Wah-e-Guru jee dee ay Khalsa..............

I am either a Sikh or a low caste Hindu (I will shortly explain how and why). I do not know which one of the two, but for the sake of fascination here, I think I am a Sikh. I always knew there is something peculiarly Sikh about my family, both extended and immediate, and me. I remember telling my mother that our Faisalabadi relatives speak punjabi the Sikh way when I first met them some 14 years ago. My most recent statement about my Sikh blood/origins to my mother has been "andron asee saray aee sikh nay"

For Those who are wondering about who I am and why am I so bothered (read excited) about my Sikh origins, I am a pakistani born muslim (at least thats what my passport, ID card and birth certificate says, I on the other hand cannot recall when I converted to this relegion) whose family is settelled in Lahore for the past 20 years or so.

But here it goes...

My family (both paternal and maternal side of it) has claimed itself to be descendents of some afghan pathan tribe called Kakezai. Achakzai, Aurakzai, Paley Shah, Kakezai, etc were 12 brothers in all. Some of the tribesmen from these 12 tribes, especially Kakezai came and settled in Jallundhar, Hoshiarpur and Ropar in India. At the time of partition, in 1947, these Hoshiarpuris and Roparis decided to migrate to Pakistan and settled in Faisalabad, Lahore, Sialkot, and Dera Ghazi Khan.

This is the family version of our origins. Today, a friend showed me an article that says quite a bit about the origins of Kakezais. The article is called Changes in Status and Occupation in Nineteenth-Century Panjab and was written by P.H.M.van den Dungen. I quote

…as a final example of social change among low castes, the history of the Hindu, Sikh and Muslim Kalals may be considered. In this, as my previous examples , the direction of change was determined by traditional status concepts…it was an occupational change made in the pursuit of status…… the history of Kalals also illustrates the slowness of status changes among low castes. British rule contributed to the story by a mixture of adverse and favorable economic and administrative influences.

...the very inferior status, which originally distinguished the Kalals, derived from their hereditary occupation, the distillation and sale of spirituous liquors. With the rise to political power of Jassa Singh Kalal, the most famous Sikh chief of eighteenth century, the importance of the Kalals had increased and there had been a tendency among them to abandon their degrading hereditary occupation. The British accelerated the process; for by subjecting the manufacture and sale of spirits to Government regulations they added a form of economics compulsion to the original concern for status…

In addition to abandoning their hereditary occupation the Kalals tried to raise their status y changing their caste names and by claiming more respectable social origins. Jassa Singh Kalal had styled himself Ahluwalia from the name of his ancestral village, a tile which was still borne by his descendents, the royal family of the Native State of Kpurthala in British times and one which the Sikh Kalals generally adopted as the name of their caste. By the early twentieth century some Ahluwalias had gone further by claimin Khatri or Rajput origin. Long before British rule some Muslim Kalas tried to conceal their antecedents by inventing a Pathan origin and calling themselves Kakezais. A further step was sometime taken in which the Kakezai became a Shaikh. The Kakezai Shaikhs of Hoshiarpur who ruled the Jullunder Doab in the 1840s were the most prominent example. The transition from Kalal to Kakezai to Shaikh continued under British rule…

Sat Sari Akal and Wah Guru dee Khalsa.

So much for being pure blooded muslims... Pakistani Middle class hang-ups (or hiccups)...

I want to go back to my ancestral occupation. Liquor Distillation. Perfect. Jassa Singh Brewries. The finest in Pakistan, The Land of the Pure.