You are a professor of anthropology and an openly gay man living in Washington, DC, who grew up in Punjab, India. In Coming of Age in Macholand, you combine your research on the region’s rigid patriarchal culture with your personal experiences of living there. What made you put your life experiences on the page alongside your academic findings?

I don’t think I could have written this book honestly from a safe academic distance. Punjab was not simply a place I visited to conduct research. It was the world that raised me, shaped me, and sometimes wounded and bewildered me. As the eldest grandson in a traditional, dominant-caste Sikh family, I grew up under a formidable patriarch. My family’s dominant-caste status and social position gave me access to male spaces and intimate conversations that might have been closed to another researcher. It also meant that I was personally entangled in many of the expectations I was trying to understand. I also carried an American passport and the experience of being gay in a world that did not always affirm queerness. By the time I began returning to India for research in 2009, I was living openly as a gay man in Washington, DC. In Punjab, however, I had to retreat into the closet for my own safety. At the same time, my grandfather was searching for a “suitable” bride for me, placing matrimonial advertisements in the local newspaper. I found myself constantly code-switching – moving between two versions of my life. I could refuse marriage and eventually fly home to America. Many of the men I met had no such easy exit. I realized that I could not tell their stories honestly without also examining my own. Putting my life on the page required me to acknowledge the privileges and contradictions I carried. It also required me to practice the emotional honesty and vulnerability that I ask of the men in this book.

The book opens with the tragic story of Sandeep Brar, a 27-year-old man from rural Punjab, who gunned down his family and himself in 2019 after a date was set for his arranged marriage. His final letter didn’t denounce the ritual, but rather a world in which marriage was the measure of manhood. Why is his story emblematic of your research?

Sandeep’s violence was extraordinary, but the pressures he described (in the letter he left behind) were painfully ordinary. He lived in a world where marriage was not treated as a personal choice. It was a proof – a rite of passage – that he was an obedient son and a complete man; someone who would marry within his caste, produce children, inherit the land, and continue the family line. His letter repeatedly said that he did not want to marry, but no one around him could accept that refusal without searching for something wrong with him. They called him impotent, mentally ill, or namard (unmanly). When he felt utterly powerless, he turned to violence to reclaim his power – like we see men doing all over. Two days after the tragedy in Punjab, a young white man in Dayton Ohio gunned down nine people, including his transgender brother. As I discuss in my book, there’s something disturbingly familiar the despair and nihilistic rage of the two men from two opposite parts of the globe. Both inherited masculinity as a promise and found it wanting. Both turned to violence as an exit strategy – not senselessly, but tragically and coherently. Of course, none of this excuses the horrific violence Sandeep committed. Women and children ultimately paid the price for his despair. But his story reveals how patriarchy can make men powerful within the family while leaving them unable to imagine a life outside its script. Sandeep tried to escape that script through annihilation because he could not see another way out.

The strict patriarchal society in Punjab, which you name Macholand, traps men in roles many want to escape. What does it do to the women around them?

Patriarchy’s costs are not shared equally. Men may feel constrained by patriarchy, but women, queer people, and oppressed-caste communities bear the brunt of its violence. In Punjab, a preference for sons begins before birth and continues through unequal access to food, freedom, education, property, and inheritance. Daughters are often raised knowing they will eventually leave their natal homes, while sons are treated as heirs who will carry on the family name and inherit the land. Marriage (especially arranged marriages) then moves women into households where they may have little authority or protection, especially if abuse occurs. Migration can intensify that vulnerability when Indian brides move abroad and become isolated from their families and dependent on their husbands and in laws. Women also sometimes help enforce these expectations because their own security depends upon remaining close to patriarchal power, vis-à-vis their sons. That does not make them responsible for the system. It shows how effectively patriarchy recruits people into sustaining the very arrangements that constrain them.

You’ve also described the deep social bonds formed between men raised within this system, and how the isolation of young men from women fosters unique emotional intimacy. What does that intimacy look like, and what happens to it when men marry?

Because boys and girls are often kept apart through adolescence, male friendship becomes one of the few places where young Indian men can experience emotional and physical intimacy. Friends spend nearly all their time together. They hold hands, lean against one another, share beds, exchange secrets, and speak about friendship in the language of love and devotion. These relationships can be incredibly tender. Patriarchy permits that intimacy because it assumes the men are heterosexual and that friendship is only preparation for adult life. Marriage changes everything. A man is expected to redirect his time, loyalty, and affection toward his wife and family, while friendships that once felt central are pushed aside. As I show in my book, migration often produces an even more abrupt rupture, leading to an unspoken (or unacknowledged) epidemic of male heartbreak. The tragedy is that patriarchy creates the conditions for deep intimacy between men in childhood and then fractures those relationships in adulthood. It allows male tenderness only temporarily and only as long as it does not become permanent queer longing, or more important than heterosexual marriage.

Patriarchy isn’t unique to India. What’s universal about it, and what is specific to Punjab?

