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AT HOME IN MOTION
a
Pal Ahluwalia
a
Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, University of
South Australia, St. Bernards Rd., Magill, SA, 5072, Australia

Available online: 22 Aug 2011

To cite this article: Pal Ahluwalia (2011): AT HOME IN MOTION, Sikh Formations, 7:2, 95-109

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 Sikh Formations, Vol. 7, No. 2, August 2011, pp. 95– 109

Pal Ahluwalia

AT HOME IN MOTION
Evolving Sikh Identities

This paper was first delivered as the keynote address at the ‘Transnational Punjabis in the
21st Century: Beginnings, Junctures and Responses’ Conference held in May 2011 at the
University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. It argues that
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there are two dimensions to evolving Sikh diasporic identities that are firmly anchored in
being at home whilst in motion. These two dimensions are rooted in culture and
dharam. The ways in which Sikh culture travels and evolves is illustrative of post-colonial
transformations and largely dependent on the host culture as well as the product of being
part of either an ‘old’ or ‘new’ diaspora – that is, being a diaspora that has been
forged in either the age of colonization or the age of globalization. While it remains to
be seen how a Sikh diasporic identity will be shaped in the future, it is apparent that dia-
sporic processes will be played out on a global stage as communications between Sikhs and
others throughout the world are further revolutionized.

A diaspora exists precisely because it remembers the ‘homeland’. Without this

memory . . . , these migrants and settlers would be simply people in a new
setting, into which they merge, bringing little or nothing to the new ‘home’,
accepting in various ways and forms the mores and attitudes that already exist in
their new country and society . . . The people of the diaspora, however, do not
merely settle in new countries, they recreate in their socio-economic, political
and cultural institutions a version of . . . that homeland that they remember.
(Reeves and Rai 2006, 18)

Introduction

It is important at the outset to consider the theme of this conference, ‘Transnational Pun-
jabis in the 21st Century: Beginnings, Junctures and Responses’. There is little doubt that
at this critical juncture there is an intensified transnational movement of people who chal-
lenge nation-state boundedness. Nevertheless, it is important to consider what makes
Punjabis transnational and in what way do they problematize nation-state boundedness?
Is it mere migration to several different countries? Is it the issue of remittances that
have fuelled the Punjab economy? Is it the condition of exile, dispersal, dislocation and
ISSN 1744-8727 (print)/ISSN 1744-8735 (online)/11/020095-15
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2011.603186
 96 SIKH FORMATIONS

displacement? Can they be considered a diasporic people? Does the idea of a Punjabi dia-
spora need to be more nuanced? Can we really speak of a Punjabi diaspora or is it more
accurate to speak about a Sikh diaspora? The dispersal of Punjabis and in particular Punjabi
Sikhs is by no means a recent phenomenon – they have been on the move for well over a
century. During the course of this address, I want to explore these questions in order to
ascertain what makes Punjabi transnationalism and the Sikh diaspora unique, whilst recog-
nizing that their identities are constantly evolving, continuously inflected by the cultures in
which they live.
I begin with two vignettes that will allow us to begin to understand not only the
phenomenon of Sikh diasporic subjects as being ‘at home in motion’ but also their
precariousness. First, on April 17, 2007 a plethora of emails and blogs captured the
precariousness and trepidation that many Asian Americans felt, as news reports about
the identity of the person who carried out the Virginia Tech shootings came to light.
Andrew Lam captured the anxiety of ethnic Americans who braced themselves for
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the after effects of the killings:

All across America, no doubt, non-Korean Asian-Americans are now heaving a sigh
of relief. ‘Asian,’ after all, was the four-alarm-fire word we saw throughout the day
after the shootings that took the lives of 33 people at Virginia Tech. The shooter was
‘Asian,’ the news reports said.
But who was this ‘Asian,’ exactly?
Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English major
from South Korea, all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A friend from a small
college town on the East Coast, who is Chinese, called to say: ‘Please, please let it
be some other Asian.
We’ll be in deep if it’s Chinese.’
In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college students were writing to
each other to speculate. One said, ‘I have a bad feeling. It might be Mi’t (Vietna-
mese slang for Vietnamese)’ . . .
The blogosphere buzzed with speculation on the identity of the killer.
The waiting game was as tense as waiting to find out who the next American Idol
might be . . .
A Muslim Pakistani friend, an engineer who refused to have his name mentioned,
emailed me to say, ‘If he’s a Paki and Muslim, we might all just pack up and go
home. I’m praying that he is some other Asian.’
Let it be some other Asian! This was the prayer among so many Asian-American
communities. And not just Asians . . .
To be a minority in America, even in the 21st century, is to be always on trial. An evil
act by one indicts the entire community. Whoever doubts this need only look at the
spike in hate crimes against Muslims and South Asian communities after 9/11.
(Lam 2007)

