1) Hum Guru Ko Bhari Aur Shakti Ko Jar Kahte Han !
Guru Aur Jar Ke Jod Se Bante Unko Gurjar Kahte Han !!
2) Kheti Karte Ann Upjate Mehnat Se Jo Jeetey Han !
Shakahari Bhojan Han Jinka,Dudh -Dahi Ji Peetey Han !!
3) Sushti Tajtey Kushti Ladtey ,Dangal-Dangal Rahte Han !
Dugdho utpadan, Anno utpadan Mein Inki Ruchi Gehri Han !!
4) Rastra Ke Rakshak, Dusht Ke Bhakshak ,Seema Ke Ve Prahari Han !
Gurjar Dharti, Taja Karti , Han Yaadein Beetey ItiHaas Ki !!
5) Gurjar Se Gujarat Bana Han, Baat Han yeh Vishwas Ki !
Loron Ne Lahore Basaya Aur Basaya Khariyan !!
6) Jo Inkey Itihas Purush They Unse Rahi Bharat Ki Shaan !
Gujarat Mein Jinki Vaani Gunji, Punjab Mein Jinki Aab Han !!
7) Desh-Deewane Aazadi Ke Parvane Inmey Behisaab Han !
Gujari Bhasa Ke Bhasi Aur Gujari Raag Ke Raagi They !!
8) Jab Tak Desh Partantra Raha Bane Rahe They Baagi They !
Hua Desh Swatantra, Magar Kiya Inko Kuch Inaam Mila !
Kiya Freedom Fighter Naam Ya Kuch Inko Kaam Mila !!
By- Late Shri Yadram Pardhan Ji
Regards
This Blog is a Platform for all Gurjar community People all around the World.We are a progressive community which had a glorious past and promising future. so to enlightene its glory lets conjoined our hands together to uplift the Gurjar samaaj in every sphere ...... Jai Gurjar Jai Bharat
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Why HAs History Forgotten this Giant..?

"LAl BAHADUR SHASTRI JI, Ke Janam Diwas ki Hardik Subhkaamnae ,Jai Jawan
Jai Kissan, Shastri ji Humesha Amar Rahenge Humare Karm Aur Vichaaron
Mein."
Why HAs History Forgotten this Giant..?
It is a matter of shame that while everybody was busy in paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi, nobody realised that october 2 was also the birth anniversary of one...of
our greatest freedom fighters & Leader -A man of Soil,Simplicity &
Devotion- Shri LAl BAHADUR SHASTRI JI,.The media seems to have
forgotten Shastri Ji 's Sacrifices for the nation (insteaad of it media
is more devoted in celebrating any actor or actress birth anniversary well have these actors or actress have done any social reforms in society or have they led their life in country pride thn why is it so in our country....? we have to biocott this prevailing scenerio ....)It shows the sycophancy of the congress leadership,which on the one hand is running an austerity drive & on the other,is spending lakhs on full page newspaper advertisements in the memory of their Gandhi 's.....
Shastri Ji, is my idol of Honesty,Courage,& Confidence,
He is the LEGEND of India.which is now suffering from incurable diseases, politics,
He Truly Deserves to be the Father of Nation not anyone else.so i request u to all please pay ur tribute to this Holy Soul on his Post Birth Anniversary.
Regards
Ravi Kasana
Mechanical Engineer
Vill & Post-Jawli,Ghaziabad
Monday, September 13, 2010
GYAAN... Dengue Cure Treatment
I would like to share this interesting discovery from a classmate's son who
has just recovered from dengue fever
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever> . Apparently, his son was in
critical stage at the ICU when his blood platelet count drops to 15
after 15 liters of blood transfusion.
father was so worried that he seeks another friend's recommendation and
his son was saved. He confessed to me that he gave his son raw juice of the
papaya leaves. From a platelet count of 45 after 20 liters of blood
transfusion, and after drinking the raw papaya leaf juice, his platelet
count jumps instantly to 135. Even the doctors and nurses were surprised.
the second day he was discharged. So he asked me to pass this good
news around.
Accordingly it is raw papaya leaves, 2pcs just cleaned and pound and
squeeze with filter cloth. You will only get one tablespoon per leaf.. So
two tablespoon per serving once a day. Do not boil or cook or rinse with
hot water, it will loose its strength. Only the leafy part and no stem or
sap. It is very bitter and you have to swallow it like "Won Low Kat". But
it works.
*Papaya Juice - Cure for Dengue*
You may have heard this elsewhere but if not I am glad to inform you that
papaya juice is a natural cure for dengue fever. As dengue fever is rampant
now, I think it's good to share this with all.
A friend of mine had dengue last year.. It was a very serious situation for
her as her platelet count had dropped to 28,000 after 3 days in hospital
water has started to fill up her lung. She had difficulty in breathing.
She was only 32-year old. Doctor says there's no cure for dengue. We just
have to wait for her body immune system to build up resistance against
dengue and fight its own battle. She already had 2 blood transfusion and
all of us were praying very hard as her platelet continued to drop since
the first day she was admitted.
Fortunately her mother-in-law heard that papaya juice would help to reduce
fever and got some papaya leaves, pounded them and squeeze the juice
out for her. The next day, her platelet count started to increase, her
fever subside. We continued to feed her with papaya juice and she recovered
after 3 days!!!
