‘Randua on the bench’: examining the colonial and post-colonial roots of contemporary forced bachelorhood and vigilantism in the Agrarian North

Situated in Western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, the paper (1803-present) traces the contemporary roots of forced bachelorhood in the agrarian north from the vantage point of colonial and post-colonial political economy. The colonial government relied on a historicist view to endorse the land settlement as a revival of antiquarian yeomen institutions. The late 19th century witnesses a mimesis in the way propertied castes/classes stake a claim on the colonial idea of antiquity to push for a variety of economic and socio-religious demands. This involved Landholder petitions to secure revenue remissions as well as demands to ban cow slaughter. Post-colonial policies on food security revealed a colonial era obsession with the ancient yeomen spirit. It offered dominant Hindu propertied castes the elbow room to re-root themselves as defenders of the peasantry. In the more contemporaneous period, ‘tradition’ is redrawn to accommodate the aspirations of the rural unemployed, also forced bachelors (randuas). The paper shows how this has opened avenues of work for (randuas) who interchangeably use of the terms samaj sewak (social work) or dharam Raksha (protectors of faith). Such work serves to assuage anxieties of marriage and joblessness while also lending validation to the far right character of an atrophied political economy.