Sikhism in the United States of America Gurinder Singh Mann
1 Sikhism in the United States of America Gurinder Singh Mann The history of the Sikhs is primarily associated with the Punjab, a region in northwest India they call their homeland (Grewal 1990). Situated among the dominant communities of the Hindus and Muslims, the Sikhs have, historically, remained a minority even within the Punjab. Beginning in the seventeenth century, groups of Sikh traders moved into other parts of the subcontinent and established small communities in far-off cities; the number and size of these communities outside the Punjab remained rather small. The annexation of the Punjab by the British in 1849 opened doors for the Sikhs to migrate to distant countries as members of the imperial working force. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, we see the emergence of small but distinct Sikh communities in East Africa and Southeast Asia (Barrier and Dusenbery 1989). At the turn of the twentieth century, the Sikhs expanded their range of travel further and began to arrive in North America. They constituted a large majority of what Raymond Williams in his introduction to this section calls "a thriving farming community in California." Despite great personal and legal hardships in the mid-twentieth century, the Sikhs persisted in their efforts to settle in the new land and today, they constitute a vibrant community of over 200,000 spread throughout the United States, with distinct concentrations in California, Chicago, Michigan, and the greater New York and Washington D. C. areas. La Brack (1988) made a pioneering study of the history of the Sikhs in the United States.
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