Local Customs       

The full title of the chapter is Local Customs & the Economy grow Mustaches. Property titles, fixed revenue assessments and reduction of a universe of customs into a tightly construed code of customary law altered the grammar of social relations. The man became the owner of farmland and was responsible for paying revenue. In case of default he was responsible for borrowing money and paying the revenue or selling the land. A woman could rarely own land in her own name except as a widow who did not have sons. All this led to an erosion of women’s rights, they are wholly dependant on the authority & goodwill of their nearest male relative.

Just as the Bengal countryside has undergone a profound change when the notorious Permanent Settlement of 1793 altered the meaning of the word ‘zamindar’ from ‘revenue collector’ to ‘landlord’ the creation of peasant properties in the Punjab unleashed a whole social revolution.

Many key terms in the British records acquired colonial meanings, even as they purported to describe precolonial situations, and they were further skewed by translation into English as codes of law for e.g. the word ‘local’ which meant village (as geographical locality) before customary laws were written down was transformed to mean caste or tribe after the codification of customary law. This shift in terminology had implications for women; people were now constituted to belong to patriarchal lineages more then to localities.

Earlier land was seldom bought or sold but the shares of the family grew or diminished according to political or economic opportunities as new lands were acquired by the village through war or fresh settlement after cleaning forest. Men tilled the soil and were called to join the army of the larger political unit to the which the village belonged in case of war. Men defended the rights of their family and were entitled cultivate and they their wives, widows, daughters shared in the heaps of grain. Rights of women were not different from rights of men. These consisted of a share in the produce rather than the right to own the land or mortgage it. When man migrated to another village his wife and family who chose to stay behind did not loose their share in the produce of the land or the village of his birth.

The registration of ownership of land laid the foundation stone for making the economy more masculine. The next step was an attempt to translate social & customary practice into legal codes. Only male heads were consulted to ascertain customs thereby making them more important.

The codification of customary law in the Punjab had six distinct stages (Tupper 1881: vol1) and its offers a fascinating study of the evolution of custom as British political & economic intrusions reconfigured the supply body of local knowledge & practice. My purpose is to focus on how the process of codification itself transformed the meanings & social realities of women rights. Friends the book has too much of detail on this topic so am just sharing key points so they might appear disjointed.

The design of this project of gathering local knowledge (in which local had come to mean tribe not village) was entrusted entirely to masculine hands from conception to execution. There is also little doubt that the civilians objective was to exclude ambiguities from creeping into the vertical grid of patriarchal & agnatic rights in land that would devolve from father to son and thereafter. Socially close relationships with the mother’s kin (nanke) and wife’s kin (saure) that would otherwise have been readily acknowledged now posed difficulty since the entire exercise of creating customary law books was framed by the more crucial tasks of creating property records & noting revenue demands simultaneously.

Widows were probably the most vulnerable category of women in this revamped codification of customs project. Wilson wrote that a widow couldn’t sell, mortgage or give away by way of gift any immovable property, which has devolved, from her husband meaning it had to revert to the husband’s relatives on her death.

Tupper said that daughters were prohibited from inheriting land in the Punjab because they were generally married outside the clan, although within the looser circle or tribe of origin, and allowing daughters to inherit would have allowed land to pass outside the clan. He had, in all fairness, also listed the exceptions & caveats to this simple construction of a daughters rights. This customary right of unmarried daughter was a casualty of the British vested interest in protesting the importance of clan & tribe and agnatic devolution, and in making men responsible for paying their share of revenue.

Sons not only gave their labor to the family plot, now less secure and inalienable than it once has been, but served as construction workers, soldiers or migrants to new canal colonies. Both conditions – increased opportunity & prosperity and financial insecurity spurred the planning of large families with more male children than ever before. The demand for Punjabi males, particularly Jats & Muslims translated into more sons per family and this demand increased as the colonial govt recruited them aggressively to join the army and construction works and to clear /cultivate the many millions of wooded acres in the Punjab.

Control of land & houses i.e. any form of productive wealth seemed to be reserved for men now. Women acquired rights of maintenance to such property only through their relationships to men as their daughters, wives, mothers and widows. Muslims came out bluntly against the notion of women’s special property rights as most Sikhs & Hindus, only the dowry paying castes of Hindus still admitted that women controlled their own stridhan. The Brahmins, Rajputs, Khatris & Banias thought of it as movable property of females over which they had exclusive control. The husband could call the stridhan, only with the wife’s consent and only in times of crisis.

