REPRESENTATION OF SIKHS IN BOLLYWOOD CINEMA

Like other ethnic minorities, Sikhs have been conventionally represented in popular Hindi cinema either as brave warriors or as uncouth rustics. In the nationalist text in which the imagined subject was an urban North Indian, Hindu male, Sikh characters were displaced and made to provide comic relief. Since the mid-1990s, Hindi filmmakers have genuflected to the rising economic and political power of the Sikh diaspora through token inclusions of Sikhs. Although 1990s films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) included attractive images of Sikhs, Hindi cinema could introduce a Sikh protagonist only in the new millennium in Ghadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) and featured a turbaned Sikh as a protagonist only two decades later in the film Singh is Kinng (2009). Ever since the film became a superhit, top Bollywood stars such as Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and even Rani Mukherjee have played Sikh characters in films like Love Aaj Kal (2009), Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009) and Dil Bole Hadippa (2009). Even though Bollywood stars have donned the turban to turn Sikh cool, Sikhs view the representation of the community in Hindi cinema as demeaning and have attempted to revive the Punjabi film industry as an attempt at authentic self-representation. This paper examines images of Sikhs in new Bollywood films to inquire if the romanticization of Sikhs as representing rustic authenticity is a clever marketing tactic used by the film industry to capitalize on the increasing power of the Sikh diaspora or if it is an indulgence in diasporic techno-nostalgia that converges on the Sikh body as the site for non-technologized rusticity. It argues that despite the exoticization of Sikhs in the new Bollywood film, the Sikh subject continues to be displaced in the Indian nation.     

(EN)Gendered Sikhism: The iconolatry of manliness in the making of Sikh identity

Among the most insidious regimes of control inaugurated by the British in India was the identification of a fundamental affinity between themselves and manly ‘races’ such as the Sikhs. I will suggest that this apparent commensurability of colonial and native traditions depended upon the Sikhs readily accepting a masculine signature which restricted the ambiguous organization of the Khalsa Sikh body to the muscular piety prescribed by colonial discourse. Thus, far from inscribing ontological parity between the British and the Sikhs, this advocacy of ‘racial’ kinship actually communicated a censorious judgement about Sikh identity. The significance of interventions by Sikh reformers, such as Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha (1861–1938) and Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1958), will be highlighted as key influences in the disciplining of a native semiotics of the body. This reformist ideology encouraged the representation of Sikh corporeality as not-effeminate, signalling not only the insinuation of a colonial iconolatry of manliness at the heart of Sikh tradition, but also the disingenuousness of received opinion concerning the progressive nature of Sikh sexual politics.     

‘KEEPING THE FAITH ALIVE': TEACHING SIKH KIRTAN IN AMERICA

Since the large influx of Sikhs to the USA beginning with immigration reform in the 1960s, Sikhism has continued to come into view as an American religion. Throughout the USA today, Sikhs are devoting vast amounts of time and effort toward keeping continued generations of Sikh Americans connected with Sikh communities, traditions, history, and ways of being and knowing. One of the primary ways that many communities are teaching younger generations how to be Sikh in America is through teaching the performance of the Sikh sacred musical tradition, Gurbani kirtan (musical performance of the Word of the Gurus and Bhagats of Sikhism found within the Guru Granth Sahib). This article will explore observations from my field research and interviews among people who are teaching the Gurbani kirtan tradition in the USA, and their students. I will discuss how those teaching the tradition fall into several groups: organized kirtan academies, well-known kirtaniyas (Sikh sacred musicians) who hold periodic workshops, professional music teachers, and volunteer instructors within gurdwara communities. I will present insights from my interviews conducted with interviewees from each group about their pedagogical methods, reasons for teaching, and hopes and concerns for the future. Finally, I will conclude with some observations on the role of Gurbani kirtan in the emergence of Sikhism as an American religion.     

Social and political activism amongst British Sikhs: Responses to issues of equality and human rights – a new way forward?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two key issues relating to activism amongst British Sikhs. The exploration focuses upon the mobilisation of Sikhs at rallies and protests surrounding human rights issues, as well as their overall objection to caste legislation in British Law. The revelations surrounding the British Government’s involvement in Operation Bluestar came as a huge shock not only to British Sikhs but also to Sikhs worldwide. This paper will discuss whether the British Sikh community has taken on a fresh approach when confronted with issues surrounding equality and human rights and will explore how youth led Sikh groups and organisations have responded to contemporary challenges by using Sikhi to encourage activism amongst British Sikhs.     