Amazing but it's true. It's believed one's body would be overheated when
one is down with dengue and that also caused the patient to have fever
papaya juice has cooling effect. Thus, it helps to reduce the level of heat
in one's body, thus the fever will go away. I found that it's also good
when one is having sore throat or suffering from heat.
Please spread the news about this as lately there are many dengue cases.
It's great if such natural cure could help to ease the sufferings of dengue
patients.
Furthermore it's so easily available.
Blend them and squeeze the juice! It's simple and miraculously effective!!
KEEP SHARING................
A Bagdavad Gurjar
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Save Your Pride & Purity of a Blood
Mera sabhi Gujjar ladke or ladkiyo se nivedan hai ki or kisi b caste or cultulral me shaadi kr k Gujjar Samaj me apne Mata-Pita or apne Khandan ka naam kharab na kre kyonki parivar ka naam Banane me bhot time lgta hai or Gavane mein sirf 1 koi b chotti si Galti hi kafi hai ...!
A Bagdavad Gurjar
A Bagdavad Gurjar
Friday, September 10, 2010
Gurjar Samraat Mihir Bhoj Jayanti

We are celebrating The Jayanti of Gurjar Samraat Mihir Bhoj Mahaan on 10 Sep 2010 at Gurjar Bhawan ,Kotla, Patparganj, Delhi 91..We invite you to attend the Jayanti celebrations on 10 Sep 2010 at 7:00 Am at Gurjar Bhawan ,Kotla, Patparganj, Delhi 91.Dipak Gurjar( Dedha) Dalupra 9289086667.Event Organiser
Congrats
Friends "The Great Gurjar Samraat Mihir Bhoj Jayanti " has
been organised with a prompt Sucess with a Marvelous & Encourging
speeches of Great Gurjar personalites like Sh.Ramsharan Bhati ji (ex
director Agriculture deptt),Sh DayaramKapasiya ji(Ex Director of
......Horticulture,Sh Nepal Singh Kasana, Sh Roop...Singh Nagar... ji,Rampal Kasana ji,, Sh Mukhiya Gurjar & Many others with amassive response from our young youth....!
http://119.82.71.95/haribhumi/Details.aspx?id=18905&boxid=29946794
A Bagdavad Gurjar
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The power of words
The power of words
A group of frogs were traveling through the woods, and two of them fell into a deep pit. When the other frogs saw how deep the pit was, they told the two frogs that they were as good as dead. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit with all their might. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, that they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and gave up. He fell down and died.The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out. When he got out, the other frogs said, "Did you not hear us?" The frog explained to them that he was deaf. He thought they were encouraging him the entire time.This story teaches two lessons:1. There is power of life and death in the tongue. An encouraging word to someone who is down can lift them up and help them make it through the day.2. A destructive word to someone who is down can be what it takes to kill them.Be careful of what you say. Speak life to those who cross your path. The power of words... it is sometimes hard to understand that an encouraging word can go such a long way. Anyone can speak words that tend to rob another of the spirit to continue in difficult times. Special is the individual who will take the time to encourage another.
A Bagdavad Gurjar
A group of frogs were traveling through the woods, and two of them fell into a deep pit. When the other frogs saw how deep the pit was, they told the two frogs that they were as good as dead. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit with all their might. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, that they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and gave up. He fell down and died.The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out. When he got out, the other frogs said, "Did you not hear us?" The frog explained to them that he was deaf. He thought they were encouraging him the entire time.This story teaches two lessons:1. There is power of life and death in the tongue. An encouraging word to someone who is down can lift them up and help them make it through the day.2. A destructive word to someone who is down can be what it takes to kill them.Be careful of what you say. Speak life to those who cross your path. The power of words... it is sometimes hard to understand that an encouraging word can go such a long way. Anyone can speak words that tend to rob another of the spirit to continue in difficult times. Special is the individual who will take the time to encourage another.
A Bagdavad Gurjar
For Country Sake
"तुमने दिया देश को जीवन,
देश तुम्हे क्या देगा,!
अपना नाम अमर रखने को,नाम तुम्हारा लेगा!!"
By- Lal Bahadur Shastri
देश तुम्हे क्या देगा,!
अपना नाम अमर रखने को,नाम तुम्हारा लेगा!!"
By- Lal Bahadur Shastri
Gurjar Mahima
1)Jab chalde gujjar sar uthake
"Dar ke mout bhi niche jhanke
Ranbhumi me jab dodaye ghode"
Nimbu ki tarah ye khoon nichode
Bade bhudo ka ye aadar karte"
Marne maarne se ye kabhi na darte
2)DEDICATED TO ALL MY GUJJAR BROTHERS
GUJJAR ki goonj se heeli dharti saari,
katleaam huaa har dushmann bari-bari,
GUJJAR NE KABHI NA BAAJI HAARI
Dushmano ki lash bichakar
kARDI DESH PAR JAAN nyochawar
shoorveer GUJJAR ka andaaz niralaa
Sammaan ke Liye khoon bahana khel purana
3)GREAT GUJJARGUJJAR maare esi dahad"
Sun ke hill jate hai pahad
Kabhi berr na inse lena"
Varna zindgi mangoge udhaar
Ithihas gawah hai is baat ka"
Nahi koi GUJJAR sa dildaar
Bhari sabha me awaaz utha de"
Ache-ache ko apne samne jhuka de
Sachche GUJJAR ki pehchaan yahi hai"
Desh pe jaan luta ke dikha de...........
