KARACHI: In order to understand the social model of pre-Partition India, the British presented it as a hierarchical society, which was a representation based on the pattern of the Brahmanical system of caste. It distorted the reality of local society. This was the point on which French scholar Michel Boivin focused during his talk on ‘Islam and the Social Forms of Domination: Pakistan through the Lens of Anthropology’ at the Alliance Francaise on Wednesday.
Mr Boivin, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, mentioned at the outset that in his lecture he would try to ‘de-centre’ the study of Pakistan — a country usually depicted as the hub of terrorism. For him, it was a challenge on a different level, because it aimed to analyse things not from the perspective of political science and not deny the existence of violence, but to submit it to anthropological methodology. In the early days of anthropology (19th century) it was discovered that violence was the main issue in every religion, and the sacralisation of power was not specific to Pakistani society, he said.
Discussing the colonised period of India, Mr Boivin pointed out that ‘caste’ was the common element which framed all societies in the region, regardless of religious beliefs. The word ‘biradri’ was not easy to translate for the colonisers. The issue of language was one that the British faced from the very beginning. What they discovered, though, was that caste was an important social unit, the “backbone of society”, he said.
Mr Boivin said the Portuguese were the first ones to reach India. They found out that caste, implying different degrees of purity, referred to two different concepts in the Brahmanical system: varna and jati. On the other hand, the Muslims in South Asia were divided into two groups — the ashrafs and the ailafs. This was the impact of the Brahmanical system on non-Hindus in colonised India, he argued.
In 1960, Mr Boivin said, two major works of anthropological studies on Pakistan came out. One was by a Turkish woman Zekiya Eglar and the other by a Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth. The former discussed villages in Punjab and the latter, the Swat valley. Afterwards, many scholarly works on the subject appeared, and for the first time Kasmani, in 2015, did his anthropological thesis on Sindh.
Mr Boivin specially mentioned a 60-page paper published in 1976 by noted scholar Hamza Alavi on the biradri system. Alvi divided the biradries into two groups: one was to do with lineage based on marriage structures between patrilateral parallel cousins (when a boy marries the father’s brother’s daughter); and the other could be translated as ‘clan’, made of a number of exogamous patrilateral lineages, he said. However, the one definition of biradries that had more clarity, he stressed, was by Gaborieau who believed a biradri included all men who could trace back their patrilineal link to a common ancestor.
Mr Boivin said another type of social organisation was that of the Jats, the camel breeders of the Indus delta with a centralised authority. They had 100 groups called autaq, and each autaq had a head wadera who gave his allegiance to a malik, he explained. Although there seemed to be a certain kind of egalitarianism in this pattern, there was also a feudal involved in the form of the malik. And that’s where the sacralisation of non-religious power, that is, in the case of the Jats, could be identified, he said. The sum of all biradries of the Jats was known as a ‘zat’, he remarked, taken from the Arabic word ‘dhat’ meaning the essence of a person, which was also phonetically close to the word ‘jati’ often used in India.
Mr Boivin then spoke on the division that existed in the rural-urban context, claiming that some suggested there were 36.5 urbanised people in Pakistan, which had ethnic and middle class factors. The ethnic factor was related to languages, but, he commented, there was a difference of opinion on the subject of the Pakistani middle class, as one scholar claimed it was greater than that of India and Sri Lanka. According to another scholar Firoz Ahmed, he said, the middle class was divided into four groups – military, capitalists, bureaucracy and landlords.
Mr Boivin concluded by saying that the British presented Indian society as a hierarchical one, based on the pattern of the Brahmanic system of caste, distorting the reality of local society. Nevertheless, he added, the biradri system sill worked.
Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2015
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