Researcher and author Dr Manpreet J Singh’s new book holds space for the Sikh identities overshadowed by the Jat Sikh, challenging their carnivacalistic portrayal in mainstream cinema
Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
This interview gets a bit meta at the onset: Speaking in a low, measured, articulate tone is author and researcher Dr Manpreet J Singh. Her book, The Sikh Next Door (Bloomsbury) is due for release today, and unlike its international debut in 2020, it will be in all major bookstores across the country in a few days. It’s a book that talks about the various Sikh identities—away from the agrarian and military stereotypes and the mainstream cinematic tropes. The loud Punjabi, ever ready to break into a bhangra. It’s a book she hopes everyone—not just Sikhs—read.
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“People come up to me at weddings, and ask ‘Aap dance nahin karengi, aap to Punjabi hai’; we’re more the reading sort,” she says quietly as we sip lactose-free chai (another stereotype broken there, most members of the family are mildly lactose intolerant). “While we are proud of that aspect of the community identity, it remains only one aspect. But it drives all other aspects to the periphery. There is heterogeneity within homogeneity—Besides, over time, the contours of community identities change in response to other factors.”
And we’re thinking, ‘How un-Sikh-like is she!’ Mea Culpa. The idea behind her book is to hold space for the other identities that are overshadowed by the agrarian Jat Sikh, like the urban Sikh who would have come from western Punjab of undivided India and been a trader or a professional.
Many traders, like those from the Khatri trading caste, were the first migrating diaspora, taking furniture and cloth to Southeast Asian outposts of Shanghai, Thailand, Myanmar and Singapore. Even before that, soldiers from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s court travelled to such outposts and many stayed back, marrying local women. Then there were cleaved colonial migrations, with Sikhs travelling with the British Army or migrating as blue collar workers to the US, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Or the Ahomyasikh farmers of Assam who have intermarried so deeply that they look more Assamese than Punjabi, and the women wear traditional mekhela chador. Then, there are the Dakhni Sikhs of Hyderabad.
Many colonised countries, once they gained their freedom, to assimilate and integrate their varied population, told Sikhs to