GREAT GUJJAR
"Dar ke mout bhi niche jhanke
Ranbhumi me jab dodaye ghode"
Nimbu ki tarah ye khoon nichode
Bade bhudo ka ye aadar karte"
Marne maarne se ye kabhi na darte
2)DEDICATED TO ALL MY GUJJAR BROTHERS
GUJJAR ki goonj se heeli dharti saari,
katleaam huaa har dushmann bari-bari,
GUJJAR NE KABHI NA BAAJI HAARI
Dushmano ki lash bichakar
kARDI DESH PAR JAAN nyochawar
shoorveer GUJJAR ka andaaz niralaa
Sammaan ke Liye khoon bahana khel purana
3)GREAT GUJJARGUJJAR maare esi dahad"
Sun ke hill jate hai pahad
Kabhi berr na inse lena"
Varna zindgi mangoge udhaar
Ithihas gawah hai is baat ka"
Nahi koi GUJJAR sa dildaar
Bhari sabha me awaaz utha de"
Ache-ache ko apne samne jhuka de
Sachche GUJJAR ki pehchaan yahi hai"
Desh pe jaan luta ke dikha de...........
GREAT GUJJAR
Stand for Indian Identity"
A"Stand for Indian Identity"
कोई भी शख़्स हिन्दी में बोलने से छोटा नहीं हो जाता है !!!हिन्दी से मत डरो हिन्दी मे बातचीत करो !!!"Stand for Indian Identity"
A Bagdavad Gurjar
कोई भी शख़्स हिन्दी में बोलने से छोटा नहीं हो जाता है !!!हिन्दी से मत डरो हिन्दी मे बातचीत करो !!!"Stand for Indian Identity"
A Bagdavad Gurjar
Pride is More than Life - Indian Express dated-08-
Gujjars killing their own children for the sake of saving their dignity and honor or there are some other factors behind it. please read in details:http://ashokharsana.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gurjarsThe Indian Express talks about honour Killings in Gujjar on its sunday special page, in detail. (8th August, 2010)Read below:http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-the-city-beyond-its-limits/657429/5Or see the complete (original printed paper online) at:http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2010/08/08/INDEX.SHTML(go to the Sunday story on 14th page)http://gujar.co.nrOrhttp://ashokharsana.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gurjars&action=display&thread=258
Below a photograph of Katrina Kaif cut from a glossy magazine cover, Khushboo Nagar wrote her name in blue on the first page of her diary. They said she resembled the Bollywood actor. Her hair was styled like Katrina’s, cut in layers, framing her face. She believed in the comparison but the 18-year-old Gurjjar girl wanted to go beyond the resemblance. She wanted to be the cover girl.
On the next page, she scribbled, “Height—5.5, Weight—50 kg, Age—18 years”.
The other pages held cuttings from newspapers—mostly beauty tips. In those pages, floating between the beauty tips and the astrology predictions she cut out and pasted, there was an undercurrent of the conflict between modernity and tradition that her life had come to embody.
Khushboo, a Gurjjar girl in Wazirpur, one of the many urban villages in Delhi, dared to dream past her village’s boundaries. Khushboo wanted to be a model, fell in love with a model coordinator, and eloped with him. She crossed into what they call the ugliness of the other side.
It’s been over two months since Khushboo went missing from her Wazirpur house. And while the family was searching for her, her cousin Monica and her sister Shobha were killed in cold blood, allegedly by her family for choosing their partners and defying the unspoken rules of the village. These are rules that have been laid out by a community that’s struggling to hold on to its ‘tradition’, in a city that is lurching forward in its obsession with modernity and with being a world class city.
Shobha, Monica and her husband were the first casualties in the battle of identities between the village and the city. This was the battle between the core and the periphery.
In the heartland of this city, the national capital that will be showcased to the world this October during the Commonwealth Games, there are urban villages that are unwilling to give up on their ‘tradition’.
The national capital has around 135 urban villages. They are no longer surrounded by farmland. Instead, they are in the midst of untamed development. These are spaces where municipal planning rules do not apply. Basic services like roads, water supply and drainage have not reached them. But cars, amenities, and other such luxuries have.
Monica, Shobha, and Khushboo were hemmed in in such a space. Caught between the aspirations of the city and the limits set by their village.
Five years ago, Monica, Khushboo’s cousin, married a Rajput boy from the same village. In the 400-year-old history of the village, no girl had dared to do this. Monica left the village and stayed away.
But when Monica’s cousins, Shobha and Khushboo, too crossed over to the ‘other side’, ‘they’ decided to intervene. It began as a childish dare between Mandeep, Khushboo’s brother, and Ankit, Monica’s brother. When Mandeep taunted his cousin Ankit, saying he wasn’t able to stop his sister Monica from marrying outside her community, Ankit retorted saying Mandeep too was not able to rein in his sisters. Shobha was having an affair with Nawab Raja, a Muslim boy who ran dance classes in Ashok Vihar, and then in May, Khushboo eloped.
