The clash of cultures - the village in the city

For a couple of days we tried going into Delhi's urban villages trying to locate the conflict between the city and the villages that have existed for years. In the end, we visited Wazirpur and that's when we convinced the father to show us his daughter's diary. The diary told her story and that's what we narrated, too.

An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday section of The Indian Express on August 8, 2010.


The battle of identities

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi


Under a picture of Katrina Kaif cut carefully from a glossy magazine cover, Khushboo Nagar wrote her name in blue on the first page of her diary. They said she resembled the Bollywood actress. Her hair was styled like hers, too, streaked and cut in layers, framing her face. She believed in the comparison but the 18-year-old Gujjar girl wanted to go beyond just the resemblance. She wanted to be the cover girl herself.

On the next page, she scribbled “Height – 5.5, Weight- 50 kgs, Age – 18 years”.

Flip through the pages and there are cuttings from newspapers – mostly beauty tips on how to make lips softer, how to improve complexion. In those pages, floating in between the handwriting, and the astrology predictions that she meticulously pasted on the pages trying to score a perfect future, there is an undercurrent of the conflict between modernity and tradition that her life had come to embody.

Khushboo, a Gujjar girl in Wazirpur, an urban village, one of the many in Delhi, near Ashok Vihar in Delhi, dared to dream past the village’s boundaries. That’s where the waves broke and rolled back for others. They could go into the city but when they returned, the “cityness” had to be abandoned at the village threshold.

Not for her. Khushboo wanted to be a model, fell in love with a model coordinator, and eloped with him. She crossed into what they call the ugliness of the other side. But no thresholds had ever beaten Khushboo. Not when she scribbled those aspirations in her diary. Not when she wore what they called “outrageous” clothes, not when she ran away from home in May.

It's been more than two months since Khusboo has been missing from her Wazirpur house. And while they were searching for her, Khushboo's cousin Monica and her sister Shobha were killed in cold blood by the family for defying the unspoken rules of the village, of their community that's struggling to hold on to their tradition in the midst of a city that is lurching forward in its obsession with modernity and with being a world class city where cultures intersect, melt, and everything becomes a fluid identity. At least that's the dream. But on the road from inception and fulfillment of the melting pot dream, there’s a lot of distance to be covered. They were the first casualties in the battle of identities between the village and its wayward child – the city. This was the battle between the core and the periphery.

In the heartland of this city, the national capital that they will showcase this October to the world during the commonwealth Games for which infrastructure projects are being completed at a fast pace, beyond the front row of houses that seem to uphold the melting pot identity, there are urban villages in and around the city that are unwilling to give up on their customs.

The national capital has around 135 urban villages, so called because they are no longer surrounded by farmland. Instead they are in the midst of untamed development.

These are spaces where municipal planning rules do not apply. Basic municipal services like roads, water supply and drainage have not reached them. But cars, amenities, and other such luxuries have.

A spate of honour killings have rocked Delhi and the NCR region. Sangeeta, a Gujjar girl, was killed in her ancestral village in Bargadpur in UP village after she married Ravinder Kataria, a Jatav community member who she had met while pursuing a computer course in Mayur Vihar in Delhi. She was a resident of Noida. On July 13, four months after she had secretly married her lover, her family took her to the village, strangulated her and set her on fire.

On June 14, a 19-year-old girl and her boyfriend were electrocuted by the girl's family in Swaroop Nagar in north Delhi.

According to police, number of couples seeking protection has gone up in the city. Nidhi and Kulbhushan, who married at an Arya Samaj temple in Delhi, approached the Delhi Commission for Women seeking protection after the girl stared receiving threat calls from her family.

At the DCW, officials say they now receive one or two letters seeking protection against honour killing daily and at least two couples drop by personally demanding the same.

“After the khap panchayats in Haryana that ordered such killings, we have got at least 20 such complaints from Delhi. Most couples were educated and parents were harassing them. We summon the parents and we do counseling. They usually work. We used to get cases before also. But after the killings in Delhi, the couples are more scared,” a DCW official says.

Such gruesome killings have also been reported from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana where the khap panchayats have openly dictated that such errant youth must be killed in order to preserve their culture and to set an example.

Recently, a youth was stabbed was stabbed to death in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district allegedly by the father and brother of a girl who he was having an affair with.

Lal Singh, Anju's father, has been arrested along with his son Rinku, after they admitted to killing Mithun, 20, a graduation student to protect their family's honour.

As urban way of living becomes more attractive, it also destroys traditional cultures. Anthropologists have pointed out that a city is a social context very different from peasant communities. Robert Redfield, who focused on contrasts between rural and urban life, cities are the centres through which cultural innovations spread to rural areas.

