteristic of TharParkar came to be reproduced among migrant communities across Kutch, enabling many of them to earn a good livelihood from handicraft in the decades to come. Vir Singh stayed with his extended family for three years in the Shivlakha camp, moving in 1974 to his new village. In the camp, he recalled, they were huddled together under the permanent watch of the police. They were impatient; this was not what they had crossed into Kutch for. They wanted to go visit their relatives and begin to chart out their options, begin a new life. “Before we got nagarikta [citizenship], we had to apply for a pass to leave the camp and visit villages outside. The pass was valid for three days, issued by the police chowki attached to the camp. They kept a heavy eye [bhari nigrani] on us. As soon as our three days were up, on the fourth morning, sure enough, the police would show up at our relatives’ villages and round us up. They would say, ‘You are from Pakistan; we can’t let you roam freely’ ” (emphasis added). Vir Singh also described the ritual of offering them some money and allowing them to extend their curfews by a few hours or days. Summing up his migration experience after leaving the camp, he said, “After coming here, we received nagarikta [citizenship], but nothing else. Five thousand to six thousand rupees per family, ten acres of land, ration cards [identity cards that permit a stipulated amount of food grain free of cost per family per month] for everyone; that is all [bas].” Although it sounded like a lot to me and I said as much, he responded that “others” were able to get much more and become ghamandi (arrogant) in the process, a not-so-veiled reference to those lower caste groups who were able to lay claim to Scheduled Caste status and avail affirmative action. But it is possible to also read his lament in terms of the harsh reality he had to face when he realized that citizenship did not solve the problem of social belonging. As migrants from the “enemy” country, they were potential “traitors” even with the right kinds of papers.
The third narrative is from Ram Singh Sodha, who requested the use of his real name. Ram Singh is a well-known name among Hindu citizenship seekers from Sindh. He had been living in Kutch for almost seven years when I first met him. He was still awaiting his formal grant of citizenship, although it is not clear under what provisions his Indian visa is extended repeatedly. Unlike other visitors from Pakistan who have short-term visas and are obliged to repeatedly register themselves with the civil police authorities, Ram Singh’s visibility and status were far out of proportion with his formal legal status as a citizen-in-waiting. In Pakistan, he was an elected member in various district bodies in Sindh and eventually became a member of the Sindh Legislative Assembly. His direct channel of communication with the prime minister and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) may have had something to do with his extended visa status. He was hopeful that once the CAA was passed, he would not have to run from pillar to post on this official matter anymore (dhakke na khane padenge).
I had spoken with Ram Singh on the phone, and he confirmed a morning appointment to meet at his house in Nakhatrana town, an hour’s drive west of Bhuj. He requested that I arrive on time as he had a busy day with a number of meetings scheduled. As has been a common experience for me in Kutch, no address was provided; accompanied by Mohamed Hosain, I arrived at Nakhatrana’s central bus station where we began to make inquiries. In this case, we did not have long to wait before we were directed into various small alleyways that eventually opened out onto new suburban developments. We asked around in the few shops for Ram Singh Sodha or “Bapu” as many Rajputs are called in Kutch. The halwai tending a large vat of freshly frying jalebis yelled out to another man, “Where does he live? Ram Singhji Sodha, Pakistan vara [the guy from Pakistan]?”
Directed thus, we drove up to his house, an enormous and opulent new multistoried structure with a prominent golden Om (Hindu auspicious symbol) on the roof. Ushered in respectfully by his son, we wait in the living room surrounded by photo portraits of Ram Singh, his father, and his sons—a genealogical display of Rajput status. In their respective photographs, Ram Singh and his father are wearing signature traditional red headgear and long, twirled mustaches, standard sartorial references to Rajput or Kshatriya status. In the same theme, a small glass-fronted cabinet is filled with trophies and mementos inscribed in Gujarati script, Kutch Zilla Rajput Kshatriya Sangh (Kutch District Rajput Kshatriya Association). The room signaled elite Rajput caste identity in no uncertain terms; this was an important theme in his discourse.