That’s when the killings happened—on June 20, this year. Three in a day, within minutes of each other—Monica and her husband Kuldeep were hunted down and killed outside their flat in Ashok Vihar. Shobha was killed the same day but her body was discovered only a couple of days later from a car parked in the neighbourhood and only after the stench from the body gave the killing away. All three were shot at point blank range in the head by their brothers.
In the past year, a number of honour killings have rocked Delhi and the NCR region. According to the police, the number of couples seeking protection has gone up in the last few months. Officials at the Delhi Commission for Women say that they receive at least one or two letters every day seeking protection from their parents and at least two couples drop by personally.
“After the recent honour killings in Haryana, we got at least 20 such complaints from Delhi. We used to get cases earlier too but after the killings in Delhi, the couples are more scared,” a DCW official says.
So, what has contributed to the growing number of honour killings in Delhi? According to sociologists, as more and more villagers adopt an urban lifestyle, traditional cultures feel threatened.
But it’s not as if honour killings are a recent phenomenon. Such killings happened earlier too, but they didn’t make it to the headlines. The death of a daughter or a sister gone ‘astray’ would be termed as an accident or a suicide. Penetrating the layers of the village to investigate the deaths would often be a futile chase, says a Jat community member.
Choudhary Charan Singh Lohmod, a member of the Ghitorni village panchayat in Delhi, says more than 15 years ago, Ghitorni witnessed its first honour killing. A Gurjjar girl was strangled for marrying a boy from the barber community. No police report was filed. The body was cremated and it was reported as suicide.
Seventeen years ago, there was another case of honour killing in Dayal Pur village in East Delhi. “They killed the boy. I don’t know what happened to the girl. The khap dictated the family must be boycotted,” Charan Singh says. “Today the world is changing. Although I don’t approve of inter-gotra marriages, a murder can’t be condoned.”
Charan Singh has been around long enough to know that things are beginning to change. Along with urbanisation and development have come new attitudes. Young and educated people don’t care much about their traditions anymore, he says.
“In all these killings, there’s a desperation to hold on to something that we are losing. Delhi has been witnessing the dilution of caste and gotra barriers,” says Charan Singh.
Over the past few years, the real estate boom has pushed the city’s boundaries into villages and their cultures. As the demand for space went up, the Gurjjars and the Jats, the two communities that had their villages in and around Delhi, experienced the rush, the high that comes with wealth, the transition that it promises.
In Wazirpur in north Delhi, farmers sold their land to the government in the 1960s and multi-storey buildings came up, jostling with each other for space. There was an influx of migrants soon after. But here in this village, even the tenants are expected to subscribe to the village rules.
While the Gurjjar community says they don’t have khap panchayats like the Jats, the other predominant community that have followed the same trajectory in terms of socio-economic status, they have village elders whose diktat is as good as the word of law. Even on matrimonial websites like www.jeevansathi.com, most Gurjjar girls, including doctors and MBAs, have listed their gotras in their profiles.
“Everything comes with a price tag. Same is the case with development. The negative change in the new generation is the price we Gurjjars are paying as the cost for this development,” writes a member who identified himself as Gurjar Krishan Kumar on www.ashokharsana.proboards.com, an interactive web portal for the Gurjjar community set up by Ashok Harsana, a Gurjjar, a few years ago.
Another observation by someone who calls himself ‘Hardcore Gurjar’ reads: “Very often there is news that some Gurjjar boy has had a love marriage or yet another Gurjjar girl has run away with a boy, and Gurjjars outside Delhi say that we are not real Gurjjars because we can’t save the honour of our families.”
Kanwar Singh Tanwar, a former BSP member who has now joined the Congress and is a heavyweight Gurjjar leader in South Delhi, says it is difficult to let go of the system that has anchored them for centuries.
And the new fighters for old customs are very often the young. Like Pramod Mavi, an engineer who set up the Youth Gurjar Federation last year to reach out to the community and focus on “education”. Mavi travels regularly to Delhi’s urban villages on weekends to talk to the youth about their culture and the gotra system. He is also collecting material for a book on Gurjjar culture, listing all the gotras in Gurjjar villages across India.
Ram Niwas Gurjjar, of the Federation, says they have been holding meetings in Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan regularly to educate youngsters about the Gurjjar tradition.
“Money has gone to their head. We tell them that you need to hold on to tradition,” he says. “This is to make sure people don’t have to resort to such things as honour killings.”
At a point where Ghitorni, another urban village in south Delhi with a predominantly Gurjjar population, opens up to the metropolis, a swanky car showroom has set shop. On display is the dream car—a two-door red Mercedes sports car. Its doors open out like giant wings. The blazing red car already has 80 suitors. Many are from the nearby urban villages of Khanpur and Sultanpur, where there are no concrete roads.
Money knows no limits here. The farmers have sold off their land to private builders. Resto bars have come up on both sides of the road.
Youngsters, their muscles pumped-up from working out for hours in the local gyms that dot the village, hang out at offices of property dealers. In the evenings, they pack themselves away in swanky cars and drive through the village’s crumbling roads, loud trance and techno music playing, and hit the pubs in the city.