His body was found is Kajipura village in Uttar Pradesh.

The police says they can only take action after the crime has been committed but in most cases, the killings are hailed by the family and the villages as the right thing.

People tend to judge their surrounding world according to their space grounded in ethnicity, gender roles and norms, and that helps them differentiate from right from wrong, good from bad. It is a question between collectivism and individualism, anthropologists say.

In these villages, the individual obeys the tradition. If anyone fails to meet those expectations, or to conform to the “identity” they are taken to be endangering the order of the society, of upsetting the apple cart. That leads to the emergence of urban-rural conflicts and individual freedom. In Villages, everyone is connected. Everyone knows everyone and that knowledge functions as social control.

Therefore urban and rural function as different social systems.

However, cultural diffusion does happen and then caught between two or more social groups, people usually experience an identity crisis, researchers say.

That's what happened to Monica, Shobha, and Khushboo.

Monica married a Rajput boy from the village around five years ago. And Shobha was having an affair with a Muslim boy called Nawab Raja who ran dance classes in Ashok Vihar area.

Five years ago Monica, a Gujjar girl and Khushboo's cousin, married a Rajput boy from the same village. As per the village's worldview, that was a sin. In the 400-year-old history of the village, no girl had dared to do this. Butthey looked the other way. Monica left the village. They were outcasts.

When Monica's cousin sisters – Shobha and Khushboo – dared to cross over to the other side, so they could merge with the city, its diversity, marry it with their own fluid identity, the one they thought came with wearing jeans and shirts at their elder sister's marriage, they had clearly upset the cart. Girls in the village were going astray. They had to be reined in. With the killing they made a statement. A message was sent out. There were no victims. Only heroes that were to be venerated.

Memories of the past, of Monica's marriage came tumbling out of the closet, and during conversations, Mandeep, Khushboo's brother, taunted Ankit that he wasn't able to stop his sister Monica from marrying outside her community. Ankit retorted saying Mandeep too was not able to rein in his sisters. That's when the killings happened. Three in a day, within minutes of each other. Monica, her husband Kuldeep and Shobha whose body was only discovered a couple of days later from a car parked in the locality and only after the stench from the decomposing body gave her away. All of them shot at point blank range in the head by their brothers.

***

Not that these murders are a recent phenomenon. Choudhary Charan Singh Lohmod, a member of the Ghitorni village panchayat in Delhi, recalls an incident in his own village, a village that is teeming with millionaires because of the real estate boom and with teenagers sporting designer wear and driving expensive cars.

More than 15 years ago, the village witnessed its first honour killing. A Gujjar girl was strangulated for marrying a boy from the barber community. No police report was filed. The body was cremated and it was reported as a suicide case.

“The whole village knows about the killing. We couldn't do anything. We didn't interfere,” Charan Singh says.

There was yet another case of honour killing in Dayal Pur village in East Delhi around 17 years ago. That was a marriage within the Dedha gotra, a sin equal to incest because in the village everyone is part of the bhaichara and hence are brothers and sisters. There are scientific reasons behind our tradition of not marrying within the gotra, he adds, a rhetoric oft repeated by the custodians of the village culture.

“They had killed the boy. I don't know what happened to the girl. A panchayat was called, the khap dictated the family must be boycotted. The girl had left the village after marriage but then they found the boy and killed him,” Charan Singh says. “Today the world is changing. Although I don't approve of inter gotra marriages, a murder can't be condoned.”

Charan Singh can see the change. He has been around for long. With urbanization and development, views are changing. Young and educated people don't care much about the tradition, he says.

“In a few years, all of this will crumble and break. In all these killings, there's a desperation to hold on to something that we are losing. Delhi will first witness the dilution of the caste barriers, the gotra barriers because we are living in the city. We have a few girls in the village who married outside caste. The families have severed ties with them but they didn't kill them. The girls have left the village,” Charan Singh says. “Systems are changing. Education has changed a lot of things. We must be ready for the change. All this tradition, codes will break, melt. There are signs. The city has changed us in so many ways,” he says.

Already the villagers, astounded with what the city can do to their structure by its proximity, are blaming the Delhi government for its soft stand on migrants. The population has soared. That’s how the

corrupting winds of change started to howl in their ears. More men and women, those who didn’t cater to their prescribed rules, the ones that have been intact through generations, entered their space, claiming their share, paying rent that the villagers needed to sustain themselves in an inflation-ridden metropolis, but bringing ideas that struck at their very core.

