Ya base Gujar, Ya rahe ujar
(May only Gujars or desolation inhabit the city)
—Shaikh Nizamuddin’s prophecy (or curse) on Ghiyasuddin Tughlaqand his new citadel of Tughlaqabad 800 years ago.
And so it came to pass.
These words capture something of the essence of the Gujar nomads whose preferredhabitat has been the inhospitable ravines of the Aravali ranges. They convey thepathos too, of a free ranging (lawless) pastoral community which has beenforcibly ‘settled’ into some notion of agriculture only early in the lastcentury probably in an effort to tame them but speeded on by the shrinkingpastures where they once roamed. Even today, their first love is their cattle(remember their clanking milk cans brought on bicycles to Delhi homes, stoppingonly to add water from insalubrious sources on the way?) and goats andcamels—the latter their main transport until barely 20 years ago.
I have lived and worked amongst Gujars in the Mehrauli/Gurgaon area for close on40 years. These four decades have seen changes for everyone, but drastically forthe Gujars who have been hurled into the raging consumerism of liberalising,globalising India singularly ill-equipped to deal with it.
Look at what has happened to them. They had barely settled into cultivatingtheir barren, rocky land in villages like Mandi, Jaunapur, Fatehpur Beri, Dera,Aya Nagar, Ghitorni, etc, living in total backwardness, disdaining school fortheir children or any contact with the City except for their wild milk-sellingforays, when DLF moved into their domain in the fifties. It bought up the bestland at throwaway prices but soon to soar as roads were laid and plots developedfor what, even then, were euphemistically called ‘farms’, for the urbangentry.
Until the seventies the new farm owners were mostly absentee and the Gujars hadentry everywhere and lorded it over the migrant ‘purabias’ employed on thefarms who survived only at their pleasure. Gujar women cut the grass for fodderand Gujar men used the isolated farms to construct stills for brewing andselling tharra smuggled on camelback at night from the villages of GwalPahari, Baliavaas in Haryana.
The scheduled castes and Gujar women were oppressed as badly as the migrants inthe mines and quarries of Bhatti, Mandi and Jaunapur where the Gujars became thecontractors.
By the early nineties everything changed. Mining was banned, luxury mansionssprang up behind high walls and barred gates on the erstwhile ‘farms’ andthe Gujars were divested again, of what had been their livelihood and theoverlordship of their domain.
The changes since then have been so rapid, the invasion of consumerism sosweeping that the Gujars, unready in every sense could only sell off theirremaining land and turn to property dealing, using their local clout in dubiousdeals to make quick money and spend it as quickly on acquiring the goodiesadvertised on their television sets.
Those few who saw the writing on the wall now cast about desperately to findgood schools for their sons. And this is where they met a stonewall. No decentschool would have them. Not only were they first generation learners, they hadno English. But even these youth were hungry only for sarkari jobs. Why?"Good pay, job security and no need to work," was the artless reply. Sotoday, while they possess consumer durables of every kind their future is bleak,although their attitudes and actions remain aggressively rash and bullying.
Little wonder that their recent explosion of lawlessness was on a demand to gobackwards! If only they would demand quality education instead. But then that isGujar Buddhi for you!
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This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, July 2007