The pradhan of Wazirpur, Choudhury Subhash Khari, says it was land that played an anchor to the villagers. Now the land has gone, replaced by an inflated bank account. The villagers have been rendered rootless, but with thick wads of notes, they have no option but to indulge.
Riya Lohia, a 12-year-old who studies at the Poorna Prajna Public School, is a product of that conflict. At her age, she knows she has to live within an invisible boundary. Her friends from school hang out, stay over at each others’ houses, but Riya is chaperoned if she has to attend anything outside school. “They can go out. We can’t go alone for outings. We have different lives,” she says.
Like hundreds of other urban villages clustered in the heart of the national capital, Wazirpur would have remained an obscure village trying to insulate itself against the city’s overtures had it not been for the “folly” of the three Gurjjar girls.
Cars can’t navigate the narrow lanes of the urban village that is not very far from the city’s glass-and-steel structures, the glittering malls. A young girl stands on the second-floor balcony of a multi-storey house in Wazirpur. Behind her, a older woman stands as if on guard, craning her neck to follow the girl’s eyes. About 200 metres away is the house where the two “disgraced” girls lived.
Khushboo left her house on May 25. The family waited until June 3 to file a complaint at the Ashok Vihar police station. Every morning, the family sent out two cars to look for the youngest daughter of the house who had “brought shame to the family, to the village and to the community”.
But they didn’t find her. According to Ashok Vihar police officials, Khushboo is in an undisclosed location with her husband—she had sought protection fearing the same fate as was meted out to Shobha.
The father Jai Singh Nagar shrugs off the death of his daughter, Shobha. “What’s done can’t be undone. But I want to know where Khushboo is. Her marriage was a fraud,” he says.
He is still waiting for Khushboo, his daughter who loved dressing up, and who, he says, was misled by an advertisement in the local paper about a modeling agency and eloped with Ravi, a model co-ordinator.
There’s an old family photograph, a black-and-white framed picture shot in a studio with mountains and trees as backdrop. It still holds a place of pride in the family’s living room. In it, Khushboo sits on her father’s lap, the youngest of six siblings—four girls and two boys. Shobha is in the frame too.
In the wedding album of their eldest sister Rajni, who married within the community but outside their gotra in December 2008, Shobha and Khushboo wore jeans and satin shirts. They danced through the night. They were wild, but innocent, says Jai Singh.
No, they won’t kill Khushboo, the runaway child who doesn’t know the difference between right or wrong, he says. But no one can be certain. The clash of the village and the city has already claimed many.
Below a photograph of Katrina Kaif cut from a glossy magazine cover, Khushboo Nagar wrote her name in blue on the first page of her diary. They said she resembled the Bollywood actor. Her hair was styled like Katrina’s, cut in layers, framing her face. She believed in the comparison but the 18-year-old Gurjjar girl wanted to go beyond the resemblance. She wanted to be the cover girl.
On the next page, she scribbled, “Height—5.5, Weight—50 kg, Age—18 years”.
The other pages held cuttings from newspapers—mostly beauty tips. In those pages, floating between the beauty tips and the astrology predictions she cut out and pasted, there was an undercurrent of the conflict between modernity and tradition that her life had come to embody.
Khushboo, a Gurjjar girl in Wazirpur, one of the many urban villages in Delhi, dared to dream past her village’s boundaries. Khushboo wanted to be a model, fell in love with a model coordinator, and eloped with him. She crossed into what they call the ugliness of the other side.
It’s been over two months since Khushboo went missing from her Wazirpur house. And while the family was searching for her, her cousin Monica and her sister Shobha were killed in cold blood, allegedly by her family for choosing their partners and defying the unspoken rules of the village. These are rules that have been laid out by a community that’s struggling to hold on to its ‘tradition’, in a city that is lurching forward in its obsession with modernity and with being a world class city.
Shobha, Monica and her husband were the first casualties in the battle of identities between the village and the city. This was the battle between the core and the periphery.
In the heartland of this city, the national capital that will be showcased to the world this October during the Commonwealth Games, there are urban villages that are unwilling to give up on their ‘tradition’.
The national capital has around 135 urban villages. They are no longer surrounded by farmland. Instead, they are in the midst of untamed development. These are spaces where municipal planning rules do not apply. Basic services like roads, water supply and drainage have not reached them. But cars, amenities, and other such luxuries have.
Monica, Shobha, and Khushboo were hemmed in in such a space. Caught between the aspirations of the city and the limits set by their village.
Five years ago, Monica, Khushboo’s cousin, married a Rajput boy from the same village. In the 400-year-old history of the village, no girl had dared to do this. Monica left the village and stayed away.
But when Monica’s cousins, Shobha and Khushboo, too crossed over to the ‘other side’, ‘they’ decided to intervene. It began as a childish dare between Mandeep, Khushboo’s brother, and Ankit, Monica’s brother. When Mandeep taunted his cousin Ankit, saying he wasn’t able to stop his sister Monica from marrying outside her community, Ankit retorted saying Mandeep too was not able to rein in his sisters. Shobha was having an affair with Nawab Raja, a Muslim boy who ran dance classes in Ashok Vihar, and then in May, Khushboo eloped.
