What Goes Without Saying: Symbolic Violence and Inequality in Pakistan

 

 A SCENE. THREE SCENES, ACTUALLY.

 

Picture a village in rural Sindh, a hari—a sharecropper—bows his head before the wadera, the landlord. No one asked him to. There’s no gun to his head. There are no shackles on his wrists.

Now, shift the scene. Imagine a posh drawing room in Lahore. A family patriarch speaks. Everyone else falls silent. They aren't afraid of being hit; they just "know" that his opinion carries more weight. They seat themselves according to an unwritten hierarchy.

Finally, think of a classroom in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A young girl is told her ultimate destiny is to be a "good wife." She doesn't argue. She isn’t lacking intelligence; she’s just been convinced, through every fiber of her upbringing, that this is the "natural" order of things.

Three scenes. No guns. No courts. No police. And yet — in each — power is being exercised perfectly. This is what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the most elegant, the most durable, and arguably the most dangerous form of domination ever devised by human society. And today, we are going to take it apart — in the specific, complex, and deeply revealing context of Pakistan.

 

 

WHAT ON EARTH IS "SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE"?

Let me be precise before we go further, because this is a concept that is easily misunderstood. When Bourdieu talks about symbolic violence, he is not talking about the violence of symbols — flags being burned, statues being pulled down. He is talking about something far more subtle and far more consequential.

 

Symbolic violence is the imposition of categories of perception — ways of seeing, classifying, and evaluating the world — that serve the interests of dominant groups, but are experienced as natural, legitimate, and even just by those they subordinate. It is, in Bourdieu and Passeron's classic formulation, "the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity."

 

The keyword is complicity. Not consent in the liberal sense — a free, rational choice made by an informed agent. Not false consciousness in the Marxist sense — a lie that, once exposed, dissolves. Something in between, and far more unsettling: a practical, embodied, pre-reflexive sense of the world that makes subordination feel like the natural order of things.

 

This operates through what Bourdieu calls the habitus — the durable dispositions, the second-nature behaviours, acquired through a lifetime of living in a particular social position. The hari's lowered eyes. The Lahori patriarch's effortless authority. The girl's quiet ambition for wifehood. These are all habitus. And the shared, unquestioned assumptions that make these feel normal — what Bourdieu calls doxa — that is the invisible infrastructure of symbolic violence.

But wait — if the dominated are complicit, doesn't that mean they bear some responsibility for their own subordination? Isn't this just victim-blaming dressed up in French theory?

 

It is the most important objection you can raise, and it is worth taking seriously. Bourdieu's answer — and I think it is the right one — is a firm no. The dominated did not choose their habitus. They were formed by it, through conditions of deprivation and constraint that preceded them. The hari did not decide to be deferential; he was made deferential by a social world that rewarded deference and punished its absence from the moment he was born. To say that his complicity makes him responsible is like saying that the fish is responsible for the shape of its river. The key analytical move is to understand the mechanism — not to assign blame.

 

 

HOW DID WE GET HERE? THE COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS

Before we examine where symbolic violence operates in Pakistan today, we need to understand why it is so deeply entrenched. And for that, we need history.

 

The social structures through which symbolic domination operates in Pakistan today were substantially built by the British colonial state — sometimes deliberately, sometimes as the unintended consequences of administrative decisions. The colonial land revenue settlements in Punjab and Sindh did not simply tax existing landlords; they created them. They assigned legal proprietary rights in land to groups that had previously held more fluid and negotiated forms of authority, and in doing so, they converted contingent power into institutionalized domination.

 

The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 is a perfect example. By legally distinguishing "agricultural tribes" — Jats, Rajputs, Awans, Arains — from "non-agricultural" artisan and service castes (the Kammis), the colonial state did not merely reflect an existing hierarchy. It encoded it, formalized it, gave it the imprimatur of law. It made the hierarchy look like nature.

 

And then there is the education piece. The founding of Aitchison College in Lahore in 1886 — the "Chief's College," explicitly designed for the sons of feudal and tribal elites — was an act of symbolic engineering. It produced men who had the cultural capital, the social networks, the English accent, and the habits of authority that would allow them to govern, and to make their governance feel legitimate. After 1947, this class — largely intact — inherited the Pakistani state. The symbolic order of colonial domination was not dismantled. It was rebadged.

