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8 Making Home Abroad Sikhs in the United States

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8 Making Home Abroad Sikhs in the United States GURINDER SINGH MANN 8 Making Home Abroad Sikhs in the United States Beginning with the first wave of Sikh migration to the United States in 1900, the Sikh tradition has become part of the American religious landscape. While Sikh men, women, and children have adapted their tradi- tions to this new land, American society has only slowly come to accept their presence. The most recent and most explicit recognition of the Sikh commu- nity manifests in the respects paid to Sikhs by President George W. Bush on the birth anniversary of Guru N anak (1469-1539), the founder of the commu- nity, on N ovember/, 2003,' Unfortunately, the press concerning Sikh beliefs and practices has not always been positive. In light of the attacks of September n, 2001, and given the similarities in appearance between Sikh males who mark their faith with distinctive dress (turbans and beards) and al-Qaeda leaders, tbe U.S. media took pains to explain why Sikhs look the way they do and thereby to protect them from bigotry and hatred. But happier stories have also been heard, including a greater acceptance of religious diversity, as evidenced by a 2003 New York Times editorial endorsement of "the scarf of a Muslim woman, the skullcap of an observant Jew and the turban of a Sikh" as exercises in "free- dom of conscience."' This chapter begins with a brief introduction to basic Sikh religious beliefs and history. It then traces Sikh immigration to the United States, analyzes the current composition of the Sikh community, a n d examines Sikh negotia- tions with American culture by focusing on the establishment in the United States of a key Sikh institution, the ,gurdu;ara (house of the guru, or Sikh temple). A brief concluding section argues that the Sikh community's inter- actions with American society, both historically and currently, have not only introduced a new faith to American society but also helped the evolution of the Sikh tradition. This creative interaction has forged a tradition of Sikh- ism that may have lasting implications for the future of the Sikh c o m m u n i t y 160 both in its homeland in the Punjab in northwest India and in other areas around the globe. There are currently some 23 million Sikhs—17 million in the Punjab, 4 million in other parts of south Asia, and 2 million in southeast Asia, east Africa, Europe, and North America.≥ Their history starts with Guru Nanak, who founded the community in the central Punjab in the 1520s. His writings emphasize the unity of God (Vahiguru, the Great Sovereign), who runs the world with the twin principles of justice and grace. Guru Nanak believed in a life oriented around the values of personal purity, charity, hard work, service, and social and gender equality. Liberation, understood as attaining a place of honor in the divine court, is presented as a collective responsibility. The heart of Sikh piety comprises congregational prayer in which men, women, and children gather together and sing praises (kirtan) of the divine. After Guru Nanak’s death, a line of nine continuous successors provided leadership. As the fledgling group expanded and its influence grew in the central Punjab, problems with the ruling Mughal administration arose. Guru Arjan (1581–1606) and Guru Tegh Bahadur (1666–75), the fifth and the ninth Sikh gurus, respectively, were executed as political threats. With the o≈ce of the personal guru under constant attack, Guru Gobind Singh (1675–1708), the tenth guru, declared in the late 1690s the Sikh community to be the Khalsa (the pure). Sikhs now understood themselves to be a special people account- able only to God. In addition to values promulgated in early Sikh history, the use by men of external symbols such as kes (unshorn hair), kanga (comb), kirpan (sword), karha (steel bracelet used to protect the wrist), and kaccha (breeches worn by warriors) became the markers of loyalty to the Khalsa. While the unshorn hair and comb were rooted in Sikh belief in keeping the body in its pristine form, the sword, steel bracelet, and breeches represented Sikh readiness to confront injustice. Guru Gobind Singh’s declaration of the Khalsa was thus both re- ligious and strategic, as it ultimately prepared the way for the discontinuation of the personal authority of the living guru, provided the community with a visible identity, and established a well-defined political agenda of establishing Sikh sovereignty, the Khalsa Raj, by supplanting the unjust Mughal Empire. Guru Gobind Singh also elevated the Sikh scriptural text to the status of the Guru Granth (the guru in book form). As the repository of revelation, the Guru Granth serves as the ultimate source of Sikh belief and practice. Punjabi, the language of the text, and Gurmukhi, its script, are deemed sa- cred, and the Sikh community as a whole, collectively referred to as the Guru Making Home Abroad 161 