That’s when the killings happened—on June 20, this year. Three in a day, within minutes of each other—Monica and her husband Kuldeep were hunted down and killed outside their flat in Ashok Vihar. Shobha was killed the same day but her body was discovered only a couple of days later from a car parked in the neighbourhood and only after the stench from the body gave the killing away. All three were shot at point blank range in the head by their brothers.
In the past year, a number of honour killings have rocked Delhi and the NCR region. According to the police, the number of couples seeking protection has gone up in the last few months. Officials at the Delhi Commission for Women say that they receive at least one or two letters every day seeking protection from their parents and at least two couples drop by personally.
“After the recent honour killings in Haryana, we got at least 20 such complaints from Delhi. We used to get cases earlier too but after the killings in Delhi, the couples are more scared,” a DCW official says.
So, what has contributed to the growing number of honour killings in Delhi? According to sociologists, as more and more villagers adopt an urban lifestyle, traditional cultures feel threatened.
But it’s not as if honour killings are a recent phenomenon. Such killings happened earlier too, but they didn’t make it to the headlines. The death of a daughter or a sister gone ‘astray’ would be termed as an accident or a suicide. Penetrating the layers of the village to investigate the deaths would often be a futile chase, says a Jat community member.
Choudhary Charan Singh Lohmod, a member of the Ghitorni village panchayat in Delhi, says more than 15 years ago, Ghitorni witnessed its first honour killing. A Gurjjar girl was strangled for marrying a boy from the barber community. No police report was filed. The body was cremated and it was reported as suicide.
Seventeen years ago, there was another case of honour killing in Dayal Pur village in East Delhi. “They killed the boy. I don’t know what happened to the girl. The khap dictated the family must be boycotted,” Charan Singh says. “Today the world is changing. Although I don’t approve of inter-gotra marriages, a murder can’t be condoned.”
Charan Singh has been around long enough to know that things are beginning to change. Along with urbanisation and development have come new attitudes. Young and educated people don’t care much about their traditions anymore, he says.
“In all these killings, there’s a desperation to hold on to something that we are losing. Delhi has been witnessing the dilution of caste and gotra barriers,” says Charan Singh.
Over the past few years, the real estate boom has pushed the city’s boundaries into villages and their cultures. As the demand for space went up, the Gurjjars and the Jats, the two communities that had their villages in and around Delhi, experienced the rush, the high that comes with wealth, the transition that it promises.
In Wazirpur in north Delhi, farmers sold their land to the government in the 1960s and multi-storey buildings came up, jostling with each other for space. There was an influx of migrants soon after. But here in this village, even the tenants are expected to subscribe to the village rules.
While the Gurjjar community says they don’t have khap panchayats like the Jats, the other predominant community that have followed the same trajectory in terms of socio-economic status, they have village elders whose diktat is as good as the word of law. Even on matrimonial websites like www.jeevansathi.com, most Gurjjar girls, including doctors and MBAs, have listed their gotras in their profiles.
“Everything comes with a price tag. Same is the case with development. The negative change in the new generation is the price we Gurjjars are paying as the cost for this development,” writes a member who identified himself as Gurjar Krishan Kumar on www.ashokharsana.proboards.com, an interactive web portal for the Gurjjar community set up by Ashok Harsana, a Gurjjar, a few years ago.
Another observation by someone who calls himself ‘Hardcore Gurjar’ reads: “Very often there is news that some Gurjjar boy has had a love marriage or yet another Gurjjar girl has run away with a boy, and Gurjjars outside Delhi say that we are not real Gurjjars because we can’t save the honour of our families.”
Kanwar Singh Tanwar, a former BSP member who has now joined the Congress and is a heavyweight Gurjjar leader in South Delhi, says it is difficult to let go of the system that has anchored them for centuries.
And the new fighters for old customs are very often the young. Like Pramod Mavi, an engineer who set up the Youth Gurjar Federation last year to reach out to the community and focus on “education”. Mavi travels regularly to Delhi’s urban villages on weekends to talk to the youth about their culture and the gotra system. He is also collecting material for a book on Gurjjar culture, listing all the gotras in Gurjjar villages across India.
Ram Niwas Gurjjar, of the Federation, says they have been holding meetings in Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan regularly to educate youngsters about the Gurjjar tradition.
“Money has gone to their head. We tell them that you need to hold on to tradition,” he says. “This is to make sure people don’t have to resort to such things as honour killings.”
At a point where Ghitorni, another urban village in south Delhi with a predominantly Gurjjar population, opens up to the metropolis, a swanky car showroom has set shop. On display is the dream car—a two-door red Mercedes sports car. Its doors open out like giant wings. The blazing red car already has 80 suitors. Many are from the nearby urban villages of Khanpur and Sultanpur, where there are no concrete roads.
Money knows no limits here. The farmers have sold off their land to private builders. Resto bars have come up on both sides of the road.
Youngsters, their muscles pumped-up from working out for hours in the local gyms that dot the village, hang out at offices of property dealers. In the evenings, they pack themselves away in swanky cars and drive through the village’s crumbling roads, loud trance and techno music playing, and hit the pubs in the city.
