Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity

Jaspal Kaur Singh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138281493
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000060263
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh women who are either virtually erased from narratives, bodily eliminated through honor killings, or constructed and represented as invisible. It looks at the role of violence during critical junctures in Sikh history, including the Mughal rule, the British colonial period, the Partition of India, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, and the terror of 9/11 in the United States. The author analyzes how violence reconstitutes gender roles and sexuality within various cultural and national spaces in India and the diaspora. She also highlights questions related to women's agency and their negotiation of traumatic memories for empowering identities.

The book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of postcolonial English literature, contemporary Indian literature, Sikh studies, diaspora studies, global studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, history, sociology, media and films studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies.

1

Introduction

Part One: Intersections of Sanctioned Historiography and Personal Stories in the Understanding of Sikh Gendered Identity

The Public and the Private

Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity examines violence as constitutive of Sikh identity, analyzing public or dominant constructions and representations as well as private or personal narratives of Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture from a critical postcolonial feminist perspective. Turbaned male Sikhs have been targets of violence since the early days of Sikhism’s inception as a separate religious community in India: from the Mughal period to British colonization, through two World Wars and the Partition of India, to the 1984 anti-Sikh Massacre and the ensuing 1990s Sikh killings in the postcolonial Indian nation-state.¹ After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the 2005 bomb blasts in the UK, and in the ongoing Global War on Terror, Sikhs have become targets of hate crimes and violence in the diaspora due to their external appearance. How, then, do Sikhs construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? As a postcolonial feminist critic and comparative literature scholar, I excavate Indian literature and culture to locate empowering narratives in interstitial spaces, seeking to understand the role of violence in the construction of Sikh gendered identity and the subsequent feminization (through binary discourse where Sikhs are constructed and represented as hypermasculine) of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, variously constructed as brave lions, brutal warriors, terrorists, and “billis” (cats or pussies; Brian Keith Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 133) and the often violent and aggressive, but then silenced Sikh women, almost erased from narratives or bodily eliminated through honor killings and then constructed and represented in literature as passive or maternal, or rendered invisible.

I begin this examination of marginalized and minoritized literature in India and in the diaspora with a number of questions: What role did violence play in the construction of Sikh identity during the Mughal period in India? When were the Sikhs considered a “martial race” and when did they become known as the “Lions of India”? How did violence transform Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims from neighbors into warring communities during the Partition of India? What role does violence play for diasporic Sikhs, turbaned males, and invisible and silenced females in the aftermath of the 9/11 violence, and the ensuing and ongoing Global War on Terror?

In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, commenting on Oscar Wilde’s “enigmatic claim that ‘Most people are other people … Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passion a quotation’” (xv), argues that while “identity can be a source of pride and joy … [it] can also kill—and kill with abandon” (1). He remembers the communal violence of 1947 where Sikhs and Hindus clashed with Muslims in the name of the newly created nations, Pakistan and India. According to Sen, when we identify with one or the other group, we become defined by a “fostered,” “singular,” or “solitary” identity that transforms us “into a powerful weapon to brutalize another,” such that “sectarian hatred can spread like wildfire” (xv). Over 1 million people were killed during the Partition violence, and almost 10 million were dislocated from their ancestral homes and became refugees. We abandon any empathic kindness we might have for each other, and the “result,” claims Sen, “can be homespun elemental violence, or globally artful violence and terrorism” (xv). As we can see from the Global War on Terror, communities and nations are being splintered and brutalized. The “powerful weapons” of brutalization, states Sen, are constructed by “commanders of persecution and carnage” and “artisans of terror,” who are then led to kill “others on behalf of their ‘own people’” (2). While in reality a human being has “plural affiliations,” notes Sen, they can be transformed “through the advocacy of a unique identity for a violent purpose … through selective emphasis and incitement” (175). Through distortions, groups are targeted as having only certain qualities in their identities and then are targeted for violence (7). For example, British colonialism, through its “Divide and Rule” policy, constructed the turbaned Sikhs as ferocious warriors, ignoring their multifaceted religious and cultural attributes. Sikhs and Muslims then clashed and slaughtered each other during the Partition melee. Seen as violent beings, Sikh men, with their unique turbans and unshorn long hair and beards, themselves become targets of violence during different historical moments, while women’s bodies, used to wage various wars upon, become objectified, their bodies reinscribed for nationalism or for communalism.

