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.     

Ethnic Identity,Family Cohesion,and Symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Maltreated Youth

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is prevalent among maltreated youth, but little empirical work exists regarding the role of ethnic identity and family cohesion as influential factors among different ethnic groups. This study included an ethnically diverse sample of adolescents affiliated with a state-administered residential facility for maltreated youth. Variables included ethnic identity and family cohesion, as well as symptoms of PTSD, depression, dissociation, and post-traumatic cognitions. The most prominent finding was that low family cohesion predicted greater PTSD symptoms, depression, dissociation, and post-traumatic cognitions. This finding was especially pronounced for multiracial youth. Results are discussed within the context of developmental pathways regarding ethnic identity development in multiracial youth.     

Guru Nanak’s sensuous metaphysics

ABSTRACT

Religion and aesthetics are demarcated as two different avenues with ‘God’ and ‘Beauty’ as their respective goals. Opposite of anesthetic, aesthetics is clearly the heightening of the senses. But religion with its focus on God dwelling in a world beyond ours mandates a negation of those very senses. Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, overturns such an antithesis. My paper focuses on Guru Nanak’s Japji, the foremost devotional hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib, to explore the way in which aesthetics and religion merge together in the unitary experience of a sensuous metaphysics.     

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.