The curious case of Patnibrata men: Revisiting masculinity in Sikh and Punjabi reformist literature, c. 1925–1939

ABSTRACT

In the 1930s, Trilok Singh Vaid, a celebrated Sikh and Punjabi writer and Ayurvedic practitioner wrote a series of books on conjugal health and ideal masculinity in which he articulated a conjugal-domestic masculinity, which he termed Patnibrata: men who will love their wives, respect their wives' consent, and form a happy dyadic unit with them. In this paper, I argue that (a) transnational sexology and women's movement in India necessitated this new model of masculinity, and (b) conjugal-domestic masculinity reconceptualised gender roles, but more importantly, sought to empower young men as heads of their household and as independent subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• Sikh
• conjugal
• domestic
• colonial

Introduction

In 1935, Trilok Singh Vaid, a Sikh writer and Vaid, wrote a 120-page book, Adarsh Pati, arthat Hadayatnama Mard, which may be translated as, Ideal Husband, meaning, Advice for Men (Vaid 1935). The book continued the themes of his other books, especially Dampati Sikhya, or Education for Married Couple, which was first written in 1933–34. In Adarsh Pati (1935), Trilok Singh Vaid (AP and TSV hereafter) offered advice to men on how to become ideal husbands. He called ideal men, Patnibrata mard: men who are loyal to their wives in the literal sense of the phrase. In Sikh and Punjabi literary sphere, it was common to preach women to be patibrata: be loyal to your husband and serve him and his family.¹ TSV invoked the coinage patibrata aurat in his book to turn it on its head and wrote, ‘like women are taught to be patibrata, men are never taught to become Patnibrata’ (Vaid 1933, 53). By explicitly associating ideal husbands with ideal men, TSV proposed a new model of masculinity, which was extraordinary in the literary sphere/s of the 1930s. This essay attempts to examine what necessitated this seemingly radical coinage of masculinity and what purpose it may have served in the wider social world of Sikh and Punjabi community.

In the following sections, I provide an overview of Sikh and Punjabi masculinity in the historiography, describe TSV’s vision for ideal men in detail, discuss two important discourses that allowed him to propose his model of masculinity: women’s movement and sexology, and examine the possible implications of his model for the social order of family and kinship. I argue that while TSV’s Patnibrata men seems to be articulating new gender roles for men most obviously insofar as he focuses on men’s relationship with their wives, his model of masculinity, which I term conjugal-domestic masculinity in this paper, does not operate within the gender binary exclusively. The conjugal-domestic masculinity that TSV proposes seeks to challenge the social order of joint family and the age-based social hierarchy of Sikh, Punjabi, and wider South Asian communities in which elders decide the fate of the young man (his marriage, occupation, education); his model is an attempt to institute young married men as the head of their households. It is through urging men to form a dyadic unit with their wives that he has presented a case for a new masculinity in which men are not dependent on their elders and family.

Two observations are in order that may buttress the claims of this paper. First, studies of masculinity in the Sikh and wider South Asian colonial historiography have often overlooked home and the domestic as a location for the construction of masculinity. Analysing TSV’s writings has helped me recentre home for a history of masculinity by situating men’s roles within home and the domestic as an essential part of their masculinities. I agree with Mrinalini Sinha that, ‘The domestic, in fact, emerges in the context of colonial Indian conditions as a preferred site for the self-constitution of men qua men’ (Sinha in Loomba and Lukose 2012, 365). Here, I am indebted to histories that disrupt the established association between home and women, and that analyse the construction of manliness and masculinity vis-à-vis the domestic, such as recent work by Abigail McGowan in the South Asian context and the vast historiography on masculinity and home in England, which I refer to later (McGowan 2016; McGowan 2009).

Second, masculinity is not only a gendered mode of existence; men are constituted as men through their roles in the gender binary as well as their actions in the social and political worlds of which they are a part. While home is the privileged site of TSV’s conjugal-domestic masculinity, it has broader ramifications for the social order of Sikh and Punjabi community. In other words, situating masculinity within the domestic does not mean restricting it to the gender binary; the domestic is not an isolated private sphere, but a deeply important one that interacts with other spheres. Studies of masculinity in colonial India would benefit from studying the domestic as well as masculinity’s construction vis-à-vis other social organisations and actors such as work, other men, caste, class, and so on. This essay is an attempt in this direction.

Sikh masculinity: a historiographic overview

In the historiography on colonial Punjab, Sikh masculinity has been analysed as a martial, Khalsa masculinity. The British colonial officials and policy divided the peoples of India into effeminate or martial races, depending on their affinity with the British and the British government’s political, economic, and war programmes (Streets-Salter 2004; Sinha 1995). In the British colonial attitude from at least late nineteenth century, Sikh male bodies were positively compared with the British body of the past – strong, muscular, and sturdy (Streets-Salter 2004). Army recruitment of Sikhs was a critical element of British rule over Punjab. At the outbreak of World War One, Punjab was supplying about half the Indian soldiers to the army and this proportion increased during the next two years (Chowdhry 2013, 721). A combination of martial race theory, colonial recruitment policies, and alignment of the Sikh elite’s projects with British interests constructed the notion of an ideal Sikh man: a loyal and manly soldier (Jakobsh 2006, 50–69).

Further, values of the Khalsa order – loyal, brave, masculine – were utilised to validate army service and it was made compulsory for Sikhs to participate in the Khalsa initiation ceremony upon joining the army and always maintain bodily display of Khalsa (Jakobsh 2006, 50–69). The politics of army recruitment also had a considerable impact on education for young boys which included a regimen of physical activity and sports. For instance, only sports that were directly related to recruitment in the army were encouraged at Khalsa College, Amritsar (Brunner 2018). Beyond army, the Singh Sabhas also propagated a manly Sikh identity for Sikh men, making Khalsa masculinity the hegemonic form of Sikh masculinity at least until 1925. The culmination of this hegemonic form of masculinity can be discerned most forcefully in the acquisition of Gurudwaras from mahants, its erstwhile owners who were believed to be improper Sikhs, too close to Hindus in their practices, and in the acknowledgment of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) as the legal representative of Sikhs by the colonial government in 1925 (McLeod 1989; Tan 2005).

In the domestic sphere too, Khalsa masculinity had its corresponding roles. Sikh men were expected to create ideal families by fathering healthy children and teaching their wives to become ideal Sikh women who know the science of home management, who do not believe in superstitions and any other religions or deities, and who can become mothers to warrior sons (Mir 2010).² The writings of Singh Sabha reformers, such as Bhai Vir Singh and Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid, and pamphlets and tracts published by the Khalsa Tract Society often focused on preaching reform to women, but they were more often than not written by men. Sikh men were constituted as their wives’ teachers in the domestic sphere.