Examining Samuel Huntington’s thesis of civilizational clashes that he defines as “conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines,” Sen critiques the theory that contrasts “‘Western civilization’ with ‘Islamic civilization,’ ‘Hindu civilization,’ ‘Buddhist civilization,’ and so on … [which is then] incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of one dominant and hardened divisiveness” (original emphasis 10). Can the “relations between different human beings … be seen,” asks Sen, “without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations” (original emphasis 11)? He castigates the “reductionist view” and “foggy perception of world history which overlooks … the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories … and the reach and influences of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations” (original emphasis 11). Sikhs were formed by centuries of social and religious syncretism at the crossroads of various cultural influences in Punjab, yet if we only see from the “clash of civilizations” perspective, hybrid and syncretic cultural traditions of Sikhs are reduced or fetishized, leading to communal and gender violence.

This study in part examines “cross-border interactions” and “shared human interests” along with violent, including gendered, clashes within the Sikh community and with other communities during the Mughal period, during British colonialism, and in the postcolonial period, while also investigating “artisans of terror” who foment violence by the “imposition of singular and belligerent identity” and “[kill] others on behalf of their ‘own people’” (Sen 2). Through a postcolonial feminist critical framework, I analyze Sikh syncretic identity construction and reconstruction in culture and literature to bring to light the often-violent political and social forces at work in singular identity formation and representation, and their impact on Sikh gendered identity formation.

R.S. Sugirtharajah claims that postcolonial analysis bears in mind “postcolonial circumstances such as hybridity, fragmentation, deterritorialization, and hyphenated, double, and multiple identities” as well as “subaltern and feminine elements embedded in the texts” (Sugirtharajah 537). He adds that postcolonial reading “thrives on inclusiveness,” which probes “injustices, [and]produces new knowledge which problematizes well-entrenched positions and enhances the lives of the marginalized” (538). Postcolonial reading examines the contexts of the texts and provides an intersectional critique. A postcolonial reading, argues Sugirtharajah, concerns itself with “liberation hermeneutics;” yet “liberation hermeneutics” on its own “fails to appreciate the historical or political ramifications” of reading certain texts at “face value,” for it neglects to take into account those who are marginalized, displaced, and uprooted in their “own lands and own countries” (539). For example, Sikhs are minoritized and marginalized in India and in the diaspora through violence, as the 1984 state-sponsored massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards shows. (Gandhi was assassinated for her attacks on the Sikhs’ holiest site, the Harmandir Sahib—the Golden Temple—which she ordered to smoke out Sikh “terrorists” hiding in the temple; I discuss the 1984 Sikh Massacre in more detail in Chapter 1).

Postcolonialism thus argues for the “idea of liberation and its praxis [which] must come from the collective unconsciousness of the people. It sees liberation not as something hidden or latent in the text, but rather as born of public consensus created in democratic dialogue between text and context” (Sugirtharajah 539). Repressed stories of violence from the collective unconsciousness, once made narratable by the working through of repression and trauma, through representation, and through sharing, help in creating empowering narratives and identities. In analyzing Sikh trauma narratives through a postcolonial lens, I will locate marginal texts written by Sikhs, including private narratives of trauma, to see how the traumatized Sikh subjects are able or unable to work towards social healing. If they are unable to work through the trauma of various violent periods in history, violence becomes cyclical or reappears through the “repetition compulsion” (Fletcher 238) as, for example, communal violence, or gendered and domestic abuse.