 

If symbolic domination is so old and so deeply rooted, is it not simply inevitable? Can anything actually change?

 

A fair challenge — and history itself is the answer. The Bengali Language Movement of 1952, where students died on the streets of Dhaka refusing the symbolic violence of imposed Urdu hegemony; the Women's Action Forum challenging Zia's Islamization in the 1980s; the nationalist movements confronting the state's symbolic authority for many decades — these are all moments when the dominated refused the terms of their domination. Symbolic order is durable, not permanent. When contradictions sharpen enough — when lived experience diverges sharply enough from the story the dominant are telling — the doxa can crack. The question is what replaces it.

 

 

THE FEUDAL ORDER: POWER WRITTEN INTO THE BODY

Let us go back to rural Sindh — because there is no better laboratory for observing symbolic violence in its most concentrated, most visible form.

 

The wadera — the large landlord — typically commands enormous holdings. He controls access to water, to land, to dispute resolution, and in many cases to the police and the courts. He is, in any realistic sense, the state within his domain. But what is most sociologically remarkable is not his control of these material resources. It is the degree to which his authority is experienced by his haris as legitimate — as earned, as benevolent, as the proper order of things.

 

The rituals of deference are dense and embodied: shoes removed at the threshold, eyes lowered, voices softened, elevated titles deployed. The landlord's haveli — typically positioned at the center of the village, visible from all directions — encodes authority into architecture. The darbar where he hears petitions is not merely a room; it is a theatre of power in which the spatial arrangement of bodies performs the hierarchy before a single word is spoken. This is what Bourdieu means by the "objectification of social relations" — power inscribed in the material world so thoroughly that it no longer needs to announce itself.

 

And then there is peshgi — the advance payment to tenant families that creates the moral economy of bonded labour. When a landlord gives a family an advance in a moment of crisis, he is not merely creating a debt. He is creating an obligation — a moral claim dressed in the language of reciprocity and honour. The Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research estimated in 2020 that approximately 4.5 million people remain in various forms of bonded labour in Pakistan. Many of them describe their situation not as exploitation but as a debt of honour. That description — that misrecognition of extraction as reciprocity — is the work of symbolic violence.

 

And the jirga — the council of elders that adjudicates local disputes — completes the picture. Research by the Aurat Foundation documented that jirga outcomes disproportionately favor more powerful parties, particularly in cases involving land and gender disputes. Yet these decisions are experienced as the expression of collective wisdom, ancestral tradition, and communal justice. The arbitrary exercise of class power is misrecognized as the neutral administration of custom.

 

 

CASTE, BIRADERI, AND THE INVISIBLE HIERARCHY

Now let us move from the fields of Sindh to the streets of Punjab — because Pakistan's other great machinery of symbolic domination is the biraderi system, and it works very differently, and is in some ways even harder to see.

 

Biraderi means, roughly, "brotherhood" — a patrilineal kinship group organized around shared zaat, a caste or descent category. The zaat hierarchy in Punjab arranges groups in a prestige order: at the top, the ashraf lineages — Syeds (claiming descent from the Prophet), Qureshis, Abbasis, and the great landed martial castes, Jats, Rajputs, Awans. Below them, the artisan and service castes, the Kammis. At the base, the Scheduled Castes — mostly Christians — working as sweepers and agricultural labourers.

 

This hierarchy is reproduced not through law — Pakistan's constitution formally prohibits caste discrimination — but through the endogamous marriage practices that prevent zaat mixing, through the occupational channelling that directs Kammis into "their" occupations, and through the doxic assumption that these differences reflect real moral and even biological distinctions. And here is the chilling part: research by scholars, including Stefan Lyon and Oskar Verkaaik, shows that even highly educated, urban, globally mobile Pakistanis routinely reproduce caste hierarchies in their marriage choices. The body carries what the mind has disavowed.

Consider the Christian sweeper communities — the Churas — in Pakistani cities. They are not legally required to sweep. So why do they? And why do some of them resist their own community members when they try to leave?