The pradhan of Wazirpur, Choudhury Subhash Khari, says it was land that played an anchor to the villagers. Now the land has gone, replaced by an inflated bank account. The villagers have been rendered rootless, but with thick wads of notes, they have no option but to indulge.
Riya Lohia, a 12-year-old who studies at the Poorna Prajna Public School, is a product of that conflict. At her age, she knows she has to live within an invisible boundary. Her friends from school hang out, stay over at each others’ houses, but Riya is chaperoned if she has to attend anything outside school. “They can go out. We can’t go alone for outings. We have different lives,” she says.
Like hundreds of other urban villages clustered in the heart of the national capital, Wazirpur would have remained an obscure village trying to insulate itself against the city’s overtures had it not been for the “folly” of the three Gurjjar girls.
Cars can’t navigate the narrow lanes of the urban village that is not very far from the city’s glass-and-steel structures, the glittering malls. A young girl stands on the second-floor balcony of a multi-storey house in Wazirpur. Behind her, a older woman stands as if on guard, craning her neck to follow the girl’s eyes. About 200 metres away is the house where the two “disgraced” girls lived.
Khushboo left her house on May 25. The family waited until June 3 to file a complaint at the Ashok Vihar police station. Every morning, the family sent out two cars to look for the youngest daughter of the house who had “brought shame to the family, to the village and to the community”.
But they didn’t find her. According to Ashok Vihar police officials, Khushboo is in an undisclosed location with her husband—she had sought protection fearing the same fate as was meted out to Shobha.
The father Jai Singh Nagar shrugs off the death of his daughter, Shobha. “What’s done can’t be undone. But I want to know where Khushboo is. Her marriage was a fraud,” he says.
He is still waiting for Khushboo, his daughter who loved dressing up, and who, he says, was misled by an advertisement in the local paper about a modeling agency and eloped with Ravi, a model co-ordinator.
There’s an old family photograph, a black-and-white framed picture shot in a studio with mountains and trees as backdrop. It still holds a place of pride in the family’s living room. In it, Khushboo sits on her father’s lap, the youngest of six siblings—four girls and two boys. Shobha is in the frame too.
In the wedding album of their eldest sister Rajni, who married within the community but outside their gotra in December 2008, Shobha and Khushboo wore jeans and satin shirts. They danced through the night. They were wild, but innocent, says Jai Singh.
No, they won’t kill Khushboo, the runaway child who doesn’t know the difference between right or wrong, he says. But no one can be certain. The clash of the village and the city has already claimed many.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
NDTV presents: Gao, Gotra, Gurjar
Hi Dear Gurjar brothers/sisters,
Last week NDTV showed a 30 minute report about Gurjar culture in its program called "Ravish ki Report".
It is one of the best documentaries ever presented on Gurjars, It tells about the strength and importance of our Gotra system in our community which we have been preserving for over centuries now.
The program features Baisoya Gurjars living in Kalka Garhi of Delhi. Kalka Garhi which is now a urban village, surrounded by commercial places like East of Kailash, Lajpat nagar, Nehru place etc shows a glimpse of "Ancient vs Modern: picture.
The show starts with a Bhaat, who explains the origin of Baisoyas, how were they related to Ghazni city of Afghanistan; how their gotra was named etc.
Ravish, the correspondent, sees the documents of Bhaat in which he has documented the family tree of Baisoya gotra. It includes the names of their ancestors, then their generations. The records of females started documented from 12th century onwards. Ravish admits there is no scope of mistakes in it.
Bhaat explains the importance of Gotra,"Anang pur ka ek BHADANA yaha 150 saal pehle Baisoye ke beech me raha, lekin 150 saal baad bhi uski pehchaan BHADANA hi rahi naa".
Then the Bhaat- Pt. Jeet was offered food in a Gurjar house, that includes Roti-Sabji and GHEE-BURAA, to which pandit ji says,"Ye jo ghee-buraa hai naa, aapko har gurjar ghar me milega".
Ravish explains how a Gurjar lady pays respect to purohit ji by sitting on the floor, clading ghoongat too.
Ravish then goes to a "BAITHAK" of Gurjars. He explains the way to sit on a chaar-pai(cot). Jo sabse bujurg hai wo humesha uchai ki taraf baithenge, unse chote wale unke baad, or sabse chhote khaat ke last me baithenge. Usi karm me hukka piya jaata hai, aur chhote hukka bharke laate hai.
Then he is greeted by Ch. Jhabbar Baisoya, the writer of BADHTI BEL- a book based on the ancestory tree of Baisoyas. Ravish asks him what's the reason why his villagers can not tie the knot with people of nearby villages with "same gotra"? Chaudhary sahab gave the reply, "How is it possible. Yaha aas paas ke gaon me Baisoya gotra ke log rehte hai, jiska matlab hai ki wo ek hi maa-baap ki aulaad hai. To wo aapas me bhai- behan nahi hue to kya hue"? Ravish admits.
Same question is asked to the councilor of the area who in turn gave the same answer, when asked don't you feel you should change the trend, he replies, "Why you want to change us, jab humare logo ko, humare samaaj ko humare culture se koi taklif nahi, aapko kya taklif hai".