“This has to stop. Crime has increased because of this,” his brother Samay Singh says. “We are traditional people. We have bhaichara in our villages. Villages have rules. The government must stop this infiltration.”

***

Long ago, when the real estate boom took over the city whose boundaries expanded into the farmlands and into the cultures that surrounded the city as demand for space went up, the Gujjars and the Jats, the two communities that had their villages in and around Delhi, experienced the rush, the high that comes with wealth, the transition that it promises.


In Wazirpur in North Delhi, farmers sold their land to the government in the 1960s, built multistory buildings that jostle with each other for space, jutting their necks out for visibility, to show they too are among the “rich.” There was an influx of migrants soon after. But here in this village where the differences between the two communities are starkly visible, the tenants subscribe to the village rules.

There is a wall of silence between them.

They won’t talk about the murders in the village. They won’t disapprove of it. Nor will they approve. They are suspended in silence.

“We have no opinion, no advice, no memory of it,” one young man, who refused to disclose his name, says.

While the Gujjar community says they don’t have Khap panchayats like the Jats, the other predominant community that have followed the same trajectory in terms of social-economic status, they have village elders whose diktat is as good as the word of law. Even on the matrimonial websites like www.Jeevansathi.com , most Gujjar girls, including doctors and MBAs, have listed their gotras in their profiles.

Like hundreds of other urban villages clustered in the heart of the national capital, Wazirpur would have remained an obscure village trying to insulate itself against the city's overtures had it not been for the “folly” of three Gujjar girls from the village who dared to overstep the boundaries their culture imposed.

Cars can't navigate the narrow lanes of the urban village that is not very far from the city's glass and steel structures, the glittering malls, and the Metro. Electric wires hang from the poles, and the drains are overflowing.

A young girl stood in the balcony of her second floor home of a multistory house in Wazirpur. Behind her a older woman stood as if on guard, craning her neck to follow the girls' eyes. About 200 meters on her left stands the house where the two “disgraced” girls lived.

Khushboo left the house on May 25. The family waited until June 3 to file a complaint at the Ashok Vihar police station. Every morning, the family sent out two cars to look for the youngest daughter of the house who had brought shame to the family, to the village and to the community.

But they didn't find her.

The father Jai Singh Nagar shrugs off the death of his other daughter Shobha.

“What's done can't be undone. Those who have died have gone. But I want to know where Khushboo is. Her marriage was a fraud one. This Arya Samaj marriage must be banned,” he says.

He is waiting for his daughter, the one who had long legs, and who danced and loved dressing up, and who he says was misled by an advertisement in the local paper about this modeling agency.

She fled her house on May 25 to marry Ravi, a model coordinator from Bhajanpura.
It's her sister's death and her defiance of the rules that dictate the address to their house. Jai Singh Nagar sits in his grocery store on the ground floor as if nothing ever happened. But what was he to do.

It was the city that corrupted them. How could he, placed as he was in such a setting, the metropolis surrounding him, its evils eroding the layers of tradition, stop it from happening.

He was a doting father, he says. There's an old family picture, one of those black and white framed pictures shot in a studio with the fake backdrop of mountains and blossoming tress years ago that still acquires a place of pride in the family's living room.

There Khushboo sits in her father's lap, the youngest of six siblings – four girls and two boys. Shobha is in the frame, too. They were beautiful girls, the father says.

In the wedding album of their eldest sister Rajni who was married within the community but outside their gotra in December 2008, Shobha and Khushboo wore jeans and sateen shirts. They danced and sang through the night. They were wild, but innocent, he says.

He is a father. He puts up a strong front.

No, they won’t kill Khushboo, the runaway child who doesn’t know the difference between right or wrong. He just wants to make sure she is fine.

But Khushboo, the aspiring model, is under police protection at an undisclosed location. The police says she is doing well and is happily married with Ravi, who her family alleges is a tout.

On June 20, the brothers had planned to kill her too. But Khushboo didn’t call. She was spared the fury that raged within the men.

There’s an eerie silence at the family’s house. Rajni, who is here for a few days, doesn’t know how to react to the mention of her two “wayward” sisters. She steps back, and murmurs she misses them. A tear falls. She turns away.

In this space, it is hard to say who the victim is and who the perpetrator is. That distinction is blurred.

“I don’t know where I went wrong. I was the sort of man that chased away men from the corners of the streets,” he says. “The police says she is fine but at least show her to us even on television, let us see that she is not involved with the wrong sort of a man. I don’t want her to tell me later that I failed her as a father.”

But for a few in the village, he failed Shobha.

But Jai Singh is the product of the village’s social dilemmas, its bid to try to retain its heritage.