What Lam captured is the reality that diasporic populations, especially Muslims and
Sikhs, endure where security and the threat of terrorism have dominated the political
landscape since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 9/11, and the
bombings in Bali, Madrid, London and Edinburgh. In the immediate aftermath of
Osama Bin Laden’s death, these diasporic subjects are all the more concerned. Their
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 97

concerns have best been articulated in a blog by Valerie Kaur who writes that, ‘Even if I
wanted to celebrate, I’m too busy worrying. Today, many Sikh, Muslim, and Arab
American families, brace for violence, concerned that Americans will target those
who “look like” the Osama bin Laden we just destroyed’ (Kaur 2011).
Sikhs in the West, since 9/11, have vociferously argued that they are not Muslims.
Sikh identity in the West is defined as that which it is not, namely as non-Muslim, with
claims to a unique identity. This is all the more interesting given that in the West the
identity of Punjabis or Sikhs is almost always subsumed under some other forms of tax-
onomy – Oriental, Asian, Indian, East Indian, Afghan, Paki, Punjabi etc. As ethnic
groups demand recognition rather than being subsumed into some broader category
such as Asian, Indian or even East Indian, it is pertinent to understand the processes
of identity formation as resulting from enduring cultural similarities as opposed to alli-
ances that are forged to combat external threats both real and perceived.
For example, in the post-9/11 environment, in response to American bigots, there
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is an increasing talk of a South Asian identity because ‘Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis,

Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs all look the same – brown – many victims are deciding
they have a lot more in common than they had previously realized’ (Kurien 2003,
273). There is little doubt that in the face of racism and marginalization, ethnic
groups make strategic alliances just as they did in South Africa as part of the coalition
that fought apartheid. There, Indians, Coloureds and Africans (as classified by the
state) forged a political alliance of ‘blacks’ to fight the oppressive ‘white’ regime.
Let me turn then to my second vignette. In the immediate aftermath of the events of
9/11, almost everywhere in the West, Sikhs were subjected to ridicule, extreme forms of
racism and even killings largely because of the turban that they adorned (Ahmed 2000;
Puar and Rai 2004). In Adelaide, Australia a few weeks later, when I went to a cricket
match between South Africa and Australia, at the infamous Adelaide Oval, I was person-
ally confronted by the events of 9/11. I was with a group of academics; all of us were
attending a cultural studies conference at the university and decided to watch the last
session of the cricket. Whilst in the past, I had been chided about my turban (especially
when India was playing), I was amazed at the reaction as I entered the Oval and had to walk
past the outer where the famous score board is located. As I walked past, a chant ‘Osama,
Osama’ began in earnest with empty plastic glasses being thrown in the air. After having
lived in Australia for a very long time, I felt genuinely threatened, with a mob ready to
descend upon me as we made our way to the seating area. The other academics that I
was with looked on in embarrassment but no one said anything – I think we were all
relieved that we made it to our seats without any incident. A couple of weeks later, I
was in South Africa on a research trip and found myself in one of Cape Town’s more
Muslim areas. Here, as I walked through the streets, there was a different kind of
banter with people also shouting ‘Osama’ at me with some obvious warmth. The
turban was indeed a great signifier of identity – from the racial taunts of my childhood
in Canada, to Australia to South Africa; I as a Sikh was marked in a particular manner.

At home in motion

In the autobiographical story about his travels to Egypt, Amitav Ghosh writes about his
encounter with the inhabitants of an Egyptian village. Ghosh discovers that the members
 98 SIKH FORMATIONS

of the isolated village are just as travelled as any metropolitan jet-setters. He writes of
his meeting:

The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit
lounge. Many of them had worked and travelled in the sheikdoms of the Persian
Gulf, others had been to Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen
as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of
them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas.
(as cited in Clifford 1997, 1)