Then he further moves to see a "Nai woman", giving invites in Gurjar families, a long-time tradition which is still alive in our culture.
Finally, he moves to a Gurjar chaupal, a young-man listening to a RAAGINI on his cell-phone. He explains, "ye ragini raam-ravana ke uppar aadharit hai, jisme ravan apni bahan supranakha ke apmaan ka badla lene ke liye raam se yudh karta hai".
While interviewing Gurjar boys in a Gym, Ravish complimented Gurjar boys by saying, "MAINE AAJ TAK KOI GURJAR LADKA KAMJOR NAHI DEKHA, SABHI HASTH-PUSHTH".
Then comes another compliment, "GURJAR BOYS- HEALTHY HANDSOME BUT ZIDDI TRADITIONAL.
He asks, "aap log bade-bade Pubs, 5-star hotels me BOUNCER ki job karte ho, kya aapko waha ke high-society logo ko dekhke nahi lagta ki aapko bhi wahi culture apna na chahiye"?
Boys replies, "UNKE CULTURE KO DEKH KE HUME KOI FEEL HI NAJAR NAHI AATI, JO HUMARE CULTURE ME HAI. HUM KYO APNAYE UNKA CULTURE".
Finally I have found the same video on the net.
Please take a look at that:
http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=150460
Deepak Dedha (Ashok Harshana 's Blog)
Last week NDTV showed a 30 minute report about Gurjar culture in its program called "Ravish ki Report".
It is one of the best documentaries ever presented on Gurjars, It tells about the strength and importance of our Gotra system in our community which we have been preserving for over centuries now.
The program features Baisoya Gurjars living in Kalka Garhi of Delhi. Kalka Garhi which is now a urban village, surrounded by commercial places like East of Kailash, Lajpat nagar, Nehru place etc shows a glimpse of "Ancient vs Modern: picture.
The show starts with a Bhaat, who explains the origin of Baisoyas, how were they related to Ghazni city of Afghanistan; how their gotra was named etc.
Ravish, the correspondent, sees the documents of Bhaat in which he has documented the family tree of Baisoya gotra. It includes the names of their ancestors, then their generations. The records of females started documented from 12th century onwards. Ravish admits there is no scope of mistakes in it.
Bhaat explains the importance of Gotra,"Anang pur ka ek BHADANA yaha 150 saal pehle Baisoye ke beech me raha, lekin 150 saal baad bhi uski pehchaan BHADANA hi rahi naa".
Then the Bhaat- Pt. Jeet was offered food in a Gurjar house, that includes Roti-Sabji and GHEE-BURAA, to which pandit ji says,"Ye jo ghee-buraa hai naa, aapko har gurjar ghar me milega".
Ravish explains how a Gurjar lady pays respect to purohit ji by sitting on the floor, clading ghoongat too.
Ravish then goes to a "BAITHAK" of Gurjars. He explains the way to sit on a chaar-pai(cot). Jo sabse bujurg hai wo humesha uchai ki taraf baithenge, unse chote wale unke baad, or sabse chhote khaat ke last me baithenge. Usi karm me hukka piya jaata hai, aur chhote hukka bharke laate hai.
Then he is greeted by Ch. Jhabbar Baisoya, the writer of BADHTI BEL- a book based on the ancestory tree of Baisoyas. Ravish asks him what's the reason why his villagers can not tie the knot with people of nearby villages with "same gotra"? Chaudhary sahab gave the reply, "How is it possible. Yaha aas paas ke gaon me Baisoya gotra ke log rehte hai, jiska matlab hai ki wo ek hi maa-baap ki aulaad hai. To wo aapas me bhai- behan nahi hue to kya hue"? Ravish admits.
Same question is asked to the councilor of the area who in turn gave the same answer, when asked don't you feel you should change the trend, he replies, "Why you want to change us, jab humare logo ko, humare samaaj ko humare culture se koi taklif nahi, aapko kya taklif hai".
Then he further moves to see a "Nai woman", giving invites in Gurjar families, a long-time tradition which is still alive in our culture.
Finally, he moves to a Gurjar chaupal, a young-man listening to a RAAGINI on his cell-phone. He explains, "ye ragini raam-ravana ke uppar aadharit hai, jisme ravan apni bahan supranakha ke apmaan ka badla lene ke liye raam se yudh karta hai".
While interviewing Gurjar boys in a Gym, Ravish complimented Gurjar boys by saying, "MAINE AAJ TAK KOI GURJAR LADKA KAMJOR NAHI DEKHA, SABHI HASTH-PUSHTH".
Then comes another compliment, "GURJAR BOYS- HEALTHY HANDSOME BUT ZIDDI TRADITIONAL.
He asks, "aap log bade-bade Pubs, 5-star hotels me BOUNCER ki job karte ho, kya aapko waha ke high-society logo ko dekhke nahi lagta ki aapko bhi wahi culture apna na chahiye"?
Boys replies, "UNKE CULTURE KO DEKH KE HUME KOI FEEL HI NAJAR NAHI AATI, JO HUMARE CULTURE ME HAI. HUM KYO APNAYE UNKA CULTURE".
Finally I have found the same video on the net.
Please take a look at that:
http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=150460
Deepak Dedha (Ashok Harshana 's Blog)
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