If Sikhism, at a doctrinal level, does not recognise caste — think: ‘Ek pitas ekas ke ham barik (There is only one Father, we are the children of one Father)’ — why do Sikhs continue to be divided along caste lines? If a religion preaches ‘Rana rank barabari (The rich and poor are equal)’, what justifies the subjugation of Dalit Sikhs? Translated by Akshaya Kumar and Navdeep Singh, both professors of English, Gangrene is an anthology of short stories, which confronts these difficult contradictions.
“Is this what you call Sikhi? If this is Sikhi, I will not become its blind follower…” says Jagtar, the protagonist of the titular short story by Attarjit, before he shaves off his beard and throws away his kirpan, thus denouncing Sikhism. Jagtar is a Dalit Sikh, who took the amrit — amritdhari is a religious ceremony reaffirming the vows of Sikhism — and became a baptized Sikh. He does this at the request of his beloved Paramjit, an upper-caste woman whose family doesn’t approve of their inter caste relationship. When the town gets a whiff of their scandalous affair, Param’s family marries her off to another man. Jagtar, who is now grieving, asks a relevant question: “Was falling in love a crime?” He continues “Nowhere did Gurbani condemn it. Guru Gobind Singh’s second marriage had also been a love marriage. Why did the Sikhs consider love marriage a crime?” He then answers his own question: “Not crime really… they just wanted upper castes to marry among upper castes and lower castes among lower so that the pattern of dominance remains intact”. Jagtar is painfully aware of the weaponization of religion by elites to create a divide among the rich and the poor. He calls this divide “Gangrene”. Caste persists among Sikhs with rich, land-owning Jatt Sikhs constituting 60 per cent of Punjab’s Sikh population while others, like the Mazhabis and over 39 other castes, who are part of the Scheduled Caste fold, work as labourers in fields and in non-agricultural settings. The Savarna-Dalit polarity of the Hindi heartland is replicated in the Jatt-Dalit polarity of the border state. Upper castes enjoy ritual and cultural hegemony in both places. Even the titles of these stories — Roots, Cancer, Gangrene, Cactus — are metaphors that articulate the slow, festering violence that’s so deeply embedded within Punjabi society.
Kumar and Singh’s 39-page introduction contextualises the anthology in Punjab’s complicated geographical, historical and cultural milieu. They point out that Punjabi Dalit writers are not as strident as those from Maharashtra and that their writing doesn’t ‘explode into autobiographical mode with sustained candour’. Bhagwant Rasulpuri’s Roots is the only piece in this collection that is autobiographical. Still, that they choose to explore their fraught position within the social milieu through short fiction doesn’t mean that Punjabi Dalit writers are any less hesitant about confronting inequality and oppression.
{{/usCountry}}Kumar and Singh’s 39-page introduction contextualises the anthology in Punjab’s complicated geographical, historical and cultural milieu. They point out that Punjabi Dalit writers are not as strident as those from Maharashtra and that their writing doesn’t ‘explode into autobiographical mode with sustained candour’. Bhagwant Rasulpuri’s Roots is the only piece in this collection that is autobiographical. Still, that they choose to explore their fraught position within the social milieu through short fiction doesn’t mean that Punjabi Dalit writers are any less hesitant about confronting inequality and oppression.
{{/usCountry}}The protagonist of Attarjit’s eponymous Bathloo Chamiar is a labourer whose strength is unmatched. Skilled at working with soil, he lifts the iron bathal with ease; his muscles straining and glistening under the punishing sun as sweat streams down his body and darkens the earth beneath his feet. His poor negotiation skills cost him heavily when the head of the panchayat commissions him to carry out a labour-intensive task in exchange for a pittance. As Bathloo pushes his physical limits to complete the task on time, he realizes he is being cheated. As his body gives up, he calls upon God — ‘Waheguru, sache patshah’ — and suffers a heart attack. An indictment of the exploitation of Dalit Sikhs, the story articulates how brute strength and masculine vitality cannot overpower the burden of Dalit identity. In the end, Bathloo is stripped of all dignity and reduced to a “bloody son of a Chamiar.”
Most of these pieces are written from the perspective of the Punjabi Dalit male. Those that explore themes of inter-caste love — Nachhatar’s Cancer, Bhura Singh Kaler’s Cry of the Sky, and even Attarjit’s Gangrene — exclusively explore the rejection of a male Dalit by an upper-caste woman. This has much to do with power equations within a patriarchal society. “The hypermasculinity of Jatts seems to have made deep inroads into the making of the Punjabi Dalit mind and its gender consciousness as well,” write Akshaya Kumar and Navdeep Singh.
Sexual violence towards Dalit Punjabi woman is alluded to in Kaler’s Cry of the Sky, where a woman is raped by a zaildar and in Prem Gorkhi’s My Story, Everybody’s Story where the protagonist murders the upper-caste rapists and killers of his mother and sister. However, a singular female perspective that solidifies the Dalit Punjabi woman as a fully-realised subject of grief, desire, rage, and caste oppression, does not emerge. Instead, she is a peripheral figure orbiting the wounded masculinity of Dalit men.
Indeed, the one female voice that does emerge is upper caste; Nachhatar’s Cancer has a woman diagnosed with breast cancer fondly recalling her childhood love, the Dalit Sikh doctor who will now operate on her.
Harnek Singh Kaler’s Cactus comes closest to voicing the concerns of a Dalit Punjabi woman who sets the stage on fire with her giddha performance. Mistaken for a Jatt, she gets a marriage proposal, which is swiftly retracted when her caste identity is discovered. Even in this story, the protagonist is a man and the reader learns about the Dalit woman, Damanjeet, through his gaze.
Sarup Sialvi’s Doomsday is the only exception, where a female protagonist is shown meaningfully engaging with her caste identity as she discovers the truth about her Dalit parentage. Carrying an almost otherworldly texture where reality dissolves into folklore, prophecy, and lingering ancestral grief, this remarkable story alternates between being a suspenseful page-turner, where a daughter discovers the truth about her identity through a series of diary entries, and a surreal narrative, where real-life events find a parallel in Hindu mythology.
Surprisingly, all the writers featured in this anthology are male. Perhaps the selection of these particular stories is an unavoidable consequence of the translators themselves being cisgender men.
Still, this is an important anthology that forces readers to confront the distance between Sikhism’s egalitarian theology and social reality. Again and again, these stories return to the same haunting contradiction: a faith that rejects caste in scripture continues to reproduce it in everyday life. In the end, this collection’s great strength lies in showing how deeply embedded caste is within Punjabi Sikh society.
Deepansh Duggal writes on art and culture. He tweets at Deepansh75.