The rural village as an airport transit lounge is, as James Clifford has pointed out, the
quintessential figure for postmodernity, ‘the new world order of mobility, of rootless
histories’ (Clifford 1997, 1). But it would be wrong to think that this was a new
phenomenon, because the grandparents, ancestors and other relatives of these people
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were also very well-travelled. ‘The wanderlust of its founders had been ploughed
into the soil of the village’ says Ghosh, ‘it seemed to me sometimes that every man
in it was a traveler’ (cited in Clifford 1997, 2).
Although he was writing about Egypt, this account could just as well have been
based on any number of Punjabi villages. In every Punjabi village, one is sure to encoun-
ter countless people who have travelled or, at the very least, have been in contact with
someone who has travelled. As Surinder Jodhka has pointed out, one of the most impor-
tant secular values that Sikhs embody is mobility. Sikhs are found not only in virtually
every part of India but they ‘have also been a globally mobile community. They were
among the first from the subcontinent to explore the Western hemisphere’ (Jodhka
2009, 18), a remarkable fact given that they constitute a small minority of the Indian
population.
It would not be an exaggeration to point out that the very culture of the Punjabis is a
hybrid complex, made up of the various interactions between different phases of con-
quests and contacts, Mughal and subsequently British colonialism, as well as encounters
with peoples from virtually every part of the world. The waves of migration from the
Punjab to every corner of the globe have meant increasing awareness of the world as well
as the incorporation of different cultural practices that these people bring back with
them when they return, albeit even for a brief visit. It is these forces of transculturation
that have continuously constituted and reconstituted Punjabi culture.
The idea of a culture that makes itself at home in motion is one whereby the ‘prac-
tices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as
their simple transfer or extension’ (Clifford 1997, 3). But what interests me here is
not the making of a Punjabi culture in the Punjab, although I am aware that this will
always impact on diasporic identities. Rather, I am interested in understanding the con-
structions of transnational diasporic Sikh identities that are constantly evolving, the
manner in which they are constituted and reconstituted through practices of dispersal
and displacement. Consider for example, how the very notion of the diaspora is chan-
ging with patterns of settlement leading to the phenomenon of ‘twice migrants’ (Bhachu
1985) or, as in my own case, multiple migrations – a Sikh born in Kenya, whose parents
migrated to Canada, and who now chooses to live in Australia whilst having worked in
both the USA and the UK. A central aspect of this visible ethnic identity is the turban, by
which Sikhs are unmistakably identified, as well as the centrality of the Sikh dharam
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 99

(Mandair 2009). Indeed, central to these varied experiences is the Gurdwara – that
remains a remarkable constant in all locations. In each of these countries, Sikh commu-
nities and identities are forged and maintained always in a relationship not only to the
host culture but the community that congregates around the Gurdwara. We only
need to think about the fact that we are here to celebrate the centenary of a Gurdwara
whose founding figures even a hundred years considered it the vital organ of community
life.
In his Genealogies of religion, Talal Asad argues that the term religion today is sugges-
tive of a particular trend that seeks to universalize a Christian Protestant notion of reli-
gion. In this particular rendition of secularization, religion belongs to the private sphere
with people choosing to practice their religion in an individual way.1 On the contrary,
‘“politicized religions” threaten both reason and liberty and are diametrically opposed to
the liberal political worldview of modernity’ (Pratt 2003, 421). In Britain, for example,
Arvind Mandair points out that, South Asian immigrants and settlers often ‘reproduce
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their heritage traditions in a manner that does not necessarily conform to the ideological
demands of contemporary multiculturalism’2 (Mandair 2009, 2).
Cornelius Castoriadis argues that the social imaginary is ‘the creation of significa-
tions and the creation of the images and figures that support these significations’
(Gole 2002, 175). When we look at the modern social imaginary in which Sikhs are
located, the Sikh dharam is either encoded in the manner in which Asad describes reli-
gion or it is seen as being outside the realm of the liberal political worldview in which
religions should ideally operate. Sikhs themselves remain trapped within these two dia-
metrically opposed positions. Nevertheless, what is common is the manner in which the
social imaginary is deeply invested in the turban as a signifier of difference. I will return
to the turban as a signifier shortly.
In order to illustrate further the complexities of being at home in motion, let us
turn to another story about travelling. This is an extreme story of travelling, of a Hawaii-
an group, the Moe, who play Hawaiian guitar, sing and dance and represent perhaps the
most authentic version of early 20th century Hawaiian slide guitar and vocal styles.
What is significant about the Moes is that they spent over 56 years travelling and per-
forming their music all over the world without ever returning to Hawaii. James Clifford
asks, ‘how, for fifty-six years in transient, hybrid environments, did they preserve and
invent a sense of Hawaiian “home”? And how, currently is their music being recycled in
the continuing invention of Hawaiian authenticity?’ (Clifford 1997, 26) These questions
about the Moes are equally pertinent to the transnational Sikh diaspora.
Drawing on this experience, I want to question how diasporic Sikhs, who have been
travelling for such a long time (indeed for several generations), have maintained some-
thing of ‘home’ whilst in motion. Indeed, as I reflect upon my own identity, it is one
that has been constituted entirely in the diaspora.3 More importantly, I am interested
in delineating the centrality of the turban first, as an artefact of the Sikh dharam as well
as a cultural identity and, second as part of an aesthetic realm that constitutes certain
kinds of political subjectivity. As a diasporic Sikh, the debate about a ‘soft’ or ‘hardened’
Khalsa Sikh identity that can be traced to pre or post the Singh Sabha movement, at one
level appears, at least to me, as being hardly relevant. As a diasporic Sikh subject, there are
clear filiative positions one occupies in relation to the Punjab, but more important are the
affiliative positions one has with the Sikh dharam, just as a Catholic has with the Pope and
the Vatican. One’s world is not simply defined by a geographical space that happened to be
 100 SIKH FORMATIONS