By 1850 the idea of property in the subcontinent had acquired all the refinements of the English idea of property, it was classified as inherited or self-acquired and as movable or immovable. In defining the special wealth of females the British were able to ignore the implicit wealth of married women in family land and the lapse of their shared rights occasioned by the creation of individual proprietary rights in land given to the male head of the family. The concept of property stood altered in the most radical way and on this central concept were laid down the new equations of rights of women & men.

We can clearly see Wilson welding the patriarchal strictures of the past and modern capitalistic ideas of individual rights to create hybrid meaning that transmuted into law. It emerged that wives did not have any special or ordinary wealth, and daughters could not inherit. It virtually dictated the corollary that daughters could get only movable property as dowry.

The more people became discontented with the new meanings of property and challenged the existing finality of alienations the more the govt exchequer was enriched with court fees and the more the lawyers made money. Soon the initial pretense fell away that these volumes of alleged everyday customs were anything more than a ready reckoner to help revenue officials find the next heir in line should the original titleholder be dead.

Making of a male dominated society if the British had included and ordinary men (who were not headmen) in their consultations, polls and information gathering ventures. The deliberate omission reflected their own anxieties founded in the erosion of upper class make bastions in England, where women had won limited rights to property in 1880 and working class men a wider franchise in1882 after heroic struggle against the births govt and Parliament.

Thus a new customary law took birth. But there were other major changes making society more masculine that we must urgently turn to.

Punjabi Manpower: Martial, Migratory and Self-Exploiting, IMPORTANT
For all the imperial pretensions of having created a modern administration and instituted a rule of law, state power depended on the twin pillars of land revenue & the army. The expansion of exclusively male opportunities for employment and migration and the half-baked free market in commodity production & land were the final turn of the screw in the ambivalent modernization that the colonial state offered.

Beginning in the second half of the 19th century Punjabi men were used to bring forest & scrubland under the plough, to develop & inhabit the unchartered acres within Punjab so as to expand the revenue base of the govt, to build a network of canals and barrages on the five rivers that flowed through some of the most fertile land on the globe, to lay railway lines to facilitate troop & commodity movements and to form the largest standing army in the world in order to defend the frontiers of India, quell internal unrest and expand the African empire. Punjabi men were also exported as migrant labor to Canada, South Africa and Australia. I will concentrate on the effects of these changes on female infanticide, marriage market, marriage customs & expenses in order to conclude my argument on the masculinization of the Punjab economy.

Punjab was plagued with continual warfare for long. It was the gateway & path to the fertile plains of Bharat. Geopolitics had made military skills part of the workday repertoire of Hindu Kshatriya, Jats and even Brahmins long before Islam & Sikhism produced their own religiously inspired contingents. Muslim Pathans, Afghans & Khalsa Sikhs had battled fiercely as the Mughal power declined in the late 17th century.

The Punjabi soldiery found it duly admired in a typical 19th century racial construction of their prowess as “the martial races of India” and the British were quick to sort out the martial from the non-martial Punjabis classifying whole castes rather than individuals into these categories. In keeping with the racist mentality of the colonial administration, a much-decorated general of the Indian Army, Sir George MacMunn, studiously culled all the pertinent racial thinking of the previous century into a brazen compendium. Simply put he said of the 350 million Indians he reckoned that perhaps there may have been 3 million manly males between the ages of 25-35 because the mass of people neither have the martial aptitude or physical courage which was a product of the degenerative effect of years of varying religions on their adherents, of early marriage, premature brides etc. The entire book has numerous connections made between degeneracy & effeminacy that it is clear that being ‘manly’ and capable of inflicting violence to resolve conflict was so admired that it must have encouraged this behavior in domestic situations as well.

Friends the truth for proclaiming select residents of Punjab as the martial races of India lie elsewhere as was beautifully brought out by Dr B R Ambedkar in his book, Thoughts on Pakistan written in 1941. I reproduce excerpts from my article on the same.

Question of Armed Forces (excerpts from Thoughts on Pakistan by Dr Ambedkar)
“The defence of a country depends more on its fighting force than on its scientific frontier or resources. What are the fighting resources available to Pakistan and Hindustan? The Simon Commission pointed out a special feature of the Indian Defence Problem in the sense that there were special areas, which alone offered recruits to the Indian army. The Commission found this state of affairs natural to India and in support it cited the following figures recruited from different Provinces during the Great War.

