Haryanvis Erotic

Say a sentence in Haryanvi anywhere in northern India and people know where you are from. The speech of Haryana, the farming state wrapped around three sides of Delhi, has a reputation for being blunt, loud and unsentimental, and Haryanvis tend to wear that as a badge rather than an insult. They are the Indo-Aryan people of the plain between the Yamuna River and the edge of the Thar Desert. What binds them is less a single lineage than a shared way of living: the village, the clan, the buffalo, the wheat field, and a firm belief that plain words beat polite ones. Haryanvi belongs to the Western Hindi group. It is close enough to standard Hindi to be followed easily, yet different enough to place a speaker at once. The state does not speak with one voice, though. Around Rewari and Mahendragarh people speak Ahirwati, the Meos of Nuh speak Mewati, and along the Rajasthan border in Sirsa and Fatehabad, Bagri takes over. All three lean toward the Rajasthani languages, while the northern districts shade into Punjabi.

Most Haryanvis are Hindu. There are Muslim Meos in the Mewat country, Sikhs along the Punjab border and a small Jain community. Religion runs through the farming calendar as much as through temples: swings hung from trees for Teej in the monsoon, and the Dada Khera shrine that guards a village. Society is organized by caste community, among them Jats, Ahirs, Rajputs, Gujjars, Brahmins and the Aggarwal Banias, who trace their origin to ancient Agroha. Within those communities it is organized by gotra, the clan a person may not marry into. Khap panchayats, councils of allied clans, still meet to settle disputes and enforce marriage rules, and their rulings regularly make national headlines. The land carries a lot of history. Rakhigarhi in Hisar district is one of the largest Harappan sites known, Kurukshetra is revered as the battlefield of the Mahabharata, and three battles that reshaped power in northern India were fought at Panipat. As a state, though, Haryana is young: it was carved out of Punjab in 1966. Since then the Green Revolution made it a grain bowl, and Gurugram's glass towers went up on former farmland. Haryanvis have also filled an outsized share of India's army ranks and its wrestling and boxing squads. The village akhara, a pit of soft earth where boys and now many girls train, is as Haryanvi as the hookah passed around the chaupal in the evening. Folk forms such as saang theater and sung ragini hold on beside a thriving Haryanvi pop scene.