Hence, studies of the domestic have focused on Sikh women and their agency, rather than men. Historians have also analysed the relationship between reform preached to upper caste Sikh women and Sikh men in the Sikh public sphere. Anshu Malhotra argues that advice manuals and literature on the domestic more broadly defined helped restructure caste and class identities of Sikhs since it encouraged upper-caste Sikh women to work with their own hands (apni-hatthi) and not employ any servants (which tended to be lower caste men and women) (Malhotra 2002). The proliferation of medical literature and medical education for women has also been analysed in this regard insofar as it allowed upper-caste women to distance themselves from lower caste midwives and practitioners (Malhotra 2003). Sikh femininity, particularly upper-caste Sikh femininity, has been studied in relation to the domestic.

Given this history, studies of Sikh masculinity have naturally focused on the colonial encounter of Sikh community and men with the British. Home has not been considered a site of the construction of masculinity. The history of home and domesticity is a vast field in gender and women’s histories in colonial South Asia. As Srirupa Prasad notes, the organic relationship between domesticity, colonialism, and nationalism is now historiographical commonsense (Prasad 2015). In the late nineteenth century, as Partha Chatterjee argued decades ago, while nationalist reformers accepted the influence of colonial modernity in the public or ‘outer’ sphere, they established the home as an ‘inner’ sanctum sanctorum where colonialism has or should fail to reach (Chatterjee 1987). This inner life in the home was most powerfully associated with women, and hence, reshaping both women’s lives and home-life became necessary to challenge colonial domination. Historians since Chatterjee’s work have variously studied the impact of this conception of self-sovereignty of the home on women, including Tanika Sarkar’s field defining work on Hindu wives and nationalism (Sarkar 2001).

Gradually, studies of the importance of home-life for the project of nationalism gave way to more detailed studies of the domestic itself such as the in-depth analysis of Bengali domestic advice manuals as undertaken by Judith Walsh (Walsh 2004; also, Nijhawan 2012). Since domestic manuals tended to focus almost exclusively on women, the question of women’s agency also developed in the historiography simultaneously, exemplified in Antoinette Burton’s now classic work on women’s writing about the domestic (Burton 2003). More recently, other aspects of the domestic life too such as food and sex have produced excellent histories of domesticity in the region, such as Utsa Ray’s and Jayanta Sengupta’s work on culinary culture in colonial Bengal and Rachel Berger’s work on food and desire (Ray 2015; Sengupta 2010; Berger 2013).

However, very few of these histories tend to situate men within the domestic and analyse masculinity’s construction from within the domestic. It is true that a vast majority of reformist texts such as advice manuals, women’s magazines, and cookbooks were written for women, but as Mrinalini Sinha asks, ‘What … if the domestic manual was not automatically identified with the fashioning, or, indeed, self-fashioning, of women?’ (Sinha in Loomba & Lukose, 2012, 365) Reading Walsh’s rich study of Bengali domestic manuals against the grain, Sinha argues that Bengali advice manuals also help furnish ‘a new masculine identity defined in opposition to elders, both men and women, in the family’ (Sinha in Loomba & Lukose, 2012, 365). By doing so, she resituates men into the story of home and the domestic, and urges us to undertake a more nuanced history of domesticity and home-life.

In this essay, I intend to situate masculinity within the domestic more directly. That TSV’s books deal with men-within-home allows me to critically analyse home as a location of Sikh and Punjabi masculinity’s construction in the 1930s. Theoretically too, insofar as masculinity is an instable and fluid category, one cannot speak about an unchanging and uniform model for masculinity during the entire colonial period. As historians and sociologists of masculinity and gender have noted time and again, hegemonic masculinity is contested, fractured from within, and always in flux (Connell 2016, 1995). This means not only undertaking a history of how a model of masculinity becomes hegemonic, which has been done already by historians of colonial Punjab, but also the history of what happens to a model of masculinity once it has achieved the hegemonic status.

While undertaking a large-scale analysis of Sikh and Punjabi masculinities in colonial Punjab’s public sphere is beyond the remit of this article, it does attempt to take first steps towards problematising the hegemonic Khalsa masculinity model through an analysis of TSV’s writings and reformist literature published between 1925 and 1939. Hence, I analyse the writings of Sikh and Punjabi reformers from 1925 to 1939, but particularly the ones that relate to the domestic to study ‘men in the home.’³ Thus, this article also proposes to be a corrective to historiographies on gender in colonial India, ‘which have largely defined femininity through home and sexuality, and masculinity through politics, sports, work, and associational organizing, ignoring the overlapping areas of gender construction’ (McGowan 2019, 1304).

To this end, I have chosen to present as a case study, keeping in mind the limitations of a journal article, the writings of Trilok Singh Vaid, a prolific writer, Ayurvedic practitioner, and the eldest son of the stalwart, Mohan Singh Vaid (who was arguably one of the most respected writer and Vaid in the Sikh and Punjabi literary sphere). However, the themes and debates present in T.S. Vaid’s writings are far from being isolated instances. He quotes passionately from magazines that have reviewed his work; he also writes for several monthly dailies in Punjabi. One such magazine is Phulwari; I’ve analysed its archives to corroborate my arguments here. Giani Hira Singh Dard, a prolific Sikh scholar, journalist, and activist launched Phulwari as a monthly magazine in 1924 and it became one of the most important magazines for anticolonial agitation in Punjab. Hira Singh Dard himself was a member of the Punjab Provincial Congress Committee and the magazine often published articles defending the cause of complete independence, swadesh (French and McLeod 2014, 151). While I will quote from Phulwari now and then, my primary focus will be on TSV’s own writings.

Through his writings, I present a case for the emergence of a new model of masculinity in Sikh and Punjabi reformist literature, a domestic-conjugal masculinity, which according to TSV should create, ‘patnibrata men’, or husbands that are loyal to their wives. That TSV introduces a new category for men who ought to love their wives and children and take responsibility for their lives at home, I argue in what follows, signals the rise of a new model of masculinity, one that seeks to contest, align with, and shift the contours of Khalsa masculinity simultaneously.