Panth, has the authority to interpret its text. The tradition thus does not require ritual specialists to provide religious instruction; instead, a handful of Sikhs can establish and run a congregation. This development allows Sikhs to reconstitute authority wherever the Guru Granth is present, making the tradi- tion transportable. Sikhs believe in divine immanence, so they consider the whole world to be sacred. But the gurdwara and other places of worship (dharmsals) have long been regarded as particularly sacred. When the Guru Granth replaced the personal guru, its text was displayed in all places of worship, turning them into gurdwaras. The Darbar Sahib (honorable court) in the town of Amritsar, India, emerged as the center of Sikh sacred geography and the focal point of Sikh pilgrimage. Sikh insistence on the fundamental purity of creation and individuals on the one hand and charity, service, and philanthropy on the other manifested in the practice of langar (sharing of food), an institution that the Sikhs borrowed from the Sufis and turned into a key gurdwara and community activity.∂ Finally, the Nishan Sahib, a triangular sa√ron flag, marked the sovereignty of the gurdwara. While the traditional gurdwara building is an architectural design of domes, arches, and open space, its three essential elements—the Guru Granth, the langar, and the Nishan Sahib—are easily transported to new contexts. The Sikhs’ belief in the sacrality of all creation has had major ramifications for Sikh migration outside the Punjab.∑ In fact, the tendency to emigrate in search of new opportunities has been pronounced since the inception of the Sikh community. Apart from the travels of the Sikh gurus, Sikh traders began to move to major centers of commerce in south and central Asia toward the end of the sixteenth century. A larger wave of emigration began with the British arrival in the Punjab in the mid–nineteenth century. During this pe- riod, Sikhs joined the British Army in large numbers and traveled to the far reaches of the British Empire. Throughout the twentieth century the Sikhs had opportunities for emigration, and at present they constitute the largest single group to have moved out of the subcontinent. After Guru Gobind Singh’s declaration of the community as the Khalsa, the Sikh tradition became largely nonproselytizing, and Sikh numbers conse- quently have remained small. At the peak of Sikh political power in the Punjab during the early nineteenth century, they numbered less than 5 percent of a local population that comprised Muslims (48 percent), Hindus (45 percent), and a much smaller group of Jains. Yet this historical experience as a minority group among much larger religious communities has provided the Sikhs with 162 gurinder singh mann survival techniques and has helped shape their expectations in the new lands and societies to which they later migrated. Finally, the Sikh experience of working closely with the British (1849–1947) resulted in their introduction to print culture and western systems of admin- istration, education, and justice. The Sikhs were open to incorporating mod- ern ideas while maintaining their religious heritage. The Guru Granth was first printed in 1865, and the Khalsa College, intended to prepare Sikh stu- dents in the sciences and English literature while keeping them immersed in Sikh heritage, was established in 1892. In the early 1920s, the Sikhs worked with the British to create the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (Supreme Gurdwara Management Committee), an elected body in which both Sikh men and women voted and whose primary responsibility was managing historic gurdwaras. The Sikhs were thus already exposed to modern western institutions before their arrival in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The earliest reference to the landing of the Sikhs on the West Coast appears in the April 6, 1899, San Francisco Chronicle. E√ectively navigating their way through racial and legal discrimination (the Alien Land Law of 1913, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, and the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924), Sikhs continued to immigrate to the United States, and their numbers reached around seven thousand by the 1920s. The early community was overwhelm- ingly male and came by and large from the rural Punjab. Amazed by Califor- nia’s open and fertile land, they became farmers and worked hard to establish themselves quickly. A 1920 report listed eighty-five thousand acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and thirty thousand acres in the Imperial Valley under Sikhs’ control.∏ This first phase of settlement was followed by a 1924 U.S. government ban on Asian immigration, which resulted in a significant decrease in the immi- grant Sikh community. While some Sikhs stayed on and found ways around legal restrictions on landowning, some chose to go back to the Punjab, and by the mid-1940s only about 1,500 Sikhs remained in the United States.
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