This data reveals that the fighting forces available for the defence of India mostly come from the area, which is Pakistan. Then how can Hindustan defend itself? The facts brought out by the Commission are beyond question but it cannot be said that only PAK can produce soldiers and Hindustan cannot. Do only people of Northwestern India belong to Martial Classes?

From the above data it appears so. But Mr Chaudhari (see his articles on ‘The martial Races of India’ published in the modern Review of July-September 1930, Jan-Feb 1931) has by his data demonstrated that this far from true. He shows that the predominance of the men of the Northwest took place as early as the Mutiny of 1857 some 20 years before the theory of martial and non-martial classes were projected in a distinct form in 1879. Their predominance had nothing to do with their alleged fighting qualities but was due to the fact that they had helped the British suppress the Mutiny in which the Bengal Army was completely involved. The Mutiny blew up the old Bengal army and brought into existence a Punjabized and barbarized army resembling the Indian army of today in broad lines and general propositions of its composition.

The gap created by the revolt of the Hindustani regiments of the Bengal army were once filled up by the Sikhs and other Punjabis, Hillmen eager for revenge. Said Gen Mansfield, the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army about the Sikhs “It is not because they loved us, but because they hated Hindustan and the Bengal army that Sikhs had flocked to our standard instead of seeking the opportunity to strike again for their freedom. The services rendered by the Sikhs and the Gurkhas during the Mutiny were not forgotten and henceforward Punjab & Nepal had the place of honor in the Indian Army”.

As a result of the above people from Northwest India came to be regularly employed in the army and came to look upon it as an occupation with a security and a career that was denied to men from the rest of India. This was not the case with people in the rest of India. It must be noted that occupation becomes hereditary and that the most difficult for a man to do is to change his occupation. This distinction between martial and non-martial classes is purely arbitrary. But apart from this there is enough fighting material in Hindustan. There are the Sikhs, the Rajputs, Marathas and even the people of Madras as was observed by Sir General F P Haines a one time Commander-in-Chief in India.

Hindustan need have no apprehension regarding the supply of an adequate fighting force from among its own people. The Simon Commission drew attention to three features of the Indian army that struck them as special and peculiar to India.

One the duty of the Indian army was two fold – one to protect it from independent tribes on the Indian side of the Afghan border from raiding the peaceful inhabitants of the plains below, two was to protect India against invasion by countries lying behind and beyond organized territories. The second unique feature was the role of the Indian army in maintaining internal piece. It is a striking fact that while in regular units of the army British soldiers are app 1 to 2.5 %, in troops allotted for internal security the preponderance is reversed – the ratio being about 8 British soldiers to 7 Indians.

The Third unique feature is the preponderance in it of the men from the Northwest. This is dealt with above but the Commission ignored an important feature namely, Communal Composition of the Army. Thanks to Mr Chaudhari, the following table shows the proportion of soldiers serving in the Indian infantry –

Changes in the Communal Composition of the Indian Army

This table shows how the communal composition of the Indian army has been undergoing a profound change. Change is particularly noticeable after 1919.

Communal Composition of Indian Infantry Cavalry in 1930

After 1930 there is no information available on the communal composition of the Indian Army. The book has 8 pages of Legislative Assembly debates 1938 on the subject but the British refuse to provide any information. This obstinacy on the part of the Govt of India to provide this vital point has given rise to all sorts of speculation as to the present proportion of Muslims in the Indian army, some day it is between 60-70 %. Obviously it must be high enough to cause alarm to the Hindus.

I cannot help but recalling words from Veer Savarkar’s biography by Dhananjay Keer, quote pg 257 “Said in 1940 - Since the days of the First War of Independence in 1857, it has been the policy of the British to keep the army out of politics. Our politics must be to carry politics into the Indian army and once we succeed the battle of freedom would be won. Till the day of Savarkar’s whirlwind propaganda for Hindu militarization, military career was the monopoly of the Muslims, who formed three fourths of the Indian army. The effect of this propaganda was seen everywhere. The Muslim plans for preponderance was effectively checkmated and brought down and the % of the Hindus in the army went up as high as seventy.

After the Mutiny of 1857 in order to prevent Hindus, Muslims Sikhs from uniting it was decided to divide the army on a provincial basis something that the Indian army follows up to this day. This was called the principle of Class Composition the necessity being not giving too much strength or prominence to any particular race ore religious group. These principles have been governing the Indian army policy.” End of Dr Ambedkar reference.

By the late 19th century,                      Nos of Infantry Units

Bengalis, always effeminate, were now dismissed as hopeless poltroons while the Punjabis were seen as real men with hair on their chests who could be counted on in the battlefield.