Trilok Singh Vaid – a brief introduction

Trilok Singh Vaid was an Ayurvedic practitioner and the eldest son of Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid. We know more about the latter’s life from various biographies written after his death than about the former’s. Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid was born in 1881 and he died in 1936 (Singh and Singh in Brown 1999, 172–180). He learnt to practice under his father, Bhai Jaimal Singh, a druggist-Vaid, and others, and founded the Khalsa Pharmacy at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, he made his career not only as a practitioner of Ayurveda, but as a Vaid-publicist. He is credited with reviving prose and matter-of-fact writing in Punjabi and introducing Punjabi readers to international ideas and culture through his translations and writings on science and medicine. Vaid was also a member of the Chief Khalsa Diwan (since 1907), and he joined the SGPC in 1921. Born into this family, T.S. Vaid inherited his father’s role as a publicist and reformer along with being a Vaid, and he was often introduced in his books by other writers as the talented son of Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid.⁴

TSV wrote several books including some that went on to become prescribed syllabus for the Punjab Textbook Committee. Amongst his most popular books were Suhra Ghar (1932) (A woman’s in-laws’ home), Peka Ghar (1930) (Women’s Natal Home), Dampati Sikhya Bhag ek te do (1935) (Education for Married Couples, part 1 and 2), Nari Sikhya (193?), (Women’s Education), Hadayatnama Aurat (193?) (Advice for Women), Adarsh Patni (193?) (Ideal Wife), Adarsh Pati arthat Hadayatnama Mard (1935) (Ideal Husband, meaning, Advice for Men), Viah di Pehli Rat (1933) (The First Night of Marriage), and Pati Patni (1935) (Husband Wife). Suhra Ghar (1932) was prescribed as ‘Text-Book for F. A. (Intermediate Girls)’ by Punjab University; the book also included question paper of the last three years, when it was reprinted for the sixth time in 1945.

For the purposes of this essay, I will be discussing three key texts by T.S. Vaid that focus on men-at-home: Adarsh Pati arthat Hadayatnama Mard, Viah di Pehli Rat, and Pati Patni. All three were written between 1933 and 1935 but these texts often quoted his previous work, which will also be referred to where necessary in the essay. Similarly, corresponding discussion from the magazine Phulwari between 1925 and 1939 will also find mention. This is just to reiterate that the scope of this discussion isn’t limited to T.S. Vaid’s treatises, but as we will see below, is discussed in the upper echelons of the Sikh and Punjabi literary sphere.⁵

Patnibrata Mard: a sketch for ideal husbands

The first edition of the book Adarsh Pati arthat Hadaytnama Mard was published under the title, Dampati Sikhya in 1934. The reviews mentioned by TSV or his publishers, Narinder Printing Press, Amritsar, in the first few pages of the book help establish its the importance and popularity. The very first blurb is by Bhai Kānha Singh Nabha, the eminent Punjabi scholar, writer, and translator, famously known as the author of the definitive book on modern Sikhism in the historiography, Ham Hindu Nahin (Siṅgha and Bumra 2006, 1899). The second blurb by Professor Teja Singh, another central figure in Sikh politics who went to prison for his participation in the Gurudwara Reform movement, also endorses the book wholeheartedly. Several other eminent writers are also quoted, along with excerpts of praise from Punjabi magazines such as Vihar Sudhar, Akali Patrika, and Likhari. In the words of Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha, ‘This book is an invaluable resource for those who want to spend their married life in a state of happiness.’ (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati 1–3). Such glowing reviews also find mention in the first pages of other books, including Pati Patni and Viah di Pehli Rat (the ones under consideration here).

TSV locates manliness, or more precisely, how to be an ideal man, within the domestic sphere most prominently in his books. This is not to suggest that the public sphere was not important for him, but that his texts deal with the domestic most directly. Within the domestic sphere, first, he formulates an argument for ideal husband as ideal masculinity, which situates the discussion between the conjugal sphere strictly speaking. It may be helpful to note that T.S. Vaid uses the word ghar, home, to mean both the unit of husband and wife, which may be termed conjugal, and the life at home, which may be termed domestic. We may use conjugal to denote those practices that relate directly to sexual, emotional, and interpersonal relations between husband and wife, and domestic to denote those practices that relate directly to home management such as relationships with other members of the family, cooking, finances, and material objects at home. However, these differences and definitions do not hold as conjugal and domestic intertwine and collapse into each other in his texts. For instance, children seem to fall under both categories since they’re a crucial part of procreative married life as well as are individuals whose education, health, and selves need to be managed within the domestic. In this section, I focus on the emergent ideals of masculinity within the conjugal and domestic sphere in his books.

In the first chapter of Adarsh Pati, TSV presents a thesis for the importance of sexual science for a happy conjugal life and the proliferation of the Sikh race (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 9–21). In the history of colonial Sikh, the importance of procreative, heterosexual marital relations for the project of nationalism has been noted before. Through a reorganisation and redefinition of sexual and marital lives of middle-class and upper-caste Indians, Bengali, MaraSikh Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and other reformers articulated ‘new patriarchies’ that redefined women as their husband’s ‘helpmates,’ established a new conjugal order, and redrew caste and religious boundaries (Gupta 2002, 2012; Sreenivas 2008; Basu 2012). Countless manuals on healthy sex and procreation were published in the colonial period by reformers to this end in several languages. In the Hindi public sphere for instance, sex advice literature was commonplace, which it was almost always tied to national and racial concerns (Gupta 2011). Further, Ishita Pande’s work on conjugality and ‘global/Hindu sexology’ refers to tracts that were written for married men, especially the work of a sexologist named, Harnam Das, whose books were also translated into Gurmukhi Punjabi. Das’s work offered ‘tricks’ to men to arouse and satisfy their wives sexually. She notes,

The tricks offered by sexologists to ‘young men on the verge of marriage’ might have served to both titillate and educate, but the instructions on ensuring mutual pleasure and eugenic procreation were haunted by the preoccupations of a so-called ‘dying race’.

(Pande 2017, 684)

T.S. Vaid also locates his discussion of sex within this intellectual and literary sphere. He urges men to learn ‘sexual science’ (his words) in order to preserve their community’s (qaumi) health (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 11). However, he goes beyond this common message that one can find in other reformist texts of the period, that is, beyond the message of learning the science of sex. Instead of focusing on sexual science, in the first instance, he claims that the root cause of unhappiness at home, disintegrating marriages, and consequently an unhappy community, is men’s violence against women. Consider the following quote, (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

There is so much foolishness in the world today that they [men] consider women to be lifeless objects to be devoured … Drenched in the arrogance of their money and power, men want to force themselves upon women who are as beautiful and moral as pearls. But they should remember that a woman is not a lifeless object, she is alive, and she does not want to trade her beauty, talent, skill, and health for lifeless materials and money, neither does she like those who do so [exploit her].

