#ravinder kaur

[townpostin]

Sarjamda Sikh Women’s Sangat Head Honoured By CGPC Surjeet Kaur honoured as Sarjamda Gurdwara Sikh Women’s Sangat president at a CGPC ceremony in Jamshedpur’s Sakchi....

Sarjamda Sikh Women's Sangat Head Honoured By CGPC

[pallavivyas]

Why Should We Eat More Alkaline Foods?  Watch this video and learn how we can maintain the right balance between alkaline and acidic food in our diet

[pyotra]

This study is located in one of these exclusive camps for Untouchable [Partition] refugees in central Delhi called Rehgar Pura. The settlement is located next to the now-sprawling commercial area of Karol Bagh. This is where a large number of Punjabi upper-caste refugees had set up their commercial enterprises as well as their homes in 1947. The place had been a middle-class Muslim locality built a few decades before Partition to relieve the congestion in the walled city quarters. Rehgar Pura, an Untouchable colony, was located further south of Karol Bagh where many Muslim sweepers and leather workers resided. Non-Muslim sweepers also resided in the area especially after the Delhi municipality started large-scale recruitments from among the Punjabi Chuhra communities to keep the city clean (Prashad 2000). During the Partition riots both upper-caste and Untouchable Muslims fled the Karol Bagh and Rehgar Pura areas since these were among the prime locations where maximum violence took place in Delhi. The Untouchable non-Muslim refugees were resettled in the Rehgar Pura locality where new mud huts were constructed for them. Many years later, "pucca" sheds called Sau Quarter (one hundred quarters) were constructed by the government. Within the locality these are known as the Partition houses, distinct from the houses occupied by those who had settled there before Partition. Rehgar Pura is now relatively prosperous compared to other Untouchable colonies located in east and north Delhi. The main reason for this is its proximity to the commercial activity in Karol Bagh. Skinning hides, tanning and shoe manufacturing have emerged as major cottage industries in Rehgar Pura where most houses are connected with the leather trade in one way or another. Many upper-caste traders from Karol Bagh took advantage of the cheaper real estate in Rehgar Pura and purchased property to use as storage sites or manufacturing units. The tall four-storied, newly-constructed and freshly-painted buildings are evidence of rent earned on property by the original owners. The first glimpse into the resettlement process of Untouchable migrants can be obtained from brief mentions in the archives of official files and documents at the Ministry of Rehabilitation. The Untouchable migrants are officially termed as ‘Harijan refugees’ in these accounts. The Annual Report mentions that a Harijan section of the Ministry was established on 15 February 1948 to ‘settle uprooted Harijans’ (GoI 1947–48: 24). The projects accomplished through this section include (a) the allotment of a total of 50,000 acres in Karnal and Bikaner to 570 Harijan families from East Punjab and 4,000 families from Bahawalpur respectively;2 (b) the construction of 301 houses for Harijans in Ahmedabad; (c) securing employment for 407 Harijan refugees as sweepers and for seventy Sindhi Oades [Odhs] as construction workers; and (d) the establishment of a housing society for Harijans in Delhi.

Ravinder Kaur, “Narrative Absence: An ‘Untouchable’ account of Partition migration” in Contributions to Indian Sociology 42 (2) (2008).

[pyotra]