 

Because symbolic violence has done its work. The category "Chura" carries with it a cluster of associations — physical impurity, limited capacity, a designated place in the cosmic order — that has been absorbed, in attenuated form, by the community itself. Research by the Centre for Social Justice found that Christian sanitation workers who attempted to transition to other occupations faced not just employer discrimination but active resistance from within their own community — members who feared social censure for "abandoning their place." The Asia Bibi case in 2009 began not with blasphemy but with a water dispute: Muslim co-workers refused to share a vessel with her because she was a Chura, ritually impure. The entire caste dimension of that case — its true root — was rendered invisible by a public discourse that could only name it as a religious dispute. Even the analysis of symbolic violence can become subject to symbolic violence.

 

And biraderi does not stay in the village. It governs the ballot box. Election analyses by PILDAT and other observers indicate that dominant biraderis such as Jats, Rajputs, and Awans are significantly overrepresented among winning candidates in rural Punjab. The symbolic capital of high-status lineages — the recognition that they have the right to lead, to represent, to speak — translates directly into electoral dominance. This is how symbolic capital becomes political capital.

 

 

GENDER: THE PARADIGM CASE

Bourdieu himself argued that masculine domination is the paradigmatic instance of symbolic violence — the form in which the arbitrariness of domination is most completely naturalized. And in Pakistan, the evidence bears him out with almost painful precision.

 

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2023 ranked Pakistan 142nd out of 146 countries. The female labour force participation rate sits at 22.8%, against 82.1% for men. These numbers are staggering — but numbers do not tell us why. They tell us the “what.” Bourdieu's framework tells us the “how.”

 

The answer is purdah — not simply as a set of external rules, but as an embodied habitus. The woman who adjusts her dupatta in public, who lowers her voice in the presence of unrelated men, who routes her movement through male relatives — she is not simply complying with external constraints. She has been formed by a social world in which feminine modesty, self-effacement, and domestic devotion are experienced as genuine virtues, not impositions. The National Commission on the Status of Women found in 2021 that 43% of women cited "family disapproval" as the primary reason for not pursuing employment, and 31% cited "community reputation." Not law. Not threat. Internal logic. That is symbolic violence.

But surely "honour killing" is just straightforward physical violence? What does Bourdieu add to our understanding of that?

 

A great deal, actually. The HRCP documented 470 honour killings in Pakistan in 2019 — a significant undercount, given systematic misreporting. But the analytical key is that these killings are not purely private acts of rage. They are social performances — addressed to the community, demonstrating that when symbolic violence fails to keep a woman within her designated position, physical violence will enforce it. The honour killing is the exposed skeleton of a system that normally operates in flesh. What is particularly revealing is that women family members often participate in, or fail to prevent, these killings — because the patriarchal habitus has been incorporated by women as well as men. Symbolic violence produces its own enforcers from among the dominated. That is the most unsettling thing about it.

 

 

THE PIR: RELIGIOUS CAPITAL AS SYMBOLIC POWER

Now I want to turn to a domain where Bourdieu's framework, quite frankly, runs into trouble — but where the phenomenon it points toward is real and important. This is the domain of religious capital.

 

In rural Sindh and southern Punjab, the pir — the hereditary custodian of a Sufi shrine — commands an authority that cannot be reduced to his landholdings or his political connections, though he typically has both. His authority is religious in form: it derives from the baraka, the divine blessing, of his saintly ancestor, transmitted through blood. His devotees, the murids, attribute their agricultural successes, their children's marriages, their protection from misfortune to this baraka. Large proportions of rural respondents in Sindh and southern Punjab identify specific pirs or shrines as important sources of guidance in personal and family matters.

 

What is symbolically violent about this? The material benefits that flow through the shrine network — access to land, employment, political protection, credit — are experienced as gifts of divine grace rather than as transactions embedded in social power. The economic basis of the pir's authority is made invisible by the religious idiom in which the relationship is conducted. Bourdieu would call this a conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital via the religious field — but in Pakistan, the religious field is not bounded. It bleeds into everything.