(31–32)

On the contrary, most pre-1925 writings chastised women for not caring enough about their husbands, for their lack of devotion, and for the family’s lack of happiness. The pamphlets of the Khalsa Tract Society, established in 1894 by Bhai Vir Singh and other reformers have been an important resource for historians, and these also help substantiate the originality of TSV’s work. For example, commenting on Patibrata Dharam, (A wife’s duty), a popular pamphlet published by Khalsa Tract Society in (1911), Anshu Malhotra notes,

Establishing a basic hierarchy between the genders, and more specifically between a man and his wife, it brought home the message, that for a woman of any class in society, her primary religion was to be a pativrata which basically involved ‘organizing the house and serving the husband.

(Malhotra 2002, 121)

Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid’s writings are also helpful in this regard. In his 1920 book, Grihasth Nirbah, he complied a long list of responsibilities that a woman must fulfil: (1) home, (2) duties towards husband, (3) duties towards her in-laws, (4) behaviour with guests and such, (5) management and beauty, (6) boiling, preparing, and serving food, (7) saving money, (8) time and hard work, (9) protecting children, and (10) … children’s education (Vaid, M.S., 1920, 2). Further, as a last example, consider the following quote from a Khalsa Tract Society pamphlet, Ghar wich Surg arthat Grihasth wich Sukh Kikur Maanida hai, (Heaven inside home, meaning how to be happy within domestic life), published for a third time in 1930. The pamphlet is narrated through a conversation between two women, Agya Kaur (wife) and Sushil Kaur (mother-in-law). This is what the KTS pamphlet proposes as the directives for happiness at home, (Khalsa Tract Society 1911),

Keep your [women’s] body clean and your behaviour chaste. Always obey your husband and know your happiness as his happiness and his happiness as yours. Raise your children. But not out of foolish love, but out of compassion … 

(16–17)

Pointing the obvious, the pamphlet does not mention men’s role for a happy home.

We may now return to TSV. The first injunction for an ideal husband in his writings is: men should never force themselves upon their wives. In a chapter entitled, ‘Viah da Sukh’ (Happiness inside a Marriage), he compels men to ensure that they have their wife’s consent before they have sex (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 56). He strictly prohibits any sex without the consent of both parties and although he writes that non-consensual sex can only lead to unhappiness at home, he is careful enough not to hold women responsible for withholding sex (ibid). In the chapter, he writes (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

Men have the freedom to discuss anything with anyone. So, they know before marriage that marriage also means a union of bodies, but most women do not know the real meaning of bodily union. Then, they are usually shier than men. Therefore, their hearts are often not ready for bodily union. In such a situation, man needs to be patient and he should try to assure his wife that he will always protect her, respect her, and that he will never reject his wife’s wishes and ideals.

(56)

It is significant that in the second chapter, he has already disregarded the Gandhian idea of celibacy rather openly. He writes that, ‘ … the number of men who can restrain their sexual desire will always be negligent in any society’ (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 15–16) In fact, he also argues that every human needs a partner for bodily, emotional, sexual, and spiritual fulfilment of his self (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 25–26). Besides, for Sikh reformers as is the case with other reformers too, a healthy progeny is pivotal for the project of national degeneration, hence celibacy never gained ascendancy in Sikh politics. However, that did not stop TSV from identifying men’s violence, especially sexual violence, as the cause of unhappiness at home.

Again, the dictum of educating wives to carve ideal helpmates and mothers out of them has already been a part of the intellectual and literary climate of social reform in Punjab for a while, and TSV agrees with it. For instance, he wants men to seek their wife’s opinion on worldly matters and involve her in all decisions, even if it means educating her (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati, 73–74). However, for him the health and happiness of a community can only be achieved if both parties are willing to invest in their home life. He writes (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

The way that women are taught to remain patibrat, men are never taught to be Patnibrata. The manner in which a woman sacrifices her body, her heart, her money after her marriage for her husband, a man never self-sacrifices himself for his wife. If men learn to sacrifice their egos, then domestic life will become blissful, which resembles hell today.

(53)

To be Patnibrata in his worldview means, first, that men should never force themselves upon their wives. It also means staying loyal to their wives, respecting their opinions, and practicing sexual restraint, as TSV fleshes out in more detail in his book, Viah di Pehli Rat. Here too, he explicitly sets himself in opposition to the earlier writings that blame women for lack of happiness at home. While he erects new ideals for men, he also opposes a nameless writer who according to him, ‘writes that women’s rudeness causes lack of happiness at home’ (Ibid, 67). Perhaps to avoid direct confrontation, he does not name the writer.

These make up the next set of injunctions for men: stay loyal and satisfy your wife sexually. TSV does not want men to ogle at women in bazaars or try to find happiness, or sexual satisfaction outside home (Ibid, 72). He dedicates three chapters in Viah di Pehli Rat to sex. Instead of centring around healthy and unhealthy sex, or procreative sex, as might be expected, these chapters move into the territory of desire. Here again, he chastises men for forcing themselves upon their brides, but he also encourages men to learn how to have good sex. He writes that, ‘Sometimes, what happens is that a woman is barely aroused, and her man has already finished’ (Vaid 1933, Viah di Pehli Rat, 63). Such quotes betray anxieties regarding colonial modernity. Sexual anxieties, particularly, come to the surface through his discussions about how long men last during intercourse, why missionary may be the best position for women, and how to delay ‘finishing’ (Vaid 1933, Viah di Pehli Rat, 92–102). He asks men to engage in foreplay too, (Ibid),

Scholars of human nature and the human body believe that intercourse is the right course of action only when both man and woman feel aroused. If one feels aroused and the other doesn’t, neither pleasure nor a healthy child is possible. Therefore, it is important for men to first flirt and touch their wives lovingly to arouse their wives before beginning this work [sex] … not only that, but a man must also arouse love in his wife’s heart.

(98)

Together, for a happy home, a man needs to respect his wife’s consent, sexually satisfy her, stay loyal, and share responsibilities for domestic life.

As, we move further, TSV puts forward his second important claim for a happy home, and a happy community: the importance of a suitable sathi, or spouse. By now, we know that for him and all other reformers, a happy and healthy home makes a happy and healthy community. To this end, he advocates consensual marriages where groom and bride meet each other before marriage, where the age of consent is valued, and where there are real similarities between husband and wife. In the chapter, Sathi, he writes, (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

… everybody should have someone with whom they can freely discuss anything, from whom nothing needs to be hidden, whose body and its each part is as dear as one’s own, with whom there is no strangeness. [With whom] One shares his nature and thoughts, meaning, both are of one mind, both support each other in each joy and each pain … 

(26)

Having established the need for a suitable spouse, in the chapter, Viah, he addresses the causes of unhappiness at home more directly. As we know, he has already identified men’s violence to be one cause of unhappiness. Here, he adds another reason: differences of nature between husband and wife (Ibid, p.30). He writes,

Within marriage (before it), it is important to see that the bodies and youth of man and woman, their health and beauty, their faculties and age, [are suitable for each other] because at the heart of the married couple’s life is love and the guarantee of their love is that they are compatible. In any of the faculties, abilities, whether that is of education, culture, or beauty, youth, and health, if there are no similarities between the couple, their love cannot sustain. If their love is not exact, marriage becomes a forced bond, and this bond is painful for both husband and wife. The weakness in marriage that we see today is because we have no care for the couple’s compatibility. This is why the husband and wife of today are unhappy in their marriage. The cause of unhappiness is above mentioned unsuitable marriage.

