“In India today, normative understandings of gender and sexuality remain stubbornly tethered to an antiquated script, one written in the language of patriarchal families, arranged marriages, and caste-bound kinship. It is a script with few subplots and little room for improvision or rewrites. For middle-class men from privileged families and, in less visible ways, men like me, the instructions arrive vacuum sealed. There is only one acceptable ending, and it involves a bride, an extended family, and children; perhaps a son or two if one is lucky. Indian Punjab, as a region, still wears its hierarchies on its sleeve. Among one of the more socially stratified and patriarchal societies in the world, caste-endogamous or intra-caste marriage is less a rite of passage than a form of male accreditation. It is the stamp that sanctions one’s claim to manhood.

Over time, in my fieldnotes and anthropological reflections, I began to think of Punjabi society as “Macholand,” a conceptual terrain where manhood is manufactured, distributed, and policed. The term owes a debt to masculinity studies scholar Michael Kimmel and his formulation, Guyland, a framework for understanding how American college-age men absorb, rehearse, and reproduce the theater of masculinity. Kimmel focused largely on white, middle-class, heterosexual men in the United States as they transitioned into adulthood. I focus on dominant-caste Jat men in Punjab as they come of age. The cultural particulars differ. The underlying entitlement is strikingly similar. Punjabi men carried their masculinity and caste like a birthright, something inherited rather than earned. It wasn’t that they were cruel or selfish or chauvinistic. It was that they rarely questioned the forces that allowed them to get away with it. Their dominance was seldom contested. Few were ever asked to account for it. In Macholand, power is understood as natural, even God-given. Manhood is as sacred as caste. Privilege, of course, is invisible to those who grew up swimming in it. As I quickly realized, arguing with men about their gender and caste was like arguing with fish about the water...”