Promoting Sikhi among Malaysian youth: A case study of the Sikh Naujawan Sabha Malaysia (SNSM)

ABSTRACT

The Sikh Naujawan Sabha Malaysia (SNSM) has been an important vehicle in keeping the tenets of the Sikh faith alive for the Malaysian Sikh community. It is primarily a Sikh youth organization, initiated with the blessings of the Malaysian Sikh community elders in the 1960s, who decided that starting the activity of prayer and contemplation on Sikhi was crucial from a young age. Over the decades, the SNSM has been adept in evolving its activities and organization to cater to the altering needs and self-conceptions of the various generations of Sikh youth. This paper documents the trajectory of SNSM activities and reinvention to cater to the generations of Sikhs post-Independence.     

Engendering the female voice in Sikh devotional music: Locating equality in pedagogy and praxis

ABSTRACT

The Sikh Gurus promoted gender equality, but still women’s voices are being silenced from playing Gurbānī Kīrtan inside the Golden Temple. The reasons for their exclusion center around the sexualization of the female body, purity and pollution, appeals to tradition, and questions of musical proficiency. Today, Sikhs in India and the diaspora ask that the Sikh philosophy of equality be fully enacted in pedagogy and praxis. Through ethnographic investigation, historical analysis and critical inquiry, this paper addresses the importance of liberating the Sikh self and psyche from institutional systems of oppression to reclaim Sikh sovereignty, equality and the female voice.     

Educated millennial Sikhs: Higher education,social mobility and identity formation among British Sikh youth

ABSTRACT

Large scale Sikh male migration to Britain in the 1950s gave way to family re-unions, leading to the development of vibrant Sikh communities across major cities and emergence of a millennial second and third generation Sikh youth. This chapter specifically identifies and evaluates higher education and labour market experiences of these millennial Sikhs. It argues mass participation in higher education produced differential outcomes, with a small upper segment becoming high achievers but a large bottom segment unable to realise the full potential. Further, these experiences had varied effects on their identity formation, with some moving away from their parental religion whilst others (re)embracing their tradition and adopting Sikh articles of faith. Finally, these differential experiences have also contributed to the widening of socio-economic differentiation within the British Sikh community as a whole and on potential for upward social mobility.     

SITES OF ‘SEDITION’, SITES OF LIBERATION: GURDWARAS,THE GHADAR PARTY,AND ANTICOLONIAL MOBILIZATION

This paper examines the gurdwaras on the Pacific Coast of North America as critical sites of Ghadar organizing. Linked to gurdwaras across the Pacific, particularly in Manila, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, in a network of labor migration and anticolonial politics, the gurdwaras in Stockton, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia in particular, were closely monitored by US, British, and Canadian officials as centers of sedition and fronts for revolutionary activity. Examining British gendered representations of Sikh soldiers and the ways in which Ghadar activists sought to dismantle the bond between Sikhs and the British Empire, I argue that Pacific Coast gurdwaras were critical meeting spaces for Indian migrants to forge an anticolonial movement against both British colonial subjugation in India and racial discrimination and exclusion in North America. As such, these gurdwaras constituted a central place in early South Asian American history and the histories of global anticolonialism and state repression in the early twentieth century.     

Sikhs of Nagaon in Assam (India): Dilemmas of language and religion*

Sikhs are a widely scattered community found both in India and far beyond. They have historically been a hardworking people who have sought out economic opportunity in a wide variety of places. In the state of Assam, there are Sikhs who had settled there for the past two centuries, exclusively in the villages of one district of Nagaon. They claim to be the progeny of Sikh soldiers sent there by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in support of the Ahom king. After they lost the battle and dispersed to the forested areas clearing the jungle and cultivating the land. While they have kept Sikh tradition in its entirety and believe fully in Guru Granth, they do not understand Punjabi. The Punjabi Sikhs, as later day migrants, have subjected them on these grounds and refer to them as ‘duplicates.’ This article will seek to present a full account, however, of their immersion into the culture of Assam and how they came to call themselves Axomiya, a distinct type of Sikhs from this state.     