(30)

Through this manoeuvre, Vaid returns to a final duty, or more precisely, a right of Patnibrata men: a man must have the right to choose his wife. Only when he has this right can become an ideal husband and an ideal man. To make this claim, he relies on an article published in Phulwari that he includes as chapter four of Adarsh Pati. The article is titled, Viah Sambandhi, (Regarding Marriage) and was written by Gurmukh Nihal Singh, a famous academic and Sikh scholar (Phulwari 1927, 35). Singh had attained a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and had joined the Banaras Hindu University’s Political Science department sometime in the 1930s (Singh and Shankar 2008, 67–68). Singh writes, (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

What a stupefying country is Hindustan! Isn’t it tragic and oppressive that those who are supposed to spend their entire lives together do not have the right to see each other, to talk with each other and figure out whether they can spend a happy life together or not? If a man even so much as requests to see a woman’s photo [would-be wife’s photo] or asks for his right to say, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ he is deemed shameless or ‘spoilt.’ … and women are poor cows for they have no voice at all! They are considered their parent’s property.

(34)

Later Singh declares, ‘The right to choose one’s own spouse is very noble and important’ (ibid, 35). Again, in contrast to the writings of previous reformers, Singh’s and TSV’s positions are quite unique (but becoming more common in the period). In the pamphlets of Khalsa Tract Society, such as Ghar wich Surg, it is an ideal woman who comes from a suitable family and who can please and serve the entire joint family that is important for a happy domestic life. In Ghar wich Surg, the mother-in-law teaches the daughter-in-law how to obey and serve the entire family by cooking, cleaning, raising children, and knowing what each member of the family needs (KTS 1911). In Mohan Singh Vaid’s Grihasth Nirbah, there is an entire chapter dedicated to the ‘duties of wife toward her marital family.’ In Grihasth Nirabh, Mohan Singh Vaid chides women, ‘Brothers leave each other in this world and become enemies [and] the reason upon thinking appears to be mostly women’ (Vaid 1920, 46). Further, he asks women to worship their parents-in-law, consider their husband’s brothers as their own brothers, learn everybody’s nature in the family, and so on (ibid, 43–56). Therefore, it is the family or family’s elders that are best equipped to choose a good wife, for Mohan Singh Vaid, and other early Sikh reformers.

Most interestingly, TSV makes the two people in the couple primary for achieving happiness, and not the joint family. In doing so, he adds to the list of ideals for men – loyalty, respecting one’s wife, investing in domestic life – a new ideal: choosing one’s wife. Here, we may discern a new kind of masculinity (as men’s roles) altogether – a conjugal-domestic masculinity – because men’s roles and the attendant idea of who is an ideal man has changed. Whereas the earlier form of Sikh masculinity constructed ideal men as Khalsa in the public sphere and a distant, often condescending, teacher in the domestic sphere, the new form of masculinity, articulated by TSV, constructs ideal men as companions, lovers, and equal participants in the domestic sphere. Simultaneously, both forms of masculinity emphasise the importance of a happy home for a morally, socially, and politically strong Sikh community that has a healthy progeny. It is the method through which said status of the Sikh community and healthy progeny is achieved that differentiates one model of masculinity from the other. But why does a new model of Sikh masculinity emerge in the 1930s? Before I discuss the possible impact and role of the conjugal-domestic Sikh masculinity in the private and the public sphere, I want to consider what makes such an exposition of masculinity possible in the first place. In the following sections, I hope to show two important discourses which necessitate the expression of conjugal-domestic masculinity in TSV: women’s movement and sexology.

Resituating T.S. Vaid: women’s movement and sexology

The men in TSV’s model, or the conjugal-domestic masculinity model are defined as patnibrata men, men who are loyal to their wives in the strictest sense of the word. Women are fundamental to TSV’s project for it is through discussing women’s miserable situation in married life that he chastises men and preaches to them his model of masculinity. Women have been important to the project of regenerating Sikh faith since the first Singh Sabhas. The first school for Sikh girls, Sikh Kanya Mahavidalaya, was established in 1892 by the Ferozpur Singh Sabha. The institution aimed to nurture its students to become good wives (achchi supatniyan) and well-mannered mothers (nek ate uttam svabhav vali maavan) (Bassi 2020, 78). It also published a monthly magazine, Punjabi Bhain, which was one of the first women’s magazines in the Sikh literary sphere. It is here that several women students contributed articles on the health of the Sikh community, the science of domestic management, and the health of women’s bodies, among other subjects. Some articles blamed men for female infanticide and the low status of women in Sikh community, but most lectured women to become ideal housewives and mothers.⁶ However, very few of the women who studied at SKM published any reformist writings during this period (pre-1925) outside women’s magazines or issues that were not related to women’s role in the Sikh faith.

In the 1930s, however, quite a few women were writing in newspapers and magazines like Phulwari. They were not only writing about women’s rights but also the importance of independence from the colonial rule. Some regular contributors included Bibi Jiwan Kaur, Bibi Tej Kaur, Bibi Amar Kaur, and Bibi Lakhmir Kaur; some of these women had received undergraduate education and were introduced in the magazine positively. Further, in July 1937, Phulwari released a Nari Number (Women’s Issue) in which all the articles focused on the status and role of women in the Sikh community, nation, and modern times. The first essay’s title read, Ai Mard! which roughly translates to Oh Man! The writer urged men to mend their ways, and said, (Phulwari July 1937)

O good soon, lion of Mother India!

Why are you looking at me with suspicion? Do not be afraid. I still do not want to fight with you. I only want love!