Ram Singh descended regally from a curved staircase entering the seating area with his hands folded in greeting. In his dress and demeanor—a dark waistcoat over a voluminous dhoti—it was not difficult to imagine his past—and possibly future—as a mass political leader. Sitting on the couch opposite me, he settled the folds of his dhoti, ordered tea for us, and directed me to write down his full name and title—“Ram Singh Rana Singh Sodha Rajput, advocate, ex-MLA [Member of Legislative Assembly] Sindh.” Once again, I had the feeling that this interview was staged as a political interview. He spoke about the Thar region as the most “unique” place, one that “you will not find anywhere in the world”; he also spoke of how life was difficult for minorities in Pakistan. “There is no protection there … too many shootings and dakaity.… This made life difficult in Karachi.… Things in Thar are better, but hamari problem kuchh aur bhi hai [we (Sodhas) also have another problem].” The Sodhas, Ram Singh explained, were somewhat of a “super caste” (the highest in the caste hierarchy). “Hamari hukumat thhi” (we were the rulers/in power). The problems of a “super caste” that held strongly that community honor was tied to exogamy meant that they had to marry their daughters outside the Sodha group, but other groups in the region such as the Bhatti, Sisodiya, Rathore, Chauhan, and such like were all beneath them, socially and ritually. “How can an 80 percent marry a 20 percent?” he asked in all seriousness. All the “superior” castes, compatible with the “super caste” of Sodhas were across the border in what became India in 1947—Jhala, Jadeja, Waghela, and Chudasama were the castes he referred to. “We were just not able to marry our daughters in Pakistan; sach poocho to [if you ask for the truth], this is the main reason we have decided to migrate to India—marriage and security.”
This reminder of past glories—power and majority status (in TharParkar)—with the uncertain present where they had fallen to the position of a minority (within Pakistan) and were vulnerable to shoot-outs and insecurity of life and property (the lack of “protection” even for an elected MLA) is an important theme that structures Sodha constructions of their move to India and the necessity of acquiring Indian citizenship. It is the only way to live honorably and to reproduce the family line (vansh) with purity; yet this move is premised on a shift away from the patriline who only remain as portraits on the wall, resplendent in their sartorial magnificence.
Part of the “honorable” life is a strict code of gender segregation (laj) that makes it greatly difficult, if not impossible, to talk to Sodha women. Although my interviews with Ram Singh and Vir Singh were conducted in all-male groups (men serving us tea and snacks that must have been assembled by women out of sight), my conversations with Gulab Singh took place with his wife and daughter-in-law at home but in the background. When he asked his wife to come and sit with us, she obeyed him for all of five minutes. Her head demurely covered with her delicate chiffon sari, perfectly matching her gray hair and hazel eyes. However, when the conversation turned to questions of marriage—her own and others—she was as shy as a new bride and retreated hastily to the open doorway between the kitchen and the living room, which is where she sat, head covered and face averted, for the rest of my visit.
Ram Singh clarifies that he had tried to break the taboo against marriage within Sindh for TharParkar’s Sodhas, but for the most part, people refuse to change their old ways. Exogamous marriage is a matter of honor, also a way of distinguishing themselves from others in TharParkar—Dalits, Kolis, and Muslims. Ram Singh, whose story by no means represents a “subaltern” perspective, chose to move to India and seek citizenship himself. Referring to him, Vir Singh had said, “Look at him, even he [someone of his stature and connections] could not find bahuein [daughters-in-law] in Sindh. He has just recently moved to India because he needs to marry his sons.” It is precisely this superior status that determines the necessity to migrate. Vir Singh had added, “Harijans, Kolis, and others like them [lower castes], they have no problems in Thar. They stayed on there; this is because they have no leti-deti [taking and giving, marriage relations] problems. They marry within their communities like the Muslims. Our [Sodha] main problem was of marriage.” In addition, the loss of bahumati (majority) in the context of Pakistani political life and lack of “protection” afforded to Hindus makes the move to India a desirable one.
The language used by each of these men indicates their respective social and political location. Ram Singh speaks like the politician he is—of demographics (80 percents and 20 percents), of the need for security and the stress on “protection” for minorities within a democratic context. Vir Singh spoke of the engagements he had with the state as he negotiated entry into Kutch, but his narrative is redolent of the traditional marriage system—of leti-deti (taking and giving in marriage) and the imperative of settling down in Kutch where he got political citizenship but not necessarily the social capital that was left behind in Sindh with the political and social majority (bahumati) in the region. Finally, Gulab Singh spoke candidly of being a young, single man who sought to cross the border in search of a new life for himself. The chapter tracked the work that must be done by migrants and citizenship aspirants to belong socially. Although political belonging is granted by the state to people who are seen as having the correct political and demographic attributes, this does not automatically translate into social capital and acceptance by the larger society. The work of belonging involves a reconfiguration of traditional marriage patterns and the place of “honor” in reckoning political lineage in an altered political and social context.