the birthplace of the Sikhism. What become more relevant are the broad outlines and the
bare essences of forging Sikh identities irrespective of geographical location. The impor-
tance of such affiliative positions, especially from a transnational perspective can be seen,
for example, in the case of a turbaned Sikh in the UK in 1959 who was denied employ-
ment. In the diaspora, it is these affilative positions with the Sikh dharam that become par-
ticularly salient. It is equally important again to remember that a key to these processes is
the centrality of the Sikh Gurdwara, which becomes a galvanizing force for communities
that are generally struggling to anchor themselves in a different host culture.

The turban as a signifier of identity

In his book, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge, Bernard Cohn recounts the case of a
G.S. Sagar, a turbaned Sikh who had been denied employment as a bus conductor with
Manchester Transport on the grounds that he refused to wear the official uniform cap
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prescribed for employees. This case symbolized the ‘displacement of economic, political
and cultural issues, rooted in two hundred years of tangled relationships between Indians
and their British conquerors’ (Cohn 1996, 107). The irony of the Sagar case was, Cohn
argues, that it was the British who had played a key role in making the turban a part of
Sikh identity in the 19th century.
Cohn provides a brief, distorted and deeply flawed account of the Sikhs that
deserves a through debunking given that it is based on essentially Orientalist readings.4
However, as our focus here is on the centrality of a Sikh identity signified by the turban,
it is necessary to turn to his argument about how the British were instrumental in con-
structing a Sikh identity. Cohn argues that amongst 19th-century European and Indian
artists, two types of Sikh turbans were represented:

One was a tightly wrapped turban of plain cloth, which was either thin enough or
loose enough on the crown to accommodate the topknot of the Sikh’s hair. The
second type of turban worn by the Sikhs in the early nineteenth century was associated
with rulership. This turban was elaborately wrapped and had a jigha, a plume with a
jewel attached, and a sairpaich, a cluster of jewels in a gold or silver setting. These
ornamental devices were symbols of royalty, popularized in India by the Mughals.
(Cohn 1996, 109)

The decline of the Mughal empire witnessed the rise of the Sikh state under the leader-
ship of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, which eventually was conquered and annexed in 1849 by
the East India company. The British, impressed with the ‘martial’ qualities of the Sikhs,
found them to be ‘perfect recruits for the Indian army’ (Cohn 1996, 109). Over time,
the Sikhs became an integral part of the British army in India. By 1911, although the
Sikhs were only one percent of the population, they accounted for 20% of the army.
It was in the army, Cohn argues, that the Sikh turban was standardized and made distinct
from Hindu and Muslim turbans:

This turban, large and neatly wrapped to cover the whole head and ears, became the
visible badge of those the British had recruited. The Sikh turban and neatly trimmed
beard were to stand until 1947 as the outward sign of those qualities for which they
were recruited and trained: their wildness, controlled by the turban, and their
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 101

fierceness, translated into dogged courage and stolid ‘buffalo’-like willingness to

obey and follow their British officers.
(Cohn 1996, 110)

Cohn argues that the Sikh religious code did not prescribe the turban. Hence, the dis-
tinctive headdress of the Sikhs ‘was constructed out of the colonial context, in which the
British rulers sought to objectify qualities they thought appropriate to roles that various
groups in India were to play’ (Cohn 1996, 110). This standardized military turban
encouraged by the British over time became general amongst Sikhs. The turban, he
points out, is no longer a symbol of loyalty to a military code associated with the
British. Rather, it is now an important part ‘in the Sikh’s effort to maintain their
unique identity in the face of hostility and pressure to conform to “normal” or expected
dress in mass society’ (Cohn 1996, 111). This was clearly evident in the Sagar case as
well as the Sikhs’ battle to be exempt from motorcycle helmets and a plethora of cases
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that discriminated them on the basis of their unique headdress.