(2)

The essay was published under an anonymous name, Hindi Istri – An Indian Woman. What makes this an interesting read is the ‘suspicion’ that the writer mentions and the sense of times changing that the word ‘still’ espouses. What fear is the essay is referring to? The rest of the issue helps uncover what Hindi Istri means by her essay. In the issue, there are essays on women’s health, quotes by famous writers and philosophers from around the world in favour of women, Russian women, poems on women’s lives, a list of recent women graduates, women’s education in India, women in Sikh faith and so on. The most interesting essay in the issue is ‘Hindi Istri di Position’, or Position of Indian women,’ a second editorial (Ibid, 17–20). The author, Hira Singh Dard, notes that the essay is based upon ‘Mrs Brij Lal Nehru’s recent essay in the Indian Encyclopaedia’ (ibid). Rameshwari Nehru (also, wife of Brij Lal Nehru) was a social reformer who was an incredibly important figure in the Indian women’s movement and a co-founder of the All-India Women’s Conference.

In the essay, among other social ills that befall women such as child marriage and widowhood, the author discusses legal rights that women have secured in the recent times that they may benefit from. Regarding the marriage of girls with old men, the author says, (ibid),

Women have demanded that the law should stop marriages of young and unmarried girls to old men. The All-India Women’s Conference of 1930 has demanded this by passing a motion. In the Riyasat of Baroda, such a law has been passed under which the marriage of a man above the age of 50 with a girl who is less than 18 years old is a crime.

(18)

Regarding child marriage, the author cites the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, under which the minimum age of marriage was fourteen for girls and eighteen for boys. Further, regarding divorce, the author mentions the 1892 Civil Marriage Act under which both parties can legally divorce as long as they give up their religious affiliation. Finally, the author mentions the establishment of All India Women’s Conference in 1927, other women’s organisations and councils in different parts of India, and states that, ‘this is the era of women’s organisations.’

This discussion may demonstrate that Sikh and Punjabi reformers are not only acutely aware of the emergence and rapid development of women’s movement in India but that they’re also actively engaging with it. The Age of Consent Bill of 1891 and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, as feminist historians have noted variously, significantly altered women’s relationship with the public sphere, by allowing upper-caste and middle class women to participate in public life more proactively (Anagol-McGinn 1992; Pande 2020; Kumar 1997). This also led to a proliferation of women’s writings about their marital rights, various aspects of domesticity, and their role in the nationalist movement (Basu 2018; Anagol 2008, 2005, 182). The ‘suspicion’ that the author of the essay Ai Mard talks about is perhaps that women will start exercising their legal rights and will lead public lives. The word ‘still’ too perhaps refers to the demands and strength of women’s movement which confronted men directly now for their violence against women. It appears that Hindi Istri is reassuring her men readers that she is ‘still’ not fighting them, only asking them nicely to respect women and their rights.

It is not too far-fetched to assume that TSV was also aware of these developments given that he greatly emphasised women’s consent in his books. He also often contributed articles to Phulwari on diseases and health (Phulwai, July 1938), time management (Phulwari, August 1937), excitement (Phulwari September 1937), and children and their health (Phulwari, October 1937). Along with anxieties regarding the impact of colonial modernity, we may add anxieties that sprang from women’s participation in the public sphere and increased access to the law, among other fields. In other words, while TSV may have genuinely cared about women’s status and condition within marriage, he was also operating from within a public sphere where women, mostly upper-caste and middle class, had some access to law, public sphere, and women’s organisations. At the end of the chapter Viah, he opines, (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

Today’s age is not one where a husband may as well be blind, cripple, mute, stupid, ugly, or broke, but he will be a God for his wife and she will be his servant! Or that she will believe her life’s mission has been fulfilled by serving him. That age has long gone.

(32)

TSV’s injunctions for men to be loyal, to satisfy their wives sexually, and to respect them may also be read through this context.

Since T.S. Vaid was an Ayurveda practitioner and publicist, it makes sense to locate his interventions in the field of sexual education and health and within transnational intellectual movements and developments about sex and the body at the time, especially sexology, or sexual science. Sexology is best understood as the scientific study of sex across the globe beginning in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From its inception, sexual science was an interdisciplinary field produced and maintained by specialists who codified and catalogued sexual interactions in all their myriad expressions – from the scale of the kiss or caress, to perceived ‘perversities’ found among social groups, to the impact of disease, prostitution, and population control on regional, national, and global scales (Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones 2018, 4).

In India, these specialists included psychologists, scientists, doctors, social reformers and intellectuals like Gandhi, and practitioners of non-western schools of medicine (Pande 2020). Often, Indian sexologists wrote in the spirit of reforming their particular religious or national communities by imparting lessons in sexual health, performance, diseases and the like. They appropriated, translated, and creatively used transnational ideas regarding sex and the body while simultaneously drawing upon traditional or already existing ideas about the same in their communities to write mostly reformist texts. In other words, they produced in vernacular a hybrid corpus of sexual knowledge that creatively braided transnational and local ideas about sex and the body.

For instance, in the Hindi public sphere, practitioner-publicists such as Yashoda Devi wrote books on sexual health and conjugal life in the name of reforming marital relations (Gupta 2020). Bengali publications on health, domesticity, and hygiene often discussed sex, marital life, and the domestic to a similar end (Prasad 2006; Mukherjee 2017; Guha 1996). Chronologically speaking, while marital sex was a significant aspect of social reform from the late nineteenth century, its particular iteration as sexology and corresponding popularisation through countless new books on conjugal relations, marital life, sexual satisfaction of women, and the like, as Douglas Haynes notes, gained prominence in India around 1925 only (Haynes 2012). A range of discourses – the rise of the birth control movement, Margaret Sanger’s debate with Gandhi on birth control in 1936, popular representation of themes such as love and sex in the cinema and plays – coincided in the 1930s.⁷ In Punjab too, around 1930s, we notice a rise in the number of books and articles written on sexual diseases, health, and hygiene. Whereas in the early twentieth century, there existed authors who opined on these issues sporadically such as Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid, there was a dramatic increase in the number of books and authors who addressed these issues in the 1930s, including Vaids such as T.S. Vaid.⁸

Situating TSV’s writing along the axis of global sexology is worthwhile because it allows us to view his interventions beyond strictly reformist agendas. That is, beyond the politics of nationalism and religion as well, bodily health and happiness are important for him, which is why he spends the first chapter of Adarsh Pati and Pati Patni on establishing the importance of ‘sexual science’ and quotes nameless ‘foreign’ doctors to bolster his claims. He writes, (Vaid 1935, Adarsh Pati),

If teaching a child how to eat is necessary, so is teaching the young the laws of Sexual Science … 

Science is gaining popularity in the world day by day. Through its proliferation only will superstitions erode, and we will find knowledge. It is science’s light that has cleared all delusions and now, a new dawn is upon us in which no such myths and illusions will prevail among humans that seek to disguise the truth.

