CONTRARY NARRATIVE SPACES AND THE SIKH WOMAN: Imperial aftermaths in Bhisham Sahni's Tamas and Gulzar's Maachis

Public nationalistic discourses construct ideas of national belonging for the privileged few while the minorities and the exilic struggle to find a place within nation-states in the postcolonial world. In the production and construction of the nationalistic discourse and identity, private narratives, often gendered accounts, are elided, and a masculinist and heteropatriarchal construct dominate. In this paper, I will examine private narratives ensuing the 1947 partition of India and the Sikh militancy in Punjab from 1984 onwards in order to incorporate an alternative interpretation regarding ideas of national belonging for the Sikhs, especially for the diasporic Sikh women.     

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.     

UNDERSTANDING INTER-BRASIAN CONFLICT

The phenomenon of Sikh and Muslim conflict has been largely analysed in anthropological and sociological works in terms of a product of angry youth or ethnic hatred or religious passions. This paper explores the main ways in which the increasing tensions between Sikhs and Muslims have been articulated in the landscape of postcolonial Britain. It investigates the most prominent explanations provided both in academic and popular literature to understand the various causes seen to fuel this type of conflict, that is ethno-religious causes, multicultural issues and as the symptom of youth delinquency. The paper offers a critique of such accounts and moves towards an ontological understanding of conflict, that is, to elaborate the central role of conflict and its relationship to the political as the site for contestation between ‘friends and enemies’. This reading of Inter-BrAsian conflict enables us to open up a new space to re-evaluate the nature of Sikh and Muslim tensions within the diasporic context.     

Creating a Pindh: Place-Making within a Sikh Diasporic Community in Malaya

This paper examines a diaspora group's claiming and contesting of physical space and actively engaging in host country multiracial spaces, I co-opted the Pindh, a Sikh concept incorporating relationships with the landscape and social structure, re-defining its original meaning to encompass this unique consolidation of identity, home and belonging. Addressing the use and meaning of space and the transformation of Peraktown, the geographical location, I explore this transformation to a place of meaning through the practices of everyday life within the Sikh community. It describes the concepts of spatial relationships and their impact on the construction and solidification of the Peraktown Sikh community in contrast to their inherited connection to the land and inherent romantic nostalgia for Punjab, as they recreated the meanings it contained and inscribed these on the physical map of the town. In the four spaces addressed, the home, the Gurdwara, the school and the gendered work spaces, I demonstrate the ways that space altered, through claiming, adoption and subversion. The lens of the Pindh offers a uniquely Sikh way to view and analyse the constitution of common identity and a place to belong. The Peraktown Sikhs extend the discourse of diaspora beyond postcolonial and Western modes of thought of being ‘other’ yet simultaneously belonging ‘here', ‘back there’ and to multiple places of home.     

STATE AND CRIMINALITY: THE COLONIAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THUGGEE AND THE SUPPRESSION OF SIKH MILITANCY IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA

Crime and policing, as outlined in the policies of independent India, can be traced to the definitions of criminality espoused by the British Empire. I am particularly interested in examining the role of the centralizing State, in colonial and postcolonial India, in defining ordinary (‘individual’) and extraordinary (‘collective’) crime. This project postulates a contextual definition of criminality, and interrogates the political ideology that links the colonial to the postcolonial by tracing the lineage of the Indian State’s policies toward Sikh separatism.     

Sikh diasporic negotiations: Indian and Canadian history in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

The perceived interconnection of Sikh religion and extremism, and the mistaken association of Sikhism with Islam impacted Sikh consciousness and historically, these have presented challenges to Sikh identity, representation, and intercultural negotiations in Canada. With reference to Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2010), this article investigates Canadian Sikh diaspora’s collective memories, specifically: (i) the return of the Komagata Maru ship from Vancouver (1914) (ii) partition of India (iii) the death of passengers in Air India 182 (23 June 1985) from Toronto to India; (iv) Operation Blue Star (1984) and (v) the 1984 Sikh carnage.     

WHO DESIRES THE RHINOCEROS? PROSAIC POETICAL AND MNEMONIC VISUAL REFRACTIONS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WAKE OF OPERATION BLUE STAR

This paper seeks to bring together artistic and poetic productions as sites of historical memory wherein forgetting and remembering occur so as to forge dominant narratives as well as resistance and alterity through their mutual relation to the modern postcolonial technocratic state. Twenty-five years have passed since the armed altercation between a group of so-called ‘Sikh Separatists’ and the Indian Military within the confines of the Golden Temple, Amritsar, in Panjab. This watershed moment signalled a shift in the typically amicable relations between nationalist Hindus and Sikhs. It also led to a decade-long ordeal of reckless, unmitigated violence and torture of ‘men with beards’ being taken categorically to represent a national threat. I posit that art and poetry serve as a sites where the cathexis of Sikh desires are continually projected upon an imaginal canvas; it is here that the longing for a form of sovereignty in relation to the nation-state may potentially and partially begin to be engaged. This paper examines a small number of such emanations as latent resurrections of sublimated desires that challenge subjectivity as limited solely to a single purview but is rather mitigated through a process of altercation, contestation, continuation and re-association.     