During World War I, Indians troops numbered over half a million of which 80% were Punjabi soldiers. Sikhs were recruited in large numbers although they were only 12% of the population whereas Muslims were 50% and Hindus 38%. Rawalpindi became the district from where the greatest number of recruits were drawn followed by Jullunder, Ambala and Lahore districts. Even though Sikhs were proportionately the most numerous, they were discriminated against and began resisting recruitment as the militant Akali Movement began gathering strength in response to their many grievances.

The colonial Indian army offered many inducements which included the pre-British practice of awarding land grants to officers, having a fixed tenure as a soldier with a fixed cash salary and receiving a pension after retirements from loyal service or a smaller pension for the widow if death intervened. In war years the state added cash bonuses, free rations of food & clothing and free burials to stimulate recruitment. Though this might not be big money but in hard times created by the very revenue policies that generated the money to pay for them, a military career brought the farmer security that had compromised by making its lien on land so tenuous. One must however remember that the British used the Indians as cannon fodder, keeping European lives & salaries to the minimum and they traveled wherever they were ordered to go.

Discriminated Khatris - To prevent the kind of mutiny that they had experienced in 1857 the British segregated regimental units from alleged martial races, i.e. Sikhs, Pathans, Rajputs & Gurkhas each had their own discrete cavalry & infantry units. This severely restricted Hindus of other castes who wished to join the army particularly the Khatris, who had served in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s forces. Although none of the military histories throw it up, it is important to mention that Hindus, particularly Khatris, who were acknowledged as Kshatriyas were arbitrarily lumped with the trading castes in the British census reports and were seldom accepted into the British military service. Under the British, the khatris who had also been landholders acquired vast acreage in auctions and foreclosure as agriculture became profitable until the Land Alienation Act of 1900 forbade them to do so as a non-agricultural tribe. They had always been occupationally diverse and were educated, entrepreneurial and opportunistic engaged in military, trade & agriculture. They appear to have become the core of the emergent English educated middle class whose members were to be found in leading positions in Punjabi society as lawyers, doctors, bankers, farmers & moneylenders.

Why was the first son made a Sikh? - these khatris were not considered suitable recruits for the army unless the acquired the markers of the martial races meaning the external appearance of the 5 k’s i.e. long hair, kripan, kada etc. Many families in the late 19th century and even until Independence got around this by raising one or more sons as Sikhs, chiefly by having them adopt the name ‘Singh’ and grow hair / beard to match meaning becoming followers of Khalsa. The British enforced rigid occupational boundaries by creating traditional agriculturists, martial races and trading castes. They could not trust the educated Khatri to be as obedient a soldier as the Jat. The true draw for young men who flocked to the army was the steady pay, pension after 10 years of service and the promise of one day owning a few well-watered acres in the fertile new canal colonies. This is what made the soldiers eligible husbands, far more than those who did not have jobs or whose land was in the danger of becoming encumbered.

The colonization of West Punjab now mainly in Pakistan is unique because it actually increased canal irrigated lands in Punjab almost fivefold from 3 to 14 million acres. It entailed intensive hard labor and a vast migration of Punjabis of the 3 faiths from the settled parts of Punjab. It also led to deterioration in the ecology of the region, since these acres were forests & grazing areas. Cutting down forests, opening up new lands for agriculture and army recruitment all opened new employment opportunities for Punjabi men.

The British objective was to create canal colonies and the class of people they wishes to appease i.e. hereditary agriculturists belonging to land holding lineages. Each colony as it was developed became a political weapon that entrenched conservative interests by creating a strong band of agricultural & military families who owed their existence to the state and were loyal to the British in all times. Such policies made for dominant agricultural tribes, particularly in the Muslim & Sikh communities Even though Brahmins, Rajputs & Khatris had always owned land, their access to land was now legally restricted because they were not agricultural tribes. There were a few exceptions like Baba Khem Singh Bedi, a khatri and head of the Bedis carried enormous clout amongst the leading Sikh families. Canals brought increased prosperity but also an ecological backlash. 2 tragic effects were malaria epidemics and infertility of irrigated lowlands due to an increase in the salinity of the soil cost lives and increased revenue defaults.

These few sentences tell us of the social changes in east Punjab. Quiet desperation built pressure to exploit customary ways of obtaining gold, silver or to buy land elsewhere or to replenish a herd and dowry was a proper place to look. The will to obtain large dowries from the families of daughter-in-laws becomes vivid as one leafs through dozens of official reports.