What is universal is the bargain patriarchy seems to offer men: power, authority, and social approval in exchange for following a fairly rigid script. Men are expected to be strong, heterosexual, economically productive, emotionally restrained, and in control. The details vary, but that bargain appears in India, the United States, and many other places. Time and time again, I have found that men who buy into the patriarchal bargain find its promises hollow; much like a multi-level-marketing scheme, it extracts more than it delivers. Those who do make it to the top of the patriarchal pyramid discover that it to be lonely and isolating existence, having traded love and compassion for authority and control. What is particular to Punjab is how masculinity becomes tied to land, caste, arranged marriage, migration, and histories of violence and militarization. British colonial rule classified Punjabi Sikhs as a “martial race,” helping consolidate an ideal of manhood based on soldiering, physical strength, landownership, and caste authority. I use “Macholand” not to claim that Punjab has a monopoly on patriarchy, but to show the particular forms patriarchy takes there, and how it travels with Punjabis into the diaspora.

Your grandfather wanted you, his eldest grandchild, to carry on the family legacy by marrying a Sikh Indian woman. You never married, but the pressure was intense enough that you kept up the illusion it might happen—even while living openly as a gay man in the US. How much did that shape the questions you set out to answer in Coming of Age in Macholand?

It shaped almost every question in the book. In Washington, DC, I lived openly as a gay man. In Chandigarh, I stepped back into the closet and allowed my grandfather (Papaji) to believe that marriage was still possible. I kept postponing it through work, research, and distance. That double life was exhausting, but it also taught me how patriarchy operates through love as much as through obligation and force. I hid my sexuality out my mother’s concern and anxious love; being gay was illegal in India until 2018, going back in the closet was a matter of safety not just convenience. Papaji too loved me deeply, but he could not imagine a meaningful life for me outside marriage, children, and family inheritance. To him, my education and professional accomplishments could not compensate for my bachelorhood. In his estimation, I remained an incomplete man. That tension led me to ask what happens when family belonging requires us to hide essential parts of ourselves. Papaji was not simply a truculent patriarch of our family; he had inherited these expectations too. The challenge was learning how to honor him and his life with tenderness without inheriting his understanding of what my life should be.

Emigration has pulled millions of men out of Punjabi life. How has that changed things for the men who stay?

In India, transnational migration is usually narrated as success: the visa, the airport departure, the job abroad, the new house built with remittances. But we rarely talk about the emotional wreckage left behind. Punjab’s villages have been hollowed out, leaving aging parents, abandoned homes, and men who have watched their closest friends disappear one by one. For the men who stay, migration can feel like a judgment on their masculinity. The successful man is increasingly the one who leaves, earns foreign currency, and rescues his family from economic uncertainty. Those who remain may be treated as failures, even when they are caring for parents or working family land. They also lose the friendships that once gave their lives intimacy and meaning. I call that loss a slow form of violence because it unfolds gradually and receives so little acknowledgment. The person who leaves gains a future, while the person left behind must learn to live with an absence that everyone else celebrates.

You end by asking what kinship and freedom might look like beyond patriarchal inheritance. Where do you already see that happening?

I see it in small refusals that may not initially look revolutionary. A young man delays marriage year after year. A daughter claims her share of family property. Someone marries across caste. Queer and trans people build chosen families when their biological families reject them. Men allow friendships to deepen instead of treating emotional intimacy as something they must outgrow. I also see it in parents, including my own, who gradually choose their children’s happiness over community approval. Rejecting patriarchy does not require rejecting family or tradition. It means reimagining kinship so that love is not conditional upon obedience. In the book, people like Gautam, Manjeet, and Zorawar create room for themselves through bachelorhood, gender-transition, art, friendship, and chosen communities. Their lives are not completely outside Macholand, but they expose its fragility. Every refusal widens the cracks a bit wider, making another way of living a little easier for the next person to imagine.

You raised funds to translate Coming of Age in Macholand into Punjabi. Why was it important to make the book available in Punjabi, and why is reaching readers beyond academia so important to you?

The Punjabi translation feels like a way of taking the book home. Most of the people who made this research possible spoke to me in Punjabi. I translated their words into English and wrote the book within an American academic publishing system. I do not want the people who shaped the book to remain its subjects without also having the opportunity to become its readers. There is also a personal irony here. I speak Punjabi fluently, but I attended elite English-language schools in Chandigarh where Punjabi was treated as rustic and discouraged in the classroom. That education helped my family assimilate when we moved to California, but it left me without the formal Punjabi literacy needed to translate the book myself. Raising funds for a professional translation is one way of trying to repair that loss. I especially want young Punjabi men, in India and the diaspora, to recognize something of their own lives in the book: the expectations, friendships, pressures, and silences. But I also hope it reaches women, queer and trans readers, parents, teachers, and anyone trying to start difficult conversations about caste, gender, and violence. My commitment to reaching audiences beyond academia began with filmmaking. Films can move through classrooms, community spaces, living rooms, and online networks in ways that academic writing often cannot. For me, making ideas accessible does not mean making them less serious. It means taking responsibility for who gets to encounter them. I want the work to be rigorous, but I also want it to circulate, especially among the communities that made it possible.