Wedding Bhānds: ‘From the Donkey Cart to the Aeroplane’

Abstract

In the legacy of colonial modernity and capitalism, bhānds are often marginalised in contemporary urban weddings. The author explores how bhānds, by using genealogical expertise and status interactions, penetrate contemporary capitalist structures, offering a stinging critique to General Musharraf’s liberal and military agendas that marked the 2007 period of field research. In the absence of feudal rulers, many bhānds apparently identify with lower income groups and their alienation from the urban capitalist structures, scoffing at its power from its margins, and asserting older feudal ways. Other bhānds have adapted to contemporary challenges by using their residuality to locate the persistence of feudal value systems within the urban political elite and upwardly mobile, from where they play more of a balancing act with the social structures, reaching diverse audiences, as the bhānd Munir Hussain puts it, from ‘the donkey cart to the aeroplane’.