Whilst there is little doubt that processes of transculturation affect the culture of
both the colonizer and the colonized, the suggestion that the present turban was an
invention of the British colonial army is one that is highly problematic. Indeed, Cohn
provides little evidence for such an assertion. Furthermore, the idea of a neatly
trimmed beard as a standardized British army identity is one that is easily challenged
by a cursory glance at the images of Sikh regiments. What we have in Cohn is a con-
tinuation of a caricature of Sikh identity and Orientalist representations that have
been remarkably consistent. The assertion that the turban is represented as an
outward sign to control the twin characteristics of ‘wildness’ and ‘fierceness’ are
examples of the Orientalist notions of Sikhs as a ‘martial race’ that continue to be a
dominant part of the Western imagination.
It is clear that dress is one of the most basic ways in which we are able to place not
only ourselves but also others in the social world. As Goodrum has pointed out, it is
clear that clothes socialize the body into a cultural being:

This socio-cultural production and reproduction of the body contributes to a highly

politicized series of definitions through which our individual and collective identities
are mapped and ascribed meanings. Therefore the clothed body may be viewed as a
cultural product central not only to a sense of self, but also crucial in the creation of
conformity, a feeling of shared belonging and in fostering a national identity.
(Goodrum 2001, 87)

It is clear that ‘techniques of fashioning the body are a visible form of acculturation in
which identities are created, constructed and presented through the habitus of clothing’
(Goodrum 2001, 87). It is clothing that creates an ambiguous boundary that so often dis-
turbs us. Given that the racialized body is itself highly problematic, the Sikh turban that is
so much more than a mere extension of the body inextricably links the body to the social
world but more importantly separates it from that world. As Wilson points out, ‘dress is
the frontier between the self and the not self’ (Wilson 1985, 2 – 3).
Jasbir Puar has aptly captured the dilemmas that the turban presents for the Sikh
diasporic subject especially in the West. That the Sikh turban is akin to the veil is not
surprising because:
 102 SIKH FORMATIONS

The turban is not only imbued with the nationalist, religious and cultural symbolics
of the Other. The turban both reveals and hides the terrorist, a constant sliding
between that which can be disciplined and that which must be outlawed. Despite
the taxonomies of turbans, their specific regional and locational genealogies,
their placement in time and space, their singularity and their multiplicity, the
turban-as-monolith profoundly troubles and disturbs the American national imagin-
aries and their attendant notions of security.
(Puar 2008, 54)

Vitriolic attacks on minority communities, especially Muslims and Sikhs, in Western nations
including the targeting of the veil as a pre-modern artefact that has no place within a modern
democratic society, needs to be contextualized against the backdrop of the fear of home-
grown diasporic terrorism. Indeed, some of the most intense debates surrounding the
‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan were, and are based, on the need to save its women
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whose freedom had been severely curtailed by the Taliban with the veil as the symbol
that most confronted Westerners. There is little doubt that women were adversely affected
by that regime; however, to fetishize the veil seems particularly problematic without
knowing the myriad of reasons that women veil in the first place.
In recent times, several countries in Europe have fixated on the hijab, the nikab or
the burqa as symbols of oppression that are unacceptable within a Europe that promotes,
above all else, a form of democracy underpinned by equality, freedom and tolerance. In
Australia, the debate has intensified recently within State Parliaments, where private
members have introduced bills to ban the burqa. The banning of the veil on grounds
that it is ‘undemocratic’, ‘oppresses women’, is a ‘security threat’ – all the claims
that have been articulated with zeal to ban the veil reek of the centuries old discourse
of Orientalism. There is little doubt that similar assertions can and have been made
about the Sikh turban.
However, the negation of freedom or the curtailment of freedom, in order to then
secure another freedom, is most ironic, given the high value with which religious
freedom is held in the West. To post-colonial subjects, this should not be too surprising,
given that the colonial power always knew what was best for you – given the ‘white
man’s burden’ – and the civilizing mission. More importantly, curtailing freedom on
the pretext that it was essential to secure freedom was an effective tool of governance
that was perfected by colonial regimes. Nowhere is this captured better than in the fear
of the other, the need to keep out the ‘native’, to keep them in their place. In order to
maintain this separation, elaborate forms of security and policing were essential. In
Algeria, it was Albert Camus who wrote about:

. . . this intriguing and disquieting people, close and yet separate, that one brushed
past during the day; sometimes there was friendship or camaraderie but, when night
fell, they returned to their own unknown houses which we never visited, barricaded
also with their women whom we never saw or, if we saw them in the street, we did
not know who they were with veils covering half their faces and their beautifully soft
and sensual eyes above the white mask. Though fatalistic and exhausted, they were
so numerous in the neighbourhoods where they clustered that there hovered an
invisible threat which you could sniff in the air . . .
(cited in Aldrich 1996, 141)
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 103