Songs to the Jinas and of the Gurus: historical comparisons between Jain and Sikh devotional music

ABSTRACT

Jain worship has always been accompanied by music and likewise for Sikhs the performance of and listening to the singing of hymns, as composed by several of their Gurus, continuously has been central to the community’s spiritual experience. For different reasons, however, Sikh and Jain devotional music, known as kirtan and bhakti respectively, until recently were neglected subjects in historiography. This article investigates the parallels and differences among the two genres from a historical comparative perspective against the successive backgrounds of the bhakti movement and Indic culture, the imperial encounter and globalization. In doing so, it particularly emphasizes the importance of identity politics to the making of modern Sikh and Jain devotional music, as well as the fact that, in comparison to Jain bhakti, Sikh kirtan generally remains North Indian ‘Hindustani’ art music, rather than regional folk music.     

Sikh millennials of the ‘kirtan generation’ in the making of an ‘American Sikhism’

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the millennial generation of Sikhs in the United States. Based on extended ethnographic research in Sikh communities, the author explores the role of Sikh millennials in the making of an ‘American Sikhism’, the contours of which are taking shape having followed after the explosive growth of gurdwara communities – and the educational, social, and other resources they provide – which were largely made possible by the affluence of Sikh communities beginning with the previous ‘Brain Drain’ generation. In particular, the author discusses this ‘kirtan generation’ of Sikhs, educated in gurdwara schools, and their growing leadership of Sikh communities.     

Inside the Guru's Gate: ritual uses of texts among the Sikhs in Varanasi

The images and representations of Sikhs in contemporary Mumbai cinema and popular culture, rife with portrayals of eccentricities that the audience loves to disregard eventually, point to a cultural turn that has become a power-laden strategy to regulate Sikh otherness and consequently, re-present it through a predominant, controlling gaze. In tracing such sense of carnivelesque otherness with which Sikhs have been portrayed in most Bollywood films, this paper aims to explore the configuration and re-configurations of Sikh subjectivity as an Other that remains marginalized by their difference and can only be acknowledged through a Hindu-centric lens of approval. Through depictions of what I call as Bolly Sikhs, a dubious space is created which is filled with contextual disjunctures and inconsistencies, a bricolage where Sikh identities and practices are jumbled up or deliberately misrepresented; sometimes the Sikh is presented only through subtractions and absences. The discursive limits of Sikh representation, presence and absence, when examined in context of cultural analyses offered by cultural critics as Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Foucault and Homi Bhabha, among many others, enable us to understand the neo-Orientalist rhetoric whereby Sikhs can be seen as displaced or assimilated, if not betrayed in creative/visual representations. The Sikh thought/mind is nullified and/or absorbed within the hegemonic implications of Hindu thought and the Sikh body is at times, a fashionable icon of vibrant, colorful excess and at others, an object framed in terms of weaker ethos unable to achieve any accomplishment by itself.     

PAKISTAN AND SIKH NATIONALISM: STATE POLICY AND PRIVATE PERCEPTIONS

The paper will examine Pakistan policies and perceptions of Sikh nationalism in the period from 1947 until the present day. The policies, it will be argued, have been opportunistic rather than strategic and have embraced both covert support for militancy against the Indian state in the 1980s and the attempt to use Sikhs and East Punjab as a bridge between Pakistan and India in the post-2001 period of composite dialogue. Private perceptions will be explored first through the accounts of partition survivors. They contain a typical mixture of romanticized views of Muslim–Sikh rural harmony before 1947 and of the Sikhs as an aggressive ‘Other’ in the ‘War of Religions’ at the time of the massacres and mass migrations. Their official counterpart is the attempt to ‘blame’ Sikhs for the violence and to understand the attacks in East Punjab as part of a Sikh Plan of ethnic cleansing. Secondly, private perceptions will be examined in terms of accounts written at the time of the 1980s Punjab crisis. These Pakistani works support the view of Sikhs as an ‘aggrieved minority’. Sympathy for Sikh nationalist struggle stops short of overt support for the militants in such texts. They frequently indulge, however, in attacks on the ‘Brahminical’ hegemony within India, thus echoing Sikh ethno-nationalist writings. Contemporary writings are suffused with romanticist imaginings of the Punjab, bringing harmony to the region in which the ‘love’ aspect of the love/hate relationship between Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs is emphasized. The extent to which the two Punjabs have drifted away from each other since partition is seldom acknowledged; nor the history of competing Muslim and Sikh nationalisms in the region.     