(15)

Further, drawing upon ‘sexual science’, which he writes in Roman script throughout, as well as political and social reform movements in India, he tries to create market for and gain validation for his Ayurvedic practice. Often, the last page of his books features an advertisement of his centre in Tarn Taran; the advertisements implore his readers to buy his drugs to bolster their sexual health, cure any diseases, etc. In other words, the forces of commodity capitalism and transnational ideas about sex and the body, especially global sexology, enable TSV in the 1930s to present his case for Patnibrata mard and articulate a conjugal-domestic masculinity.

Conjugal-domestic masculinity: beyond the gender binary

TSV’s conjugal-domestic masculinity lays down a set of instructions for men to follow in their married life. As such, it appears to limit itself to men’s behaviour towards women and men’s role as a distinct gender vis-à-vis women. That is, conjugal-domestic masculinity shifts the contours of gender roles, especially masculinity. However, masculinity is more than a category of gender difference. As Mrinalini Sinha says,

Men and women … are historically and discursively constructed not necessarily only in relation to one another, but also in relation to a variety of other categories, including dominant formulations of the political and social spheres, which are themselves subject to change.

(Sinha in Loomba & Lukose 2012, 360)

Further, within histories of British and Victorian masculinities, gender binary has not been the privileged site for historical analysis of masculinity. In his article from 1999, the historian John Tosh argued that ‘in modern Western societies the public demonstration of masculinity occurs in three linked arenas – home, work and all-male associations’ (Tosh 1994, 184). Excellent research has been produced in the field that shows that ideals of hegemonic and other masculinities were consolidated and operationalised through class, men’s relationship with work, imperialism, army, and other social formations (Dawson 1994; Harvey and Shepard 2005; Martin 2002).

The changing ideals of masculinity engaged with and impacted the broader social sphere of Sikh and Punjabi community. The most important consequence of this model of conjugal-domestic masculinity does not fall within the gender-binary. Conjugal-domestic masculinity challenges the kinship patterns of the Sikh, Punjabi, and broader Indian community – the joint family and the age-based social hierarchy. In Sikh, Punjabi, and most South Asian communities, joint family was the accepted norm until at least early twentieth century. The elders of the family – men and women – decided a young man’s fate by deciding his education, occupation, and wife. By beseeching men to ‘choose’ their wives and by focusing exclusively on the relationship between husband and wife for domestic bliss, Vaid implicitly challenged these norms.

Let us recall that one of the main reasons behind unhappy marriages is the lack of agency for young men. Both TSV and Nihal Singh oppose elders and parents, as the quotes mentioned in the previous sections demonstrate. Talking about a young man’s right to choose his wife, Gurmukh Nihal Singh (Singh in Vaid 1935) goes as far as to say that,

I firmly believe that unless our country is free from the customs of child marriage, Purdah, and marriages arranged by parents, it cannot progress. A man cannot be called a man if does not have the right to choose his life partner. Slavery is not just political slavery or the state of being enslaved by a foreign government, but there are many kinds of slavery. A man not only needs political freedom but also social freedom and social rights. In my opinion, social freedom is more important than political freedom of a nation.

(36)

Similarly, although Singh also attacks men for believing that marriage is a source of sexual satisfaction only, he is careful and ingenious to transfer the blame to elders and community who never teach young men the importance of married life. He chastises the community for marrying away men while they’re still young and financially dependent on their parents (ibid, 35). Further, he declares that no man should marry unless he can provide for his wife financially (ibid, 38). Once married, he says that men must father children only if they can provide for all of them and not burden their wives with ‘a child every year’ (Ibid, 40). Both Singh and TSV insist that a man can provide for his wife, father children, and provide financial comforts to his family only if he has the right to choose his own wife and decide when to marry.

Here, a man’s rights are not defined in opposition to women’s rights, but the rights of his parents and elders. His right as a man is constructed against the rights of the joint family and the age-based social hierarchy. Persuading men to take an active part in their lives at home is not only important to show respect to their wives, but also to replace the family’s elders and his parents as the heads of the household. Becoming financially independent, discussing all problems with their wives, spending time with their wives and children, conjugal-domestic masculinity seeks to change the social fabric of Sikh and Punjabi community by changing its kinship and family patterns. Further, respecting women is not an end in itself, but part of a larger shift in the young man’s role and rights in the community.⁹

As historians of family and conjugal relations in colonial India have shown variously, social reform movements sought to institute companionate and monogamous marriages as ideal forms of conjugality. These provided upper-caste women with opportunities such as medical training, home science, and teaching, while for upper caste men, these helped reduce the financial burden of supporting joint families and increased their social power. TSV is also proposing a companionate, nuclear family of husband and wife in his writings.

It may also be noted that there are indeed men who need not be married at all; the conjugal-domestic masculinity pivots itself on these men too. These are impotent men, hijra, and disabled men. By calling a nation that continues to marry their daughters to such men ‘unfortunate,’ TSV and Singh appear to be making more room and validity for their claims that they must marry wisely, that is, according to their wishes so that they may produce a healthy and responsible progeny (Ibid, 45). Here too, masculinity operates in the sphere of men’s relationships with other men, rather than the gender binary, strictly speaking.

Therefore, Sikh masculinity does not work against femininity, or through the gender binary exclusively in TSV’s writings. However, it has only been through throwing ‘home’ as a site of the construction of masculinity into broad relief that this essay has been able to define and analyse the conjugal-domestic masculinity and its possible role in the social sphere. While home has been a neglected location of historical research on masculinity, Sikh, Punjabi, and Indian men have been just as important actors in domestic life. Their roles as fathers, husbands, and men in the community have also shaped and decided their masculinities. Until at least 1925, most reformers tried to establish women as home’s managers, but it was under men’s leadership that women could manage their homes; men were always present as teachers. From the 1930s onwards, men’s role at home became more prominent through the rise of the new model of conjugal-domestic masculinity. But how men conducted their domestic affairs was always fundamental aspect of their masculinities.

In a somewhat historiographical article on domesticity, Swapna Banerjee ‘considers the newly evolved notions of colonial domesticity as a moment of [re]consideration rather than a break with the past’ (Banerjee 2010, 455). Tracing the genealogy of domesticity from India’s precolonial past, it explores the relationship between women and domesticity and signals the need to expand the field to include men and children. Following her, we may trace the meaning of home in Sikh ontology and community from its pre-colonial history to understand TSV’s model. Within Sikh ontology, domestic life enjoys a high status; Guru Nanak renounced the life of an ascetic and encouraged Sikhs to participate in domestic life, known as ‘the way of the householder’ (Mooney 2020, 95). While it may be necessary from time to time to sacrifice one’s family for the sake of the faith, family life is not erected in opposition to the life of a warrior, social reformer, and devout Sikh.At the beginning of his essay, Viah Sambandhi, Gurmukh Nihal Singh (Singh in Vaid 1935)writes that,

In a man’s life,four decisions are extremely important and difficult to make – one, choosing a companion for his worldly life; two, choosing an occupation for the livelihood of his family; three, to find a path for parmarth [salvation]; and four, to prepare to sacrifice oneself for one’s faith and country.

