by Barkat Hussain
According to the 2011 Census, 69.35 per cent of Gujjars remain illiterate.
In March 2025, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I arrived in the Pir Panjal, where spring was just breaking through the cold. This multilingual and multiethnic mountain range separates the plains of Jammu from the Valley of Kashmir.
At a government office in Rajouri, on my way to Koteranka, an elderly Gujjar with a henna-stained beard approached me. He carried a worn file of papers and asked me to check what might be missing. For three months, he had been trying, without success, to submit the file. I examined the papers. Everything was complete. I told him so.
With a weary sigh, he looked at me and said: Allah Gujjar na Gujjar gemunḍnalāveh — may Allah not place a poor Gujjar under the authority of an elite Gujjar. He explained that the officer responsible was himself a wealthy Gujjar who refused to process his file.
Those words linger. Each time I encounter an elderly man struggling with official procedures, I hear them again. They reveal the hidden hierarchies within Gujjar society, layers of power and exclusion largely unseen by the outside world. This essay seeks to unsettle the idea of Gujjars in Jammu and Kashmir as a single, unified community, and to examine the stratified order within it. Reservations in education and jobs have played a decisive role in shaping these internal divisions.
The Illusion of a Monolithic Identity
In 1991, the Gujjars were granted Scheduled Tribe status. This designation collapsed their internal hierarchies into a single tribal identity. Yet the older structures of social rank remained, and in some ways hardened.
During the 1990s, as militancy spread through the Pir Panjal, many Gujjars moved from villages to towns. They joined a small number of Gujjar families already settled in urban areas. This tiny elite declared itself the true representative of the community and crafted the myth of a unified Gujjar identity.
Since then, the voices of nomadic Gujjars and Bakarwals have been erased from public discourse. Their lives, marked by hardship and marginalisation, remain largely invisible. Instead, elite Gujjars promoted themselves as guardians of the Gojri language and culture, while obscuring the realities faced by rural Gujjars.
Controlling the Narrative
Although Gujjars across Jammu and Kashmir share Gojri, with regional variations, the elites who migrated to towns in the 1990s adopted Urdu and other languages. In doing so, they distanced themselves from the rural world. They spoke of saving a vanishing language, despite knowing that in villages and high pastures, Gojri continued to thrive in everyday use.
Many of them profited from projects run through the Gojri section of the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages. Recognition and resources followed. Yet in the hills, the language was never endangered. It endured because the pastoral economy, shaped by generations of transhumance, sustained both speech and culture.
Khalid Hussain, the Punjabi writer awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for *Sullañ da Salān*, once told me: “The purest of expressions, proverbs and literary skills are found among the illiterate rural folk.” My own fieldwork confirms this. The villages are living archives of Gojri.
The rhetoric of preservation, however, gave elites prestige and legitimacy. It also enabled them to consolidate authority over communal narratives. But can a microscopic minority that thrives on this rhetoric serve the interests of the wider rural Gujjar population, when their lived realities are so different?
Erasure of Rural Experience
The interior world of Gujjar society is shaped by poverty, violence, illiteracy and domination. These conditions rarely surface in mainstream media. What appears instead is a polished image, curated by those who claim to speak for all Gujjars.
This selective portrayal erases the existential struggles of rural families. It also shields policymakers from confronting the true scale of deprivation. Into this project steps another force: the Gujjar middle class.
Before turning to them, it is worth pausing on the Gojri poetic tradition of Sīharfi, which captures lived experience in verse. Consider the lines of Israēl Asr (1916–2007):
The gatherings are no longer warm; the empty stones bear witness to the silence.
Compassion has fled, leaving questions unanswered.
Birds have gone, nests lie bare.
O Asr, the garden is heavy with despair, branches stripped of their leaves.
This poetry, carried orally across generations, reflects truths absent from academic writing and official discourse. My fieldwork, notes, and encounters always return to this theme: the silencing of rural Gujjar voices.
Middle-Class Gujjars and New Barriers
The Gujjar middle class expanded after the 1990s, benefiting from reservations. Yet instead of bridging divides, it has deepened them. Many rural Gujjars recount instances of corruption and exploitation at the hands of their supposed benefactors.
Education lies at the heart of the struggle. Middle-class Gujjars invest in private schooling, ensuring their children stay ahead in the competition for limited quotas. Poorer families, whose children live in remote villages or migrate with herds to high pastures, are left behind.
For the middle class, genuine empowerment of the poor poses a threat, for it would mean sharing institutions and resources. This reluctance preserves a hierarchy that keeps rural Gujjars at the margins.
The Case for Sub-classification
The Constitution of India guarantees equality and protection against exploitation. Recently, the Supreme Court upheld the principle of “quota within quota,” allowing states to create sub-categories within the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
This precedent holds particular significance for Gujjars in Jammu and Kashmir. Sub-classification could ensure that the most disadvantaged benefit, rather than only the established elite.
According to the 2011 Census, 69.35 percent of Gujjars remain illiterate. Many children never reach school, trapped by poverty, displacement, and systemic neglect. Even political leaders such as Mian Altaf Ahmed, the MP for Rajouri-Anantnag, have acknowledged that poor Gujjars are not receiving the benefits of the reservation.
Unless these internal hierarchies are confronted, the lives of rural and nomadic Gujjars will remain precarious. To shift from survival to dignity, the focus must turn to equity, inclusiveness and education. Only through sub-classification, dividing creamy from non-creamy layers, can the marginalised finally be given space to speak and act for themselves.
(The writer is a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS) and the Institute of Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Ideas are personal.)
