Coming of Age in Macholand: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Search for Freedom Indian Punjab

An eye-opening anthropological examination of masculinity, violence, and transnational migration focused on present-day Punjab.In Coming of Age in Macholand, anthropologist and filmmaker Harjant S. Gill examines how Punjabi men in India, disillusioned by promises of power and control, contend with patriarchy: by submitting to it, attempting to transgress it, migrating to escape it, or coming undone by it. Gill takes readers deep inside men’s worlds to show how boys come of age and how masculinity is produced through pervasive violence, while also being underwritten by intimacy, fraternal love, and homosocial bonds.After conducting four years of fieldwork over a decade and hundreds of interviews, Gill explores how boys learn to become men against the backdrop of patriarchal constraints, political violence, shifting agrarian economies, and steady outward migration. He shows the extent to which violence is a function and a reflection of powerlessness. By tracing the making of masculinity in a society where sexuality is sanctioned almost exclusively through heteronormative frameworks of marriage and family, this book documents how patriarchy forecloses agency and autonomy. Ultimately, Coming of Age in Macholand offers a powerful indictment of patriarchy as a system that not only oppresses women and queer people but also constricts men’s intimate, sexual, and emotional lives.