Precarious and model minorities: Sikh identities in the ‘new’ global politics of religion

ABSTRACT

In many parts of the world, Sikhs have come to be perceived as a ‘model' minority – so much so that some have critiqued the Sikh community for taking up positions that are perceived as assimilationist. Such critiques, however, gloss over the sense of precarity, and the litany of hardships, racial discrimination and legal battles in which Sikhs have been forced to be engage in a post-9/11 world. Ultimately, this discrimination is enabled and justified by historical western notions of the incommensurability of the sacred and secular. Engaging with recent critical debates over the on-going meanings of the sacred and the secular, this paper argues that the contemporary moment requires a cosmopolitan religious outlook. Such debates reveal the separation between the public and the private, and between the sacred and the secular, to be ‘zombie categories' that fail to capture contemporary realities. Hence, conceptualizing Sikh identities as precarious, vulnerable ‘model minorities' in a post-Brexit/Trump era allows us to explore a Sikh ethics underpinned by the universal message of SGGS Ji. This is so because such ethics have never been conceptualized as simply being ‘other-worldly’, but rather as precisely grounded in the world that has been entrusted to us.     

Trauma and memory within the Sikh diaspora: Internet dialogue

The events surrounding the 1947 partition and the attack on Sikhs in the Golden Temple and Delhi continue to affect Sikhs today. Memory of the specifics and related issues plays a major role in politics both in India and within the diaspora. This paper explores the literature on the events and how they are recast and understood by various groups. Particular attention is paid to interactions on the Internet and especially within chat groups and on websites. Modern communication has created a global Sikh dialogue that has implications for understanding of traditions, control of institutions, and politics.

Please do not quote without permission.     

The Third Ghallughara: On the Sikh Dilemma Since 1984

This article examines the enduring impact of 1984 tragedy upon the Sikh community. After outlining the initial reaction to the Government of India's army action in the Golden Temple Amritsar, it looks at some of the ways common Sikhs made sense of the loss of the Sikh heritage and the hurt of desecration of their holiest shrine. While the Indian stately discourse enforced by the media tried to justify its ghastly action, this was challenged, by a section of the Sikh elite. Even after three decades the reverberations of the tragedy seem unending, reminding Sikhs individually as well as collectively about the precarious public space available for community's cultural, linguistic, and political expressions. The article points towards the persistent dilemma of the Sikh elite as it makes sense of various compulsions, choices, and strategies in the postcolonial Indian polity.     

Sikh millennials engaging the earth: Sikhi,environmental activism,and eco-enchantment

ABSTRACT

Diaspora Sikhs of and at the millennium are involved in a broad range of causes. This paper examines two Sikh environmental organizations: KarmaGrow and EcoSikh. Drawing from three previously unrelated strands of the Sikh and Punjabi studies literature (millennial Sikh identities in diaspora; engagements with land and landscape among Punjabis; and the influence of Sikh ethics), I explore the millennial diaspora environmentalisms of these cases. I argue that they challenge Weber's proposition that modern society is disenchanted, as well as Western notions of development, by re-engaging Punjabi ecological traditions, recuperating sacred geography and landscape, and uniting householding and stewardship.     

Lost in translation? The emergence of the digital Guru Granth Sahib

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of the digital online environment on the religious lives of Sikhs with a particular focus on the emergence of the ‘Digital Guru’, i.e. digital versions of the Guru Granth Sahib. Using data gathered through interviews and an online survey, I examine how the ‘Digital Guru’ is impacting on the transmission of the Sikh tradition and on Sikh religious authority. I then explore some of the issues faced in engaging with the ‘Digital Guru’ and the consequences of the emergence of online translations. Given that ‘going online’ has become an everyday practice for many, this article contributes to understandings of the impact of the online environment on the religious adherents in general, and on Sikhs in particular.