Table Of ContentRURAL NOSTALGIAS AND TRANSNATIONAL DREAMS:
IDENTITY AND MODERNITY AMONG JAT SIKHS
ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS
Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethnographic
works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality
and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its per-
spective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic dis-
ciplines: women’s studies, history, philosophy, psychology, political science,
and sociology.
For a list of the book published in this series see page 303.
NICOLA MOONEY
Rural Nostalgias and
Transnational Dreams
Identity and Modernity among
Jat Sikhs
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9257-1
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with
vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mooney, Nicola, 1967–
Rural nostalgia and transnational dreams : identity and modernity
among Jat Sikhs / Nicola Mooney.
(Anthropological horizons)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9257-8. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9257-1
1. Sikhs – India – Social conditions. 2. Jats – India – Social conditions.
3. Sikhs – India – Ethnic identity. 4. Jats – India – Ethnic identity.
5. Punjab (India) – Rural conditions. I. Title. II. Series: Anthropoligical
horizons
DS432.S5M65 2011 305.6(cid:2)9460954 C2010-907473-4
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Canada
Book Fund.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Identity Terms xi
Prologue 3
1 Introduction: Jat Sikh Locations and the Bahu Ethnographer 7
2 Farming, Family and Faith: Elements of Jat Sikh Identity 47
3 Good Families: Marriage, Gender, and Middle-Class, Jat
Community 87
4 Good Fortunes: Education, Class, and National Contingencies 112
5 Unities and Schisms in Jat Sikh Identity 136
6 The Rural Imaginary 173
7 A Wedding Phulkari and Other Gifts 207
Epilogue 216
Glossary 221
Notes 229
Bibliography 267
Index 287
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Acknowledgments
Many people have had a part in the production of this work. I must first
thank the people on whom this study most depends, for it would not
have been possible without the support of a broad Punjabi community,
the members of which are too numerous to name individually, in Cana-
da, India, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, and particularly in Ganganagar. My
sincere thanks to everyone in each of these places who made me part
of their family lives, took an interest in my work, and shared with me
their particular understanding of Punjabi society. The members of my
Jat Sikh saureh, both real and honorary, deserve special mention, and I
especially thank several of my sisters-in-law for their great and cher-
ished friendship. To share in the ongoing generosities and kindnesses
of so many good families is truly a gift: mere dilon, saariyan da lakh lakh
dhanwad.
A number of people and academic institutions must be singled out.
Stimulating graduate courses with Wsevelod Isajiw, Milton Israel,
Richard Lee, and Michael Levin laid the foundations of the present
work. I would also like to express my thanks here to Neil McMullin,
who taught me religious studies for four years as an undergraduate
and made it possible for me to imagine this study. In Delhi, conversa-
tions with Dipankar Gupta, J.P.S. Uberoi, Patricia Uberoi, and Ravinder
Kaur helped me formulate (and reformulate) both my research topic
and my approach to fieldwork. The advice, insight, intellectual com-
panionship, friendship, and home away from home so warmly pro-
vided by Madhulika Banerjee and Yogendra Yadav is particularly
cherished. I am thankful to Douglas Sechter for introducing me to
Hindi (in the absence of official classes at my institution), and espe-
cially to Kulwinder for her instruction and assistance in Punjabi, and
viii Acknowledgments
Dildeep for his painstaking help with translations and much else. Three
fellow thesis writers, Hilary Earl, Gillian McCann, and Carla Shapiro,
provided a stimulating and safe environment for the completion of the
dissertation on which this book is based; I am especially fortunate that
my longstanding friendships with Gillian and Carla were deepened in
intellectual and other ways in this process. As the doctoral dissertation
on which this book is based was prepared and defended, the insight-
ful questions raised by Michael Levin, my thesis supervisor, commit-
tee members Wsevelod Isajiw, Milton Israel, and David Turner, and
Cynthia Mahmood, my external examiner, invaluably improved it, and
indeed continue to challenge and provoke my research. I am very grate-
ful to Michael Lambek for his invitation to turn that dissertation into
this book, and to Anne Meneley for her advice on going about it. At the
University of Toronto Press, the comments of three anonymous review-
ers helped to strengthen my arguments while copy-editor Diane Mew
helped to refine their expression, and I am especially appreciative of the
patient commitment to the manuscript of editors Virgil Duff and Anne
Laughlin. Several years of my research and writing were funded with
the financial support of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program and
the University of Toronto Fellowship program, while two University
of Toronto Associates Fieldwork Travel Grants paid for my airfares to
India. This book was substantially completed while I was McCain Post-
Doctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University and ultimately finished at
the University of the Fraser Valley.
The work at hand has profited over the past decade from discus-
sions of some of its ideas and problems with a number of colleagues
and friends, including Pauline Aucoin, Judith Doyle, Heather Howard,
Jane Ku, Jill LeClair, Denise Nuttall, Amali Philips, Paramjit Rai, Janet
Rubinoff, Deborah Simpson, Patricia Kelly Spurles, Emma Varley, and
Donna Young. As well, I have been grateful at various junctures for the
encouragement of Robert Adlam, Balbinder Bhogal, Janice Boddy, Sally
Cole, Glynis George, Virinder Kalra, Ruth Mann, Hew McLeod, Arvind
Mandair, Kirin Narayan, and Daphne Winland, among others. As I
worked on final revisions, the book benefited from insightful exchang-
es with Satwinder Bains, Rajinder Dudrah, Van Dusenbery, Harjant
Gill, Inderpal Grewal, Doris Jakobsh, Anne Murphy, Michael Nijha-
wan, Anjali Gera Roy, Gibb Schreffler, Ashveer Pal Singh, and Margaret
Walton-Roberts, among other participants of the Diasporizing Punjab,
Disorienting Bhangra workshop that I organized at the Centre for Indo-
Canadian Studies in 2010. It remains to note that Clarence McMullen
Acknowledgments ix
– who is both a learned scholar, and by virtue of my friendship with his
daughter, an honorary uncle – has generously shared his expertise on
Punjab and Sikhs on numerous occasions, while T. Sher Singh and Jag-
pal Singh Tiwana have made valued comments on some of my writing
and ideas. Any errors are of course my own.
I must finally thank several people above all others. My natal fam-
ily has given me their unfailing confidence and love through many
years of study, while my parents-in-law greatly assisted me in, and
were greatly committed to, the completion of this book. Most of all, my
dear husband has displayed an unstinting devotion to this project – a
fealty that I fear has been in numerous ways sacrificial for him – and
was largely responsible for sharing with me the joys (and pains) of Jat-
pana, Punjabiyat, and Sikhi. This book is dedicated to him: tuhaada bahut
dhanwaad, aavdi duniya, meri duniya banaun layee.