"I think we have lost control. I had two lavish weddings for my daughters Rajni and Kajal. I allowed them every freedom. They wore western clothes. But we didn’t see this coming,” he says. “We won’t kill our daughter.”

But daughters had been slaughtered. In the village, and in the city.

Khushboo escaped, The village’s ugliness caught up with Shobha whose body wasn’t even brought to Wazirpur. Her cremation was a rushed affair.

In the following days, the family erased Shobha from their lives. They gave away her clothes, her shoes. No traces, no memories to remind them of the shame.

On the internet, many Gujjar community members have hailed the killings as an act of courage.

“Everything comes with a price tag. Same is the case with development.

The negative change in the new generation is the price we Gujjars are paying as the cost of this development,” a member who identified himself as Gurjar Krishan Kumar wrote on www.ashokharsana.proboards.com, an interactive web portal for the Gujjar community set up by Ashok Harsana a few years ago to discuss the community and its issues.

Others acquiesced. They said it was a classic case of “disruptive urbanization” that upset the social structure of the urban villages, threatening its values as other population marched into their space bringing with them the ills, the sexual liberties, the free mixing between sexes, part of the city's culture with them.

Yet another man posted that the Delhi-based Gurjars had a bad reputation elsewhere because news of Gujjar girls eloping with boys from other communities were far too frequent.

“Very often there is news that some Gujjar boy has done love marriage or yet another Gujjar girl has run away with a boy and Gujjars outside Delhi say that we are not real Gujjars because we can't save the honour of our families,” said someone who called himself 'Hardcore Gurjar.'

The virtual space is rife with such commentary barring a few that cautiously denounce the killings.

Mandeep and Ankit, the killers who are serving time in jail, have been compared to Lord Rama, the mythical hero who abdicated Sita after she returned from Raavan’s entrapment.

“That Rama, the Lord is still worship by the people. If the same thing done by our brother then how it can be termed as crime,” Ravi Kasana wrote in the ongoing thread. “I strongly termed Ankit and Mandeep to be Kalyugi Ram and Krishna and salute them for showing this world that pride is more important than life for Gurjars. Murder is wrong but this (killing) is socially the best thing that has been done.”

Such killings happened earlier too. But they didn’t hit the headlines. Those were hushed killings. The death of a daughter or a sister gone astray would be termed as an accident or a suicide. Penetrating the layers of the village to investigate the deaths would often be a futile chase, a Jat community member said.

Kanwar Singh Tanwar, the former Bahujan Samaj Party member who has now joined Congress and is a heavy weight Gujjar leader in South Delhi, says he is in favour of such panchayats.

“Gotra this is our history. Yes, inter caste marriages have caught up and culture has changed. Now more and more Gujjars and Jats are sending their daughters and sons to schools and colleges. We have doctors, engineers, and not just bouncers,” he says. “Aajkal ke gaon mein ladkiyan hi-fi hai. We have a system. We can’t let go.”

In the battle, the new recruits are a few Gujjar youth who have taken it upon themselves to preserve their culture.

Pramod Mavi, an engineer who set up the Youth Gurjar Federation last year to reach out to the community and focus on education, travels to Delhi’s urban villages on weekends and talks to the youth about their culture, the gotra system and the temptations like smoking and drinking they must resist.

With a group of young people, he is also collecting material for a book on Gujjar culture and tradition listing all the gotras in the Gujjar villages across India.

“We are working on it. We have state level people going into Gujjar villages and taking to sarpanchs asking them about gotras in their villages,” he says. “But it is at preliminary stages. We plan to distribute it free of cost to the youth. I am against honour killings but we are bound by our tradition.”

Ram Niwas Gujjar, of the same organization, says they have been holding meetings in Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan regularly to educate youngsters about the Gujjar tradition.

"Money has gone to their head. We tell them that you need to hold on to the tradition,” he says. “We are against inter caste marriages, and those within the gotra system. This is to counter honour killing so people don't have to resort to such things.”

***

At the point where Ghitorni, another urban village with a predominantly Gujjar population, opens up to the metropolis, a car showroom has set shop.

On display is the dream car – a two-door red Mercedes sports car. Its doors open out in the sky just like giant wings.

Outside, contradictions abound.

Of the around 140 Gujjar villages in the city, Ghitorni is among the ones where money knows no limits. The farmers sold off the prized land to the private builders, to the very rich who went shopping for sprawling farmhouses. Resto bars have come up on the sides of the road.

The blazing red car has already 80 suitors on its list. Many are from the nearby urban villages where roads are not yet concretized, and are riddled with encroachments and potholes.

