Qassar Erotic

The Qassar are the Muslim washermen of northern India and Pakistan, a hereditary occupational community that most neighbors still call Dhobi. Qassar is an Arabic word for a fuller, someone who washes and whitens cloth. Choosing it is deliberate: it names the same trade in the vocabulary of Islam instead of the vocabulary of caste. Over the past century several South Asian Muslim artisan groups made the same move, with weavers taking the name Ansari and butchers taking Qureshi. The Qassar belong to that pattern of a people renaming themselves on their own terms.

They are generally held to descend from Hindu Dhobis who converted to Islam, and conversion did not break up the old structure. The trade stayed, and so did endogamy: marriages are arranged within the biradari, the brotherhood of related families. Communities have also traditionally kept a council of elders to settle disputes and enforce custom. Their faith is Sunni Islam, lived in ordinary terms through Friday prayers, the Ramadan fast and the two Eids. At home people speak Urdu or Hindi, which are close to one language in everyday speech. They also speak the regional Indo-Aryan language of their district: Punjabi on the Pakistani side, Bhojpuri or Awadhi on the Gangetic plain.

The traditional work was outdoor and physically punishing. Washermen gathered bundles of laundry from client households and carried them to a river, canal or tank. There they beat the cloth clean against stone slabs, dried it in the sun and brought it back pressed. In villages, payment often came partly in grain at harvest. The riverside washing place, the ghat, gave Hindi and Urdu one of their best known proverbs: the washerman's dog belongs neither to the house nor to the ghat. People still say it about anyone stranded between two worlds.

Today much of the trade has moved into shops. Qassar families run laundries, dry cleaning counters and the ironing stalls found on streets in North Indian and Pakistani towns, and many others have left washing altogether. In India the community's position also has a political edge. Hindu Dhobis are listed as a Scheduled Caste in many states, but the law limits that category to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, so Muslim washermen doing identical work are left out. Their demand for equal recognition is now one strand of Pasmanda politics, the movement of backward-caste Muslims who argue that caste inside South Asian Islam is real and should be counted.