Coming of Age in Macholand

An eye-opening anthropological examination of masculinity, violence, and transnational migration focused on present-day Punjab.

In Coming of Age in Macholand, the anthropologist and filmmaker Harjant S. Gill shows how Punjabi men in India, disillusioned by promises for power and control, contend with patriarchy: by submitting to it, attempting to transgress it, migrating to escape it, and coming undone by it. Gill takes readers deep inside men’s worlds to show how boys come of age and masculinity is produced through pervasive violence, while it is also underlined with intimacy in the form of fraternal love and homosocial bonds.

Based on four years of fieldwork carried out over a decade and hundreds of interviews, Gill explores how boys learn to become men against the backdrop of patriarchal constraints, political violence, changing agrarian economies, and outward migration. He also shows the great extent to which violence is a function and a reflection of powerlessness. By exploring the development of masculinity in a society where sexuality is sanctioned exclusively through heteronormative frameworks of marriage and family, this book documents how patriarchy forecloses sexual agency and emotional autonomy. Ultimately, it offers an indictment of patriarchy as a system that not only oppresses women but also constricts men’s intimate and sexual choices.

Harjant S. Gill is professor of anthropology at Towson University and a documentary filmmaker whose work explores masculinity, migration, and popular culture in South Asia.