Thus the difference between the security of the rights in land that sons inherited and the movable property that daughters inherited as dowry was greatly reduced. The dowry became as great a prize for men as their inherited rights in land had been. If anything dowry was more valuable & versatile in a situation where land was barren. The devastation of the land was a tragic & unintended ecological disaster that undermined the ability of the peasants to pay their fixed dues on fixed dates. So indebtedness & poverty grew in the midst of the new prosperity, and dowries, the traditional safety net for women, now served the interests of the husbands family to purchase more land, pay revenue in a bad year or bail themselves out of the hands of loan sharks.

Faulty Liquor Policy - Another feature that increased the masculine thrusts of the economy even more pronounced was the rise in drinking in the countryside. The colonial state had a uniform policy on liquor and excise taxes in the Indian empire, the excise duty grossed only second to land revenue. What I discovered is that the colonial govt had banned the production & consumption of more nutritious indigenous brews, which use the tapping of the toddy palm or the blossoms of the mahua tree to make toddy & daru or country liquor, which were neither highly intoxicating nore addictive. In their place, the govt introduced Western style distilled spirits, which were strongly intoxicating and addictive, preserved the manufacture & distribution of liquor as a state monopoly and ordained that liquor must be sold & consumed only on licensed premises. Another effect was the violence against women by men who drank & became disorderly which had already become the besetting weakness of the soldiers who were entitled to rum rations in the army.

Expensive habits like drinking of western liquor, consumption of opium (which the British had forced to be cultivated on a large scale since the early 19th century so that they could exchange for Chinese silver), chewing of tobacco, eating of white bread instead of whole wheat unleavened chapatti, drinking tea took root. The strain on the household budget and overall indebtedness were caused chiefly by land revenue payments and new addictions listed above, in addition women seem to have less control over spending decisions as household resources came to be held exclusively in male hands.

Thus many pieces of policy & prejudice added to a severe preference for sons among all caste, tribes & creeds because men – strong young men were the only avenues to status, wealth, employment & land. Women receded into the background as total dependants in the eyes of the law, the polity and economy.

Punjabi Woman through colonial eyes - The average British bureaucrat did not see Punjabi women their veiled faces represented the backward culture they represented. Covering the face & not appearing before male strangers were cultural practices that had evolved in this war zone largely as means of self-preservation, rather than innate modesty, as conquerors were often abductors & rapists and women were often treated as the booty of war. Friends have sharing random thoughts from the book.

All this bigotry aside, civilian Brayne did not underestimate the power of Punjabi women. He understood that they were the chief decision makers in their homes & thus were a key factor in village uplift that had been overlooked by his colleagues. In new canal colonies where fertility of the soil & irrigation had led to prosperity women refused to work as menials in the fields and spent much more time in sprucing up their homes. They saw menial toil as degrading and had well tended children & homes. They campaigned against the use of jewelry. The bumper years between 1922 and 1929 allowed India to absorb 3.6 billion rupees in gold or 40% of the world production of which 40% wound up in Indian villages. Brayne criticized the villagers for doing so and wanted them to put the money in cooperative societies. Then came drought and world depression. Interest rates zoomed, the value of gold increased sharply as Britain went off the gold standard in Sept 1931, which brought more gold from farmer’s cottages to moneylender’s scales. During this hard times women’s dowries proved to be the safety net they were intended to be. It would have been disastrous if Punjabis had paid attention to the British bureaucrats who had endeavored to abolish the dowry practice through the agreements of Amritsar.

Why did dowry cost go up tenfold in Punjab when it declined in dowry conscious Britain in the same period? According to Marion Kaplan, until World War I saving for her dowry was an important aspect of a workingwoman’s life in Europe. “Only when women began to reenter the economy on a large scale as paid workers in advanced capitalist societies did the pursuit of dowries decline. Still the dowry system is in evidence in less industrialized areas of Europe”. (Kaplan 1985:6-7). Punjab & the rest of the subcontinent would have been a different place and its men & women as prosperous as anywhere in Europe had the British not been primarily self-serving in introducing a restricted instead of unfettered capitalism to the region.

Conclusion - The British selected the ryotwari settlement that gave proprietary rights in land to ryots (peasants) who tilled it and to traditional large landowners in their soldier recruiting grounds in the northwest. They insisted on fixed amounts & dates for the payment of land revenue in cash. They did not consider vagaries of Indian climate, made the peasant the owner of the land, gave him the right to alienate it though sale or mortgage. It proved disastrous in many ways. Earlier moneylenders lent small amounts, now, with land as a collateral and rising land prices, the peasant was able to borrow more, sometimes forced to as he had to pay revenue on fixed dates.