Camus’ description captures the absurdity of the colonial project, the fear, the desire and
sense of alienation from the indigenous population. In France, the current obsession with
the veil and other religious artefacts including Sikh turbans is certainly not new and
harks to the days of the Algerian War. But it is one that continues to haunt the
French imagination. In 1990, for example, Julia Kristeva, a few months after the con-
troversy surrounding the wearing of headscarves, wrote in her Open Letter to Harlem Désir
that, in order to reinvigorate the principles of secularism in French schools, a particular
quote from Montesquieu be displayed in every classroom:

If I would know of something which would aid me, and which would be harmful to
my family, I would reject it from my soul. If I knew of something which would be
useful to my family and which would not be to my country, I would try to forget it.
If I knew of something which would be useful to my country, and which would be
harmful to Europe, or which would be useful to Europe and harmful to humanity, I
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would regard it as a crime.

(as cited in Moruzzi 1994, 665)

This quote highlights the centrality of Europe to the very project of the Enlightenment.
It is admirable that Montesquieu advocates that broader European interests subsume the
French national interests. However, the migration of large numbers of post-colonial sub-
jects with filiations not to Europe but with affiliations to France highlights the perception
that there is a Western tendency to ‘close ideological and national ranks in the face of
other . . . cultural identities’ (Moruzzi 1994, 665). It should not be surprising then, that
Muslims and Sikhs view the motives behind the banning of the burqa and turbans as
cynical moves aimed at negating their freedom in order to secure their freedom.

A diasporic Sikh identity

In order to delineate a transnational diasporic Sikh identity, It is necessary to differentiate

between the multifarious types of diasporic subjects, distinguishing between economic
migrants, political asylees, exiles, refugees and post-colonial émigrés who moved
(and continue to move in the 21st century) from a formerly colonized home-country
to post-colonial metropoles. This raises particular issues in terms of place and
‘home’ (Koshy 1994; Roy 1995; Brah 1996). It raises questions about the nature of dia-
sporic experience and diasporic identity (Hall 1990; Mann 1993; Farred 1996; Mishra
1996), as well as about the significance of gender and national factors (Koshy 1994;
Foster 1997; Bhatia 1998; Bracks 1998). A rich contemporary diasporic literature has
evolved around various immigrant communities: for example, the Irish (McCafferey
1976; Akenson 1993); the Asian (Pan 1990; Lim 1997; Ma 1998) and the South
Asian (Nelson 1992; Kachru 1996; Mishra 1996; Bhatia 1998). Although these
various diasporas endure particular challenges, it is important to recognize that there
is no monolithic Sikh diaspora. Rather, in relation to Sikhs we could also think about
two further types of diasporas – ‘old’ diaspora, born out of the age of colonial
capital, and ‘new’ diaspora, those who are part of the age of globalization. There is
little doubt that these two diasporas coexist and often the old and new come together
when it is politically efficacious.
 104 SIKH FORMATIONS

In an influential essay, Brian Axel has argued that ‘rather than conceiving of the
homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider
the diaspora as something that creates the homeland’ (Axel 2002, 426). This is an
important reconfiguration because now it is not merely the centrality of the myth of
return that defines the diaspora. On the contrary, he argues that it was the diasporic
activism for a Khalistan that created a utopian homeland and as ‘such, must be under-
stood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place’ (Axel 2002, 426). Jasbir
Puar has further clarified this idea of the homeland as a spatial as opposed to locational
phenomenon that gets determined through ‘multiple and contingent temporalities, as
much as it is memory of place, networks (of travel, communication, and informational
exchange), the myth of the imminent return to origin, and the progressive telos of origin
to diaspora’ (Puar 2008, 51). If we add to this the idea of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ diaspora
that I have outlined above, we can see how the diaspora of the age of colonialism can
come together with the age of globalization even though they often don’t have much
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in common. The idea of a monolithic Sikh diaspora can be challenged by the case of
the Sikh diaspora of Singapore, for example, that is largely constituted of the ‘old’ dia-
spora that is widely accepted by the state and have not been drawn into events such as the
tundung (Muslim headscarf) controversy of 2002. In Europe, however, both the ‘old’ and
‘new’ have coalesced around the issue of the banning of the turban in French schools. It
is nevertheless, ironic that in some parts of the diaspora, the wearing of the turban has
been interpreted to mean a certain orthodoxy or indeed fundamentalism that links these
Sikhs as being sympathetic to the Khalistan movement. These representations forget that
the origins of the turban are located within a tradition that sought liberation from
Mughal oppression and persecution (Nayar 2008, 30).
The making of a Sikh diasporic identity has much to do with the manner in which Sikhs
have overcome the obstacles placed on new migrants. The difficulties associated with
migration are all too familiar. In order to highlight these difficulties, it is important to
narrate events and experiences of how interactions with the wider community in specific
locales have reinforced Sikh identity. It is crucial to remember that all identity is relational.
Let us look at one such example of identity formation in New York. In her study of what it is
to be an Indian woman in contemporary USA, Monisha Das Gupta interviewed several
second-generation Indian women. For our purposes, let us turn to her account of an inter-
view that she had with a 30-year-old Sikh woman, Manpreet. Das Gupta tells us that Man-
preet grew up in Queens in the early 1970s, which was for her a very lonely experience. Her
school memories were marred by experiences of racial discrimination and marginalization.
Consequently, she had no points of contact in the environment outside her home during
those first years. Manpreet describes her experiences:

I have suffered to the extent that the kids would wait for me and my brother and
sister after school to beat us up. It was very bad because we were Sikhs and my
brother would have his hair [knotted up] on top of his head. They would wait
for him after school just to open his hair. They would ask him whether he was a
girl . . . My father used to pick us up from school because we’d be scared to go
home alone. It got so bad that we did not want to go to school. The teachers
knew about this. They couldn’t do anything or they did not want to do anything.
You know, I felt prejudice from everywhere.
(Das Gupta 1997, 576)
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 105

The estrangement felt by Manpreet led her to seeking out Indians in an effort to link her
home-life with the outside world. As more Indians migrated to the USA, Manpreet
recalls how relieved she was to have classmates from South Asia:

You had to go to the next town [in the early 1970s] to meet an Indian. I felt very
happy if I ran across an Indian on the block. You’d make a friend right away. Now of
course you see them all over the place. Some years later [referring to the late sev-
enties] more Indians started coming. The gurdwara became a place to meet friends.
There were more Indians in school. We had places to go where we didn’t have to be
with Americans. Now you had another Indian friend to be with. In Junior high
school when we would sit in the cafeteria there would be Indians, Bangladeshis,
Pakistanis all around you.
(Das Gupta 1997, 577)
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What is significant about this example is that it highlights the manner in which cultural
identity is forged through travelling. In New York what brought people together was a
certain recognition of a shared culture, Sikh, Punjabi or Indian. But above all else, what
we can see in this example is the centrality of the Gurdwara.
There is little doubt that in many places such experiences led to Sikhs abandoning
the turban in order to conform into ‘normal’ dress practices of mainstream society. On
the other hand, as in my case, growing up in Saskatoon, Canada, where such circum-
stances prevailed on a daily basis, the desire to preserve the turban became an inescap-
able part of my identity. A dogged determination to maintain my ‘unique’ identity in the
face of a hostile environment was constitutive of a certain political subjectivity that
entailed fundamentally a politics of resistance. The turban is, at one level, a simple
piece of clothing but it entails and signals certain kinds of political subjectivity and
forms of often-problematic citizenship. Increasingly, after 9/11, the turban is rep-
resented as a signifying tradition and orthodoxy and has been met with particular
forms of policing. It is in this context, that Sikhs, especially in the USA, have
endured the full wrath of the security apparatus of the state.
As discourses of multiculturalism, recognition, tolerance and inclusivity come into
play in nations such as Canada, a different type of political subjectivity is being forged.
Here, the inclusion of the case of Baltej Dhillon, a Sikh who sought to become a member
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has been included in the celebrated,
Canada: A people’s history, as a parable of accommodation, tolerance and the acceptance
of difference. Dhillon is represented as a successful ‘new Canadian’ who is adamant
about retaining his turban as part of his uniform for the RCMP. He is quoted as
saying ‘What it is to be Canadian, I think, ultimately becomes what it is to be a
citizen on this earth’. His story is read as an ‘inspiring story, selected as a demonstration
of the capacity of the nation state to accommodate the aspirations of all groups in Cana-
dian society’ (Dick 2004, 105). It might well appear that Sikhs have come a considerable
way to gain the kind of recognition that Baltej Dhillon celebrates as ‘a citizen of the
earth’ but the continuous policing and practices of normalization are far too evident.
I want to argue, however, that there is something significant that has occurred to
heighten Sikh identity in the diaspora particularly in the last three decades. What has
given rise to a prominent new Sikh identity globally are a series of events ‘that have
scarred the memories of Punjabi Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims alike, most of whom
 106 SIKH FORMATIONS