However, this master narrative [of Partition] is characterised by a near absence of Untouchable migrants in popular accounts. The quintessential Punjabi ‘refugee’ thus constructed, always spoken of in masculine pronouns, is implicitly understood to be someone from the socially respectable castes. For instance, in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan [2006 (1956)], one of the most popular works of fiction based on the Partition and the subject of numerous films and television serials, the main characters are mainly identified through religious affiliations—for example, Jugga hails from the powerful Jat Sikh peasantry of Punjab—whose caste origins are implicit to the readers of the text. The description of professions attributed to the fictional characters like money lenders, businessmen, landed peasants, soldiers, clerks, preachers and school teachers allude to the four-fold caste structure. The Untouchables are placed outside this caste hierarchy and therefore, deemed unfit for any social interaction— sharing food and inter-marriage, etc.—bar professional or contractual work, where the Untouchables render the services of sweepers, scavengers or other such tasks considered polluting by the upper-castes. The collective memories of Partition violence and migration are voiced, written and publicly disseminated by prominent upper-caste Punjabis (see for example Anand 2001; Narula 2002; Neville 1998; Tandon 2000). This means that, to a large extent, our knowledge about Partition migration is obtained from the narratives told by the upper-caste/middle-class because, not only are these narratives repeated orally in detailed forms, they are also frequently made available in print as memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, newspaper reports and public speeches. The Untouchables do not get lost in the knowledge thus produced; rather they form the inevitable large canvas—the background—against which upper-caste/ middle-class stories are told. Partition, then, becomes a mass-produced event, the narration of which can be authenticated only when staged against the anonymous, blurred backdrop of ‘the masses’. In the course of this, upper-caste/middle-class narrators not only tell their ‘own’ stories, but also define the experiences of ‘others’ therein. The distinctive body of Untouchable experiences is ignored and superseded by the oft-narrated dominant narrative of the middle-classes in Punjabi migrant society.  The discursive absence does not mean that the Untouchables were physically absent from the Partition drama, but that they were not included in the stories of injustices meted out to the ‘Hindus’ by the Muslims during the Partition violence. Their numbers were sometimes included in government statistics to show the size of the non-Muslim population that needed to be evacuated from Pakistan. But the statistical category of ‘non-Muslim’ did not make them full Hindus even though many had taken to Hindu reform sects like the Arya Samaj since the late 19th century. The government created separate refugee camps, separate mass housing schemes and separate job arrangements for them, mostly as sweepers in the city municipality. This spatial and occupational separation was in accordance with the upper-caste Hindu ideal of keeping the polluted castes at a distance so that their shadow or touch would not pollute others. Thus, what emerges is a somewhat tragic account of Untouchable migrants from West Punjab who were kept out of the Hindu upper-caste and middle-class narratives of Partition. It is not only the fear of contamination at a physical or social level that seems to be of importance to the upper-caste Hindus but also the wish to keep partition narratives sacred and protected from contact by the Untouchables.

Ravinder Kaur, “Narrative Absence: An ‘Untouchable’ account of Partition migration” in Contributions to Indian Sociology 42 (2) (2008).

[pyotra]

Two Chuhras were busy sweeping the roads of Lahore during the Hindu Muslim violence. While the Hindus were trying to flee away from the violence, Muslims were pouring into the city from India. One sweeper asked another if he knew why people were running here and there. The other answered that the ‘Hindus are running to India while Muslims are looking for Pakistan. But we don’t need to escape to another place and nobody is going to touch us’. And they continued sweeping the empty streets. This joke is a popular one, often narrated by upper-caste Punjabi migrants in India and Pakistan. Its significance lies in its subtle and ironic conclusion: untouchable groups were neither in the communal scheme of things nor in the making of the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan. They were neither Hindus nor Muslims and therefore were not even fit for communally motivated killings. The joke is meant to highlight the ‘Untouchable’ status of these caste groups since their very condition of untouchability became a potent defence mechanism against mass violence. The sympathetic message, if any, is that these people did not need to escape from the extraordinary violence that threatened Hindus and Muslims, but needed to escape from the violence inherent in their everyday lives. The joke ends with the two Chuhras continuing to sweep the street long after everyone has left. The continued act of sweeping underlines the historical irony of ‘Untouchable’ communities not attempting to change their traditional roles even in such a cataclysmic situation. The listeners are expected to laugh at the punch line because the apparent irony of the situation is lost on the sweepers. This isolation from the cataclysmic events is incomprehensible for Hindu, Sikh and Muslim migrants whose experiences of Partition were so far removed from those of the Untouchables. Such caste-based experiential differences and discursive distances have seldom found representation in the narratives of Partition migration, especially since the archetypal Partition migrant, the ‘Hindu refugee’, was produced through the act of displacement and the religious identity of the displaced. The distinctions of caste and class have rarely been dredged up once they were conveniently submerged in the common experience of mass population migration, officially called the ‘exchange of populations’, during India’s Partition. This article contends that the common experience of displacement neither bridged nor rendered caste distinctions irrelevant. Untouchable migrants were separated physically from the upper-caste Hindus through a maze of governmental policies of resettlement between 1947 and 1965, as well as alienated discursively from the popular narratives of migration and resettlement by the upper-caste Punjabi migrants. Thus, the physical separation manifested, for example, in housing arrangements for Untouchable migrants in shanty towns far removed from upper-caste migrant neighbourhoods, meant that Untouchables did not inhabit the same social space as their upper-caste counterparts. This in turn meant that the experiences of the Untouchable migrants were rarely either acknowledged or circulated in the popular discourse of Partition migration. Thus, a telescopic vision of Partition history often reveals common patterns of migration, like routes, means of transport, destinations and resettlement strategies, across various caste groups. However, a closer view reveals diverse patterns and a complex social re-ordering based on prevalent norms of caste distinctions. As a consequence, the Untouchable refugees were ‘naturally’ settled in camps and colonies away from the ones inhabited by the upper-castes even though it was never a stated governmental policy.

Ravinder Kaur, “Narrative Absence: An ‘Untouchable’ account of Partition migration” in Contributions to Indian Sociology 42 (2) (2008).