 

 

THE STATE AND LANGUAGE: MACRO-LEVEL SYMBOLIC ORDER

We come now to the largest stage — the nation-state itself — and to two of the most consequential exercises of symbolic power in Pakistan's history.

 

Language and the Violence of Urdu Supremacy

In 1948, the government of Pakistan declared Urdu the sole state language. Urdu was the mother tongue of fewer than 8% of the population — primarily the Muhajir community from UP and Bihar. Bengali was the mother tongue of over 54% of Pakistanis. This was a foundational act of symbolic violence: telling the majority that their language — the language in which they dreamed, prayed, loved, and argued — was not fit to be the language of the nation. Four years later, students in Dhaka were shot dead for demanding that it was. The seeds of 1971 were planted in 1948, in a symbolic act.

 

English Language and Class

The hegemony of English adds another layer today. In Pakistan's stratified educational market, English-medium private schooling transmits not just language but an entire habitus of elite distinction: aesthetic tastes, social networks, modes of self-presentation. A child educated at Lahore Grammar School or Karachi Grammar School acquires the cultural capital that marks her, unmistakably, as belonging to the governing class. The National Education Policy 2017 acknowledged this bifurcation — but its recommendations remain largely unimplemented.

 

 

LIMITS OF THE FRAMEWORK: WHERE BOURDIEU RUNS OUT OF ROAD

I have been using Bourdieu's framework with considerable conviction. It is time to be honest about its limits — because intellectual honesty is what distinguishes analysis from advocacy.

 

First: religious capital. Bourdieu's framework, built on the sociology of secular industrial France, cannot fully theorize the role of Islam as an all-encompassing social, legal, and cosmological framework. Talal Asad's concept of Islam as a "discursive tradition" and Saba Mahmood's account of piety and agency in Muslim societies offer essential correctives. The woman who veils as an act of piety is not simply a victim of symbolic violence; she is also an agent constituting herself through a religious practice that carries its own complex logic of self-cultivation.

 

Second: the corporate agency of biraderi. Bourdieu's framework is oriented toward individual agents and class-level positions. The biraderi is a corporate group — it competes, strategizes, and reproduces itself as a collective. This requires frameworks that, unlike Bourdieu's, can attribute agency to groups, not merely to individuals.

 

Third: the risk of overdetermination. Scholars, including Lois McNay and Toril Lovell, have warned that Bourdieu's framework leaves insufficient room for resistance and creative agency. The Women's Action Forum, nationalist movements, the Bengali Language martyrs — all of these are cases where the dominated found ways to contest and crack the symbolic order. Bourdieu can acknowledge such resistance theoretically, but tends to underweight it in practice.

 

Fourth: post-colonial specificity. Pakistan is not 1960s France. Its social structures are organized significantly by kinship and caste rather than market-mediated class relations. Bourdieu must be supplemented by post-colonial theory, South Asian social science, and subaltern studies. The goal is not theoretical eclecticism but adequacy to the object — a sociology that fits the society it is trying to understand.

 

 

CLOSE.  WHY ANY OF THIS MATTERS

Let me end where I began — with three scenes.

 

The hari removing his sandals. The patriarch whose authority writes itself in silence. The girl who wants to be a good wife.

 

Symbolic violence is not mysterious. It is, in fact, entirely explicable — which is both the good news and the bad. The good news is that anything explicable can, in principle, be changed. The bad news is that the mechanism is deep, embodied, and pre-reflexive: it operates below the threshold of argument. You cannot simply tell the hari that his deference is a historical construction and expect his shoulders to straighten. The habitus is not dissolved by information. It is reshaped, slowly and painfully, by transformed conditions of existence — by education, by urbanization, by political mobilization, by the accumulation of counter-experiences.

 

Bourdieu believed that the social scientist's primary political contribution is reflexive sociology: a science of the social conditions that make symbolic domination possible, which by making them visible, makes them, for the first time, contestable. In Pakistan — where the doxic assumptions of feudal deference, patriarchal honour, caste hierarchy, and state authority are under growing but still fragile challenge — such a reflexive sociology is not merely an academic exercise.

 

It is, in however modest a way, a political act.