A Window To Perceptive Journalism

Phenomenon Talhan:
Caste Violence Is New,
But Caste Oppression Is Not

S P Singh

Chandigarh:

In the queer way in which issues manage national gaze in India, emerging caste consciousness among Dalits in Punjab moved into limelight only when a village exploded along caste-wedge. Talhan in Jalandhar, Punjab's Doaba heartland sandwiched between rivers Sutlej and Beas, alerted politicos to what sociologists were warning about for long.  

Talhan's Dalits, 70 per cent of the village population, wanted a stake in a shrine with crores of income, but Jats controlling it for decades refused to part with any slice of the cash pie, bringing things to a stage where violence, police firing and curfew figured in news from Punjab after a decade.

Ironically, Talhan's Dalits clashed with Jat Sikhs, thus underlining the failure of religion's institutions to build upon the tenet of castelessness, a primary attraction that Sikhism had for the lower castes in its formative years.

Interestingly, as sociologist Surinder Jodhka of JNU's Centre for Study of

Social Systems, points out, : "Low caste Sikhs of Punjab are the only Dalits from a non-Hindu religious community listed among scheduled castes."

Any Dalit versus Jats violence in the state has dangerous portents where SCs account for over 30 per cent of population, highest ratio in the country with average national figure of 16.32 per cent, and Jats control almost all power levers – an instant-explosive situation.  

In a country where brahmin is central to practice of caste, another striking aspect of caste relations in Punjab is the absence of this construct of brahmin. They do exist as a caste but are only ritually important for urban upper caste Hindus, a numerically small chunk.  

"For the first time in Punjab" were the much-spouted words in the media to describe caste violence, but as always in societal disparities, a Talhan was in the making for years. Small scale violence against Dalits is reported too frequently, and Talhan only embedded in memory images which could have virtually have any of Punjab's 12,600 villages as the dateline.  

But Talhan in Doaba was perhaps was the most apt to emerge as a symbol.  Parallel to the 1920s reform movements in Punjab, Mangoo Ram was able to mobilize a large majority of êichamarsêr from the Doaba region, and his Ad-Dharmi movement was termed by sociologists like Jurgensmeyer as among the most successful of Dalit mobilisations in the history of modern India.  

The Punjab Alienation of Land Act, 1901 clubbed Dalits with 'non-agriculturalist' castes, legally denying them the access to landholdings. While the Act was scrapped after Partition, its impact was never reversed, consequently leaving Dalits at the lowest end in the agrarian state. They now have 2.54 per cent of total agricultural land, and 0.40 per cent of total landholdings, lowest figures in the country.  

Against the all-India average of 25.44 percent, only 4.80 pc of the SC workers were employed as cultivators.  

Silent developments have telling consequences. "Over the years, Ad Dharmis have moved closer to Sikhism," says Jodhka. But Sikhism in practice, thanks to its ill-equipped preachers and Akali leaders, moved farther from its tenets.

This unleashed a phenomena of asserting autonomy by building their own gurdwaras, a phenomena Jodhka calls "a question of pride and a form of local level resistance." Talhan is a product of just this phenomenon.

With off-shore greener pastures beckoning, Jats took to the West, Dalits to the Gulf. Politically conscious after the regional reform movements, penetration of education, and occupational diversity, Dalits are now more than likely to assert themselves.  

Unlike the rest of country where hegemony of brahmin is one axis of the caste structure, in Punjab it is the oppression by landowners (read Jats) and practice of unfree/bonded labour.  

"Caste in Punjab can perhaps be understood better in the framework of 'agrarianism' rather than through the more popular notion of brahminism," says Jodhka.  

And with most political parties failing to deliver the goods to the Dalits, limiting the expression of their concerns to shagun schemes and a few units of power every month to Dalits, political space is wide open for parties willing to address the vaccum. Nature abhors vaccum, and Talhan now knows it.■  

June 14, 2003

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