That itself is proof of the transformation of the urban villages that are still steeped in tradition, in the rigidity of its dos and don’ts but are finding it hard to wrestle the changes that have crept in.

The money that once brought the adrenaline rushing to their brains, the sorts where you feel nothing can escape your fancy, where dreams are one with reality, is now making them realize that money can also make you lose control just like the drugs.

So they are in denial of the mess that money has made their lives.

Youth, with their pumped-up muscles from working out for hours in the local gyms that dot the village landscape, roam around the locality, whiling away time at the property dealers’ outlets. Many sport thick gold chains and tight T shirts accentuating their biceps.

In the evenings, they pack themselves in swanky cars, and ride through the village’s crumbling roads, loud trance and techno music playing, and go to city’s numerous pubs.

Elders say the villages have no rape cases in the village. That’s because boys and girls know that the rules prohibit them to marry within village. So they are all brothers and sisters.

A group of young men turned away when a bunch of young girls from the village passed.

In Wazirpur, at the Natraj photo studio, a young man said village girls came to get their pictures clicked for marriage purpose. But no, they were all sisters. What if fell for one? No, that’s not going to happen.

“You don’t know the rules of the village. I think you are not from here,” he says.

The Pradhan of Wazirpur Choudhury Subhash Kahri says it is the loss of the land that anchored the village people to a lifestyle is the core issue. All of that is gone and has been replaced by inflated bank accounts. They have been rendered rootless, aimless and with a thick wad of crisp notes, they have no option but to indulge.

But this money is not going to last, Tanwar says.

Not many of them have invested in other properties. So, the young people are torn between the lifestyle of the rich, lured and tempted by the freedom of choice, and the unwritten codes of the village.

Riya Lohia, a 12-year-old, studies at the Poorna Prajna Public School, is a product of that conflict. At her age, she knows she has to live within an invisible boundary.

Her friends from school hang out, stay over at each others’ house, but Riya is chaperoned if she has to attend anything outside school.

“They can go out. We can’t go alone for outings alone. So we have different lives,” she says.

Her uncle Kiran Kumar Lohia lives with his four brothers – a joint family setup that the community has not relinquished yet.

Five cars are parked in the courtyard where she sat with her uncles.

“We have women doctors and teachers in the house. We are for education but we can’t let go of our culture,” Kiran Kumar says. “No, we don’t mind inter caste marriages. The only issue that threatens our society is the population growth. Our youth are getting affected. But it is up to us to tell them what is within bounds and what is wrong.”

Riya silently walked back to the house.


The Dishonoured

On June 14, a 19-year-old girl Asha and her 21-year-old lover Yogesh were electrocuted by the girl's family in Swaroop Nagar in North Delhi. Before they were killed, they were flogged with steel rods for hours.

Sanjeeta, a Gujjar girl, was killed in her ancestral village in Bargadpur in UP village after she married Ravinder Kataria, a Jatav community member who she had met while pursuing a computer course in Mayur Vihar in Delhi. She was a resident of Noida. On July 13, four months after she had secretly married her lover, her family took her to the village, strangulated her and set her on fire.

In the last four months, in yet another instance of honour killing a newlywed man Rajesh Negi was burnt by his in-laws as he married outside his caste in Kichripur in Mayur Vihar. The entire family of the bride Bhavna Pal has gone into hiding. The two married secretly in January but when the bride's family came to know, they allegedly threatened the couple.

Then, in June again, the Wazirpur killings happened. Monica, her husband Kuldeep, a Rajput man, and Shobha who was seeing a Mulsim man named Nawab Raja were killed din cold blood by the family on June 20. Ankit and Mandeep, who are in jail for the murders, also tried to kill Khushboo, the third sister, but she had gone into hiding.

In Daula-Razpura village in Greater Noida, a khap panchayat sent out a diktat that daughters of all Dalit families will be abducted last month after an upper caste girl from a neighboring village Mandiya Priyanka eloped with Suraj Jatav, a scheduled caste boy from Daula. The panchayat also issued shoot-at-sight orders for the couple who fell in love in college in Dadri. The couple is still absconding.

While NGOs have sprung into action including a group called Love Commandos headed by Sanjoy Sachdev to help the couples that face such threats, a bill on honour killing is yet to be approved. On Thursday, Home Minister P Chidambaram said the government plans to introduce a bill on honour killings in this session of parliament. He said all state governments are being asked for their views and the “murders” must not be condoned but punished with severity. Khap panchayats have protested against the bill and have been asking for amendments in the marriage act to ban marriages within the same gotra.