RELOCATING THE SIKH SUBJECT

In 1993 a number of Sikh Canadian veterans were barred from entering a Legion Hall in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada because they refused to remove their turbans. Using a postcolonial lens to explore this meeting and the historical factors leading to it, this paper offers some important reflections on both the evolution of Canadian multiculturalism and the nature and meaning of Sikh identity in a seemingly postcolonial context. The paper suggests that the Sikh veterans involved in this event were effective at strategically constructing a subject position that relocated them simultaneously at the centre of Empire and Canada's multicultural order.