Ethical narratives,street kitchens and doing religious difference amongst post-migrant communities in contemporary Britain

Street kitchens organised by religious groups in response to food poverty and homelessness have become a ubiquitous feature of British cities. Although a good deal of literature has explored this genre of social action, relatively little has analysed it as a feature of religious practice associated with post-migrant communities. This paper uses data drawn from ethnographic research on Sikh and Muslim street kitchens in two British cities to consider the significance of such initiatives amongst Britain’s South Asian communities. The paper focuses on the role of narrative in this context, deploying Ingold’s notion of ‘storied knowledge’ to analyse fluid, emergent ethical practices expressed through religion-related stories. These practices, envisaged here as ‘religioning’, draw on South Asian religious traditions creatively reconfigured in the postcolonial city. I argue that such developments constitute a significant diasporic intervention into settled accounts of ‘faith’ as a vehicle for ethical citizenship in British urban environments.     

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.     

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF DIASPORIC SIKH NATIONALISM! FROM ANGUISHED CRIES OF ‘KHALISTAN’ TO PLEAS FOR ‘RECOGNITION’

This paper explores the nature of the diasporic Sikh nationalism in the post-1984 period. Generally labelled as a movement for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, overseas Sikhs’ reaction was a highly emotional demonstration of anger and protest at the desecration of the Golden Temple in Amritsar – the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. While it seems certain that most Sikhs were suddenly made aware of the lack of state power, the strategy and ideas advocated by various Sikh leaders and their organizations did not produce a sustainable movement. The paper discusses reasons why such a widespread and shared diasporic nationalist movement failed to generate ideas and appropriate strategies for statehood and instead subsided with pleas for recognition.     

THE FIVE SYMBOLS OF SIKHISM

The paper addresses three contemporary issues pertaining to the five Sikh symbols known as the Five Ks, specifically the decline in their observance in the Sikh homeland, that is, the State of Punjab in India; the difficulties being experienced by Sikh immigrants in Europe and North America in preserving their formal identity; and the academic controversies over the genesis, meaning and significance of the Five Ks. The first brief section describes the scale at which the Sikh youth are abandoning the two main markers of their traditional identity – unshorn hair and the turban - and stresses the need for a deeper investigation of this phenomenon in the light of sociological theory and research. The second section exposes the problems that the baptized, or traditional, Sikhs face in preserving their identity and symbolism in North America and Europe. Although the discussion primarily references restrictions placed on the wearing of Sikh symbols in public schools in America and France, the problem is more general. It is suggested that the Sikhs need to non-violently resist discriminatory or exclusionary practices in western countries guided by the ethos of their own faith. The third and last section, which forms the main body of the essay, deals with academic controversies surrounding the origin and significance of the Sikh symbols. On the basis of close textual analysis, the paper critically examines a host of interpretations – commonsensical, mystical, cosmological, structural, empiricist, psychoanalytical and feminist – of the Five Ks, and presents conclusions. The Sikh symbols signify and affirm that the spiritual concerns of human beings cannot be separated from their temporal and material concerns.     

Mimic writing: On Rammowalia’s fictional narrative of Air India Plane tragedy

This paper presents a reading of Iqbal Rammowalia’s novel What the Judges Wouldn’t See? [2005]. It is a fictional narrative of post-1984 events in a Canadian Sikh household, which, readers are invited to believe, bears closely upon the crashing of Air India plane in June 1985. The plot devised by Rammowalia turns out to be a caricature of gross distortion. Its tall claim of portraying a realistic scenario of a conspiracy is unconvincing – knowing Canada’s two national security agencies could not substantiate such a contention. As it stands, Rammowalia’s creative work only lends its weight to a shelf-load of prejudiced writings concerning the Canadian Sikhs.     

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.     

‘Second generation’ Sikh autobiographies and authobiographical novels in European languages: Turning towards and away from traditions

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes autobiographies and autobiographical novels by Sikh authors who were born and grew up in Europe and North America as sources for understanding developments of Sikh religion. It uses the concepts panjabiat (Punjabi-ness), Sikh religion and modernity/Western society to understand the tensions and conflicts described in these books. The authors had to work out the differences between panjabiat, Sikh religion and modernity/Western society. They had to figure out what place the Sikh religion should have in their new identity and for this they were looking for similarities between the Sikh religion and Western society. In the autobiographies Sikh religion emerges as an ideology employed to criticize Punjabi culture and society and Sikh religion is reinterpreted and often comes to refer to some general principles that are compatible and supportive of Western modernity.     

Out of the ashes: Sikh American institution building and the promise of equality for Sikh women

This paper examines Sikh American institution building in the post-9/11 period, and the impact of these institutions on Sikh women’s status and empowerment within the community. I examine the social and historical context of Sikh American politics and activism. I present the views of Sikh Americans who are directly involved with institution building and I describe their perspectives on women’s empowerment within the new institutions and in the broader Sikh American community. My discussion is based on ethnographic research, including open-ended interviews, participant-observation at conferences and community events, and analyses of public discourses about faith, ethics, politics, gender, and women on Sikh American websites and blogs.     

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.     

VIOLENCE,MEMORY, AND THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH FORMATIONS

This editorial introduces and contextualizes five scholarly papers on ‘Violence, Memory, and the Dynamics of Transnational Youth Formations.’ The topic of this special issue is conceptually organized around theories of postcolonial and diasporic citizenship and probes the extent to which these theories have shaped the discursive field of ‘youth formations’. We outline how an emerging scholarly field on youth cultures, youth activism and youth political organizations has responded to the new challenges of globalization and transnational mobilization. As experiences and memories of violence give shape to these mobilizations as well as the social imaginations characterizing youth movements, this special issue takes an interest in drawing connections between different youth formations. In establishing such a comparative lens, we contribute to ongoing discussions in Sikh Studies on youth issues in relation to violence, discrimination and transnational mobilization.