can attest to the heterological nature of Punjabi identity’ (Mandair 2009, 19). These
events can be recalled easily: the 1947 partition, a Punjabi exodus in the 1960s to
the UK, USA and Canada, the 1976 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan and
the events in Punjab in 1984.
In particular, it was the storming of the Golden Temple in 1984 and events there
subsequently that have impacted upon a contemporary diasporic Sikh identity –
where the ‘old’ and ‘new’ diaspora have coalesced. This sense of heightened identity
is by no means a new phenomenon. It certainly has occurred in the past. What made
this event so important and distinctive and what allowed it to capture the Sikh imagin-
ation, is globalization and the technological advances in the media that have the capacity
to bring isolated events from around the world into our homes almost instantly. It is
globalization and the communications revolution that reveals not only the full material
horror of the events in Rwanda, Bosnia, Beijing or Amritsar but also fuels long-distance
nationalisms, which give rise to a renewed sense of a common identity. It is globalization
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that has had a massive impact on the forging of a different diasporic Sikh identity from
the late 20th century onwards (Appadurai 1996).
Although culture travels, evolves and becomes hybridized, it is ‘religion’ that is the
constitutive element of a diasporic Sikh identity forged out of a sense of displacement
since the late 20th century. There are core values in which all Sikhs believe and there
is a remarkable consistency in the very manner in which the religion is practised in
Gurdwaras (temples) throughout the world. The attack on the Golden Temple, in
1984, the assassination of the Indian Prime-Minister, Indira Ghandi, and the subsequent
Delhi pogroms, and the continuing albeit somewhat muted Khalistan movement have
had the general impact of stimulating Sikh political activity as well as intensifying (if
not to some degree unifying) Sikh identity.
A cost of this has been the fragmenting of Indian identity of the sort that Das Gupta
outlined with communal identification becoming pronounced. Why is that these events
provoked such passion in the diaspora? Why have these events had such a profound influ-
ence on the Sikh imagination? Is it merely the scale and horror of the events that saw
many thousands of Sikhs killed in the Delhi pogroms and the ostracization of Sikh
widows and the displaced community? Surely the human costs during Partition were
far greater. It is, I want to suggest, the impact of globalization and the communications
revolution that instantly brought the full horror and terror of these events into our lives
and within the sanctuary of our homes (Sinclair and Cunningham 2000). It seemed that
there was no escape from them. The terror and horror of seeing the holiest seat of the
Sikhs so blatantly violated and the pain and anguish of the victims of the 1984 Delhi
pogroms remains etched firmly in the memory of the Sikh diasporic imagination.

Conclusion

There are two dimensions to evolving Sikh diasporic identities that are firmly anchored
in being at home whilst in motion. These two dimensions are rooted in culture and
dharam. The ways in which Sikh culture travels and evolves is illustrative of post-colonial
transformations and largely dependent on the host culture as well as the product of being
part of either and ‘old’ or ‘new’ diaspora – that is, being a diaspora that has been forged
in either the age of colonization or the age of globalization.
 AT HOME IN MOTION: EVOLVING SIKH IDENTITIES 107

Abdul JanMohamed makes an important differentiation between a ‘specular’ border

intellectual and a ‘syncretic’ one that is useful in thinking through this problematic. Both
types of intellectuals are located in more than one culture but the syncretic intellectual is
generally more ‘at home’ in both cultures than his or her specular counterpart as a result
of being able to combine the two cultures and articulate new syncretic experiences. The
specular border intellectual, on the other hand, is either unwilling or unable to be at
home in either culture. The specular intellectual questions both cultures and ‘utilizes
his or her interstitial cultural space as a vantage point from which to define, implicitly
or explicitly, other, utopian possibilities of group formation’ (JanMohamed 1992, 97).
While it remains to be seen how a Sikh diasporic identity will be shaped in the future,
one thing is clear, this process will be played out on a global stage as communication
between Sikhs and others throughout the world is further revolutionized.
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Notes
1 On secularization, see Taylor (2010).
2 It is important to take note of Mandair’s astute observation: ‘. . . unlike Europe’s
passage to modernity, which entailed a certain death or privatization of religion,
India’s passage to modernity happened through its being reawakened to the notion
that it had once had religion, that it had forgotten its original religion(s), but that
this religion could be recovered through the colonizer’s benign intervention, in
order to progress toward a form of modern national self-governance’ (Mandair
2009, 5).
3 It is important to note that the very notion of diaspora requires clarification. The
assumption that a homogenous diaspora exists needs to be questioned.
4 It is not surprising that Cohn relies almost exclusively on two Western sources,
(Macauliffe 1909; Macleod 1967), choosing to ignore a rich and diverse literature
on Sikh history and religion based on far more nuanced research.

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Pal Ahluwalia. Address: Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, University of
South Australia, St. Bernards Rd., Magill, SA 5072, Australia [email: Pal.Ahluwalia@
unisa.edu.au]