Sikh women, along with Sikh men, faced violence and participated in acts of resistant violence during the aforementioned historical periods, but women are simply constructed as self-sacrificial and excluded from dominant postcolonial Indian, and particularly Sikh, literary narratives and representations, as my examination of literary texts will show, thereby disallowing mourning and healing, for “some realties,” as Veena Das argues, “need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended” (Das 39). If they are not narrated or fictionalized and do not become part of the dominant narratives, traumatic experiences are disavowed, thereby disallowing witnessing to occur. Without a witness, healing is difficult, if not impossible. What role does traumatic memory play in the retelling of stories of violence that individuals and communities face within a nation-state and the diaspora, particularly in how such stories and memories shape identity formation? What language does the traumatized subject use to attempt narration? How does the traumatized subject remember and narrate the story of violence, and for what purposes? Can the hearing or viewing subject(s), whether from one’s own community or from another, bear witness to the traumatized, and do such acts promote healing? Where are the fragmented narratives located and excavated by scholars who bear witness to the traumatized gendered subjects? According to Mieke Bal et al., “Art—and other cultural artifacts such as photographs and published texts of all kinds—can mediate between the parties to the traumatizing scene and between these and the reader or viewer” (x). Readers, viewers, or listeners then “perform an act of memory that is potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity in recognizing the traumatized party’s predicament (x). Examining violence, trauma, memory, and representation in Bhai Vir Singh’s 1898 novella Sundri, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s 1999 novel What the Body Remembers, Bhisham Sahni’s 1974 novel Tamas, Vic Sarin’s 2007 film Partition, Manoj Punj’s 1999 film Shaheed-E-Mohabbat Boota Singh, Anil Sharma’s 2001 film Gadar, Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel Train to Pakistan, Amrita Pritam’s 1950 novel Pinjar: The Skeleton, Gulzar’s 1996 film Maachis (Matches), Anurag Singh’s 2014 film Punjab 1984, Ammtoje Mann’s 2003 film Hawayein, Manoj Punj’s 2004 film Des Hoyaa Pardes, Shonali Bose’s 2004 novel Amu, Liam Delzell’s 2004 documentary Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singh’s 2012 short film Taaj, Sarab Singh Neelam’s 2008 film Ocean of Pearls, and poems of Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa (2016), Sharapal Ruprai (2014), and Rupi Kaur (2015 and 2017), I locate various historical moments in Indian literature and film where Sikhs, faced with violence, are feminized and represented as having a “unique” (Sen) identity, either as the Lions of Punjab, ferocious warriors, “billis,” or pussies (Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 133), and as racial or gender deviants; however, I also show Sikhs’ attempts at self-representations as complex and hybrid beings. In analyzing the texts, I arrive at a unique understanding of violence and trauma and the Sikh woman’s position vis-à-vis the Sikh man within the Indian nation-state and the diaspora by locating the texts within the framework of Sikh cultural and political history.

In order to define and locate Sikh women in history and literature, it is important to include private narratives, as Jill Didur suggests; for example, dominant narratives of the 1947 Partition of India into two modern nation-states mostly focus on documentary historical forms; they neglect, as Didur claims, “the interpretive function of reading and writing about the partition, the discursive construction of subjectivity, agency, nationalism, and history that are involved in its narrativization” (5). The violence that ensued during the Partition of India and the creation of a majority Muslim nation-state implicated not only Hindus and Muslims, but also Sikhs, who came to occupy a troubling interstitial space in colonial and postcolonial narrative and national memory. Communalism and sectarian violence following the Partition are documented in most Partition narratives, while the gendered nature of the violence is co-opted in the “totalizing logic of bourgeois nationalism” where a more “polyphonic reading of national identity” is not considered (5). “To be more specific,” argues Didur,

Reading and writing about literature representing women’s lives involves straddling both these spheres, making visible the binary construction of the public and private implicated in nationalist discourse, patriarchal power relations, and the way in which women’s bodies were singled out as privileged sites of violence at the time of partition.

(Didur 7)

While national accounts of women (as a group) being abducted, violated, and raped during the Partition received textual representation, individual stories of violence and trauma were not immediately available. Thus, as Didur posits, “a gendered understanding of the partition necessitates a shift in the scholar’s attention from the public to the private, from the high political story to the local, everyday account” (7). Such an approach unsettles a monolithic account (10) and allows for a polyphonic and more inclusive narrative to emerge. How does national historiography differ from everyday ordinary accounts?

According to Urvashi Butalia,

How families were divided, how friendship endured across borders, how people coped with the trauma, how they rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experiences of dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns and villages they settle in … find little reflection in written history.