(33)

This opening statement is highly significant insofar as it helps us appreciate that an all too easy characterisation of domestic as the realm of women and femininity perhaps does not hold in the case of Sikh ‘householders,’ men for whom ideal masculinity is judged from their participation in home-life as much as from their martialness and public performance of Sikhi. Not only are they heads of household, but it is also their responsibility to provide for their families, respect their wives, and raise moral children since these are part and parcel of a Sikh way of life. In a nutshell, TSV’s model of a conjugal-domestic masculinity is more than what it appears; it is not so much a radical model for changing gender roles as one that allows young men ofmarriageable age to secure the right of choice for themselves. TSV wants men to perfect their roles as ideal, loving, and caring husbands so that they can form a happy unit withtheir wives and lead lives that are to some extent independent of the pressures of the joint family. Regarding making a happy home,(Vaid 1935), he says,

Men should include women in everything that they find interesting or worth knowing. Those who understand such things to be useless for women are committing ahuge mistake. Everything in the world is equally interesting for both men and women. From this only, both find mental happiness. So, husband and wife should respect each other and beinvolved in those things [in the world] that will keep them happy for their entire lives.

(74)

Conclusion: khalsa masculinity and conjugal-domestic masculinity

Seemingly, the biggest difference between the conjugal-domestic and the Khalsa masculinity is the treatment of women. At the risk of belabouring the point, Khalsa-Sikh masculinity chastises women for their lack of education, exhorts them to become ‘helpmates,’ props a disproportionately huge responsibility for the future of Sikh community on the shoulders of women, preaches ideal motherhood and wifehood, and targets women’s friendships and community. The conjugal-domestic masculinity blames men equally, if not more, for unhappy marriages and the state of the community, chastises men for not loving and respecting their wives, teaches men how to have sex and satisfy their wives, encourages them to respect their wives’ opinions, love their children, and take an active part in their domestic lives. It appears that new masculinities and femininities are constructed within the gender binary itself, where men should participate in domestic life and women should be able to work if needed.

However, my intent in this essay has been to critically analyse these changing ideals of gender roles, particularly masculinity, by asking what necessitated the articulation of conjugal-domestic masculinity in TSV rather than its impact on women’s agency, which has been the question for most of historiography on gender and domesticity in colonial India. This has also allowed me to analyse conjugal-domestic masculinity’s possible impact on the social formations of the Sikh and Punjabi community. I have suggested that conjugal-domestic masculinity articulated itself against the almost pan-Indian ideas of age-based hierarchy and the kinship pattern of joint family, even as it couched itself in the language of loving, caring, and loyal husbands. It is only by asking questions other than the relationship between gender, domesticity, and colonialism that I have arrived at a this.

However, I do want to clarify that I have relied upon the current historiographical model of Khalsa masculinity, which has not analysed said masculinity’s contours within the domestic realm. Khalsa masculinity did not talk about its domestic character that is, did not discuss much about manliness within home, but I still think it worthwhile to problematise the current historiographical model by asking different questions from the archive of Khalsa masculinity itself. It may include asking: What is the relationship between men reformers who write about ideal femininity and their treatises on femininity? What does the emphasis on women’s roles tell us about men’s roles? Can the affective registers of Punjabi in which books for women are written by men tell us something about these men? What kind of personal and emotional lives did these men lead? Reading the archive of reformist tracts for women against its own internal logic or asking what is missing from said archives, we may be able to problematise the absence of prescriptive advice for men and hopefully, the current model of Khalsa masculinity. We may also become better equipped to explore other simultaneous models of masculinity in the Punjabi literary sphere, which may or may not share much with Khalsa masculinity, or perhaps, even communal or religious forms of masculinities.

The second historiographical direction I want to suggest is the history of sexuality, particularly men’s sexuality. In the literature written under the sign of medicine – reformist and otherwise, there were several books that featured discussions on sexual desire, sexual performance, and sexuality. Similarly, there were quite a few books and tracts on diseases and the anatomical human body. Using sexuality and embodiment as analytic, we may be able to problematise and revisit histories of Sikhism and Punjab which take colonialism as their organising principle. Finally, histories of gender identities and roles may benefit from expanding their possible sites, which may be medicine, home, work, and so on in the case of Sikh and Punjab studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, I have used the phrase ‘Sikh literary sphere’ to denote public and reformist writings of Sikh organisations and its reception by public who identified themselves as Sikhs. I have used the phrase ‘Punjabi literary sphere’ to denote a nascent field of literature in Gurmukhi-Punjabi that did not necessarily limit itself to the concerns of Sikhism and included writings by non-Sikh, Punjabi actors. Chronologically, it may be argued that Punjabi literary sphere emerged in the 1930s, most forcefully through the launch of the magazine, Preetlari, which espoused the idea of universal love rather than the cause of a religion or race.

2 See Mir (2010). The social space of language: vernacular culture in British colonial Punjab, Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University of California Press. for the attack on women’s religious beliefs and affiliations by Singh Sabha reformers in early twentieth century Punjab.

3 ‘Men in the home’ is borrowed from the title of Pandey (2020).

4 For example, he was introduced as the son of Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid in the introduction of Adarsh Pati. See Adarsh Pati, 1935, p. 5

5 Nevertheless, I do not claim to have traced a genealogy of these developments in writings about the domestic, femininity, and masculinity, but merely suggest a new historiographical direction through the sources studied in this essay

6 See for example, “Gala hi Ghutt Dinde,” Punjabi Bhain, December 1912, p. 9, in which the author blames men for female infanticide; she also says that instead of making women their slaves, men should’ve killed them as infants.

7 See Ahluwalia (2008).

8 During this period, comparative titles by other authors include, Santan Sanjam, Grihasth Dharam Shastra, Pati Patni da Sansar, Viah di Chann Rat, and Garbh Rok.

9 I also suspect here a nascent articulation of the new subject-citizen: an independent man who makes his own decisions regarding his personal life, occupation, and marriage, but perhaps, also his political life. Going beyond the affairs of the religious communities to which these men belong, TSV and later, other Gurmukhi-Punjabi magazines, appear to be making room for non-communal or parareligious forms of individuality; and alternative ideas of nation as a composite unit of individuals, at least individual upper-caste men, rather than a nation of religious communities. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for drawing my attention to the relationships between nationhood and personhood.