The ritual calendar & the harvest calendar in peasant society are closely linked, marriages, circumcision for Muslims, tonsure ceremonies etc all occur at auspicious times and are celebrated on the small profits of harvest. British revenue policies never permitted the peasants to accumulate capital. Fixed dates of payments, inflexibility meant short-term loans to pay land revenue. Gradually this got converted into a long-term loan. Sometimes loan was taken to marry a daughter since her marriage could not wait once she had reached puberty for reasons of chastity because the profits of the harvest had already been pledged to the moneylender. True mothers and other elders had collected for the girls dowry but the other gifts to the grooms family, cost of the village wide feast, music and drink would possibly drive the family into greater debt. Those with whom the peasant had social responsibilities would also find it difficult to honor them in a late or poor season. This made a daughters wedding extremely difficult.

A son’s wedding even today cost as much as a daughters but a son’s wedding could wait, daughters could not. The construction of woman as kanya or virgin found in other cultures as well, is at the root of these constraints. So the virginity of a nubile daughter was a man’s deepest anxiety, and she had to be married before or around puberty so that she could be gifted as a virgin. So it was not wedding cost as much as constraints of time and fear of her sexuality that made a daughters wedding an urgent & exploitable condition in early times. Boy’s side also saw marriage as a means to obtain cash or gold from the bride’s family either to pay off a loan or to purchase land. The British increasingly understood the implications of their own revenue policies but they continued to indict what they saw as cultural crimes rather than reconstruct the landholding & revenue system until rather abruptly they repealed the act against female infanticide.
It can be confidently said that in the colonial period the cost of weddings of a daughter went up as a result of not just higher tax levels but of other policy decisions as well like the policy to drastically reduce the allowance that villages had received for social expenses for the community. The common fund upkept the village guesthouse that was used by villagers to keep guests, for weddings, ceremonies funerals and religious celebrations. The change in British policy ensured that money for guesthouse maintenance was no longer available increasing the once shared costs on individual families. The web of communal and reciprocal obligations was swept away which in turn transformed the structure of gender relations. The custom of dowry slowly attained its status as the key indicator of subjugation of north Indian women, and became ready to undergo quantitative changes to match inflation, the increasing availability of consumer goods and the growing commercialization of everyday life in the next century.

Enforcement of village exogamy had worked as part of the precolonial mechanism that balanced village resources between daughters & sons, and often daughters were given far more valuable cattle & draft animals & ornaments. Women were customarily married out of their natal villages, effectively exchanging their rights as unmarried daughters for their rights as wives. But the change in the perception or land as property altered a women right. Land went up in value and her dowry was no longer comparable to getting a fair share in her natal family’s holding. An unhappy married women might find herself without any rights to property in her husband’s or parents home. Her return to parents home was not as fluid as before because the holding was now determinately owned and her brothers & their wives would see her presence as an unrightfull one. Property & dowry came to sit uneasily beside each other.

The long-term politics & wars of this region in the precolonial period had determined a marked preference for sons among all communities. Economic & social trends saw wedding expenses escalate and dowry payments evolve into possible blackmail but ever more desperate were other conditions that created preference for sons.

• Job in army with salaries, pension and promise of land grants for loyal service.
• Hope of wealth in the enormous migration of peasants to build canals & railways & to populate the agricultural colonies that would spring up along them, all made a women’s biological capacity to reproduce her most exploited asset. Punjabi men were in great demand. A gender-targeted family was targeted and achieved through female infanticide. It was pragmatic, ruthless and necessary.
• Colonial times, with their rigid revenue policy and masculine economy only deepened this trend despite the statutory efforts to reverse it.

Notes – In our moral science in college, an Irish Catholic nun had once posed this question: “What is the most important, the most precious thing a woman has? Someone said, her brains, other simple heathen girls teased her with answers such as her wit. The correct answer was ‘her virginity’ and thus my wish to impress him that I would not lose this precious thing so lightly. The culture of virgin bride is common to Hinduism, Christianity & Islam.

Friends I hope to have done a correct précis, please forgive me for any errors. I am indebted to Veena Talwar for this super work. May Ishwar give her the Shakti / strength to undertake similar work. Being a Punjabi it has helped me find answers to a number of questions like why did parents make the first son a Sikh or why is land in Punjab today owned mostly by the Jats and not Khatris.