(Butalia 9)

Since we read only dominant “textbook formulations” or stereotypical accounts of the violence of Partition (Veena Das 2), traumatic events of the Partition can only be really known through the way they

have been handed down to us: through fiction, memoirs, testimonials, through memories, individual and collective, through the communalism it unleashed and, only as one of these aspects, through the history it produced [and this history] lives on in family histories … where tales of the horror and brutality, the friendship and sharing, are told and retold between communities, families and individuals.

(Butalia 10)

Everyday ordinary stories and narratives must become part of the Grand National narrative. In this way, patriarchal and national narratives of male violence will be complicated by stories of female valor or agency, as opposed to seeing or representing women’s bodies merely as sites of terror and violence.

As Veena Das notes, and as my experiences affirm, “The memories of Partition were … not in the nature of something gone underground, repressed, hidden away, that would have to be excavated. In a way, these memories were very much on the surface” (Das 11). As my grandmother and my mother’s Partition narratives were always fragmented, I had to learn to listen and hear their stories, spoken with “an inner language” (11), and ask different and difficult questions in my work about gendered violence and its representation in dominant historiography and in published and well-known national literature.

Throughout my young and adult life, my parents, who experienced the trauma of Partition, narrated fragmented tales of violence and horror, of lost aunts and dead girls, of ghost trains and riots, and of lost homes and abandoned country. Marianne Hirsch and Valeria Smith argue, “What we know about the past, and thus our understanding of the present, is shaped by the voices that speak to us out of history: relative degrees of power and powerlessness, privilege and disenfranchisement, determine the spaces where witnesses and testimony may be heard or ignored” (12). Indeed, hearing the stories of my parents shaped my understanding of Sikh history and Sikh gendered identity; thus, this book contextualizes published fictional accounts with my personal narrative and re-remembered stories in order to analyze Sikh trauma narratives for a “polyphonic reading” (Didur 5).

How are narratives of violence—perpetrated by or against women during nationalist movements and the Partition—rendered in the public discourse? And for what purposes? “The signature of the Partition in both the literary and popular imagination,” claims Das, “has been the violation of women, mass rapes and mass abduction, their expulsion from homes, the imperative to court heroic deaths” (13) with “its associated imagery of social disorder as sexual disorder” (21). These stories become part of the national discourse, particularly as represented and discussed through various “government ordinances (such as the Abducted Persons [Recovery and Restoration] Act of 1949, which remained in force until October 31, 1951),” allowing the state to establish “a social contract between “men charged with keeping male violence against women in abeyance” (original emphasis 21). The “male body was made to stand for the whole community” (13) and thus the “castration (both literal and figurative)” of the male body was “always elided” (13). Male violence, castration, and rape are often left out of dominant nationalist narratives. Here, the nation uses violated female bodies and gendered narratives in dominant ideology to reconstitute the memory of the dismembered and brutalized ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mughal India and Colonialism: Revising History, Gender Identity, and Violence in Bhai Veer Singh’s Sundri
• 3. Communal and Gender Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers
• 4. Gendered Violence and Partition Memory in Postcolonial Novels and Films
• 5. Partition Narratives and Sikh Gendered Identity Construction: Memory of Violence in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan
• 6. Gender and Memories of Trauma in Amrita Pritam’s 1950 Novella Pinjar and Poetry
• 7. Violence, State Terror, and Gendered Sikh Identity: The Aftermath of Operation Blue Star in Gulzar’s 1996 Hindi film Maachis and Anurag Singh’s 2013 Punjabi film Punjab 1984
• 8. Traumatized Sikh Male and Female Subjects: Representations of Trauma and Memory in Amitoj Mann’s 2003 Punjabi Film Hawayein
• 9. (En)Gendering Nations in Manoj Punj’s 2004 Punjabi Film Des Hoyaa Prades: When One’s Nation Becomes a Foreign Territory
• 10. Perpetrator Nation and the Cultural Memorialization of Sikh Trauma in Shonali Bose’s Novel Amu (2004)
• 11. Once Again, the Turban: Terror and Gendered Sikh Identity in Liam Dalzell’s Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singh’s Taaj, and Sarab Singh Neelam’s Ocean of Pearls
• 12. Gendering the Sikh Diaspora and Transnational Feminism: The Construction of Sexuality in the Poems of Sukhjeet Kaur Khalsa, Sharapal Ruprai, and Rupi Kaur
• Bibliography
• Index