Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Religious Assertion Among Dalits in Doaba Region of Punjab

2016; The Society of Economics and Development; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5958/2322-0430.2016.00175.x

2322-0430

Amanpreet Kaur, Shalini Sharma,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

In the last few decades, India has experienced a strong wave of Dalit assertion. As a result of economic, political policies and other efforts of government, assertion has taken many forms and the most apparent is religious assertion. They were proud of their caste and following the teachings of their Gurus. This phenomenon is more prevalent in Doaba region of Punjab because of their numerical preponderance with more than 60 per cent of the population in some of the villages. So the present study was conducted with specific objective to study the religious assertion among Dalits of Doaba. From randomly selected 16 villages from four districts of the regionl60 Dalits were interviewed. The study found that 14 village had separate Gurudwaras for Dalits. They celebrated their religious functions separately with great pomp and show. Though, overtly Jat Sikh have not defied their attempt(s) and were supportive but the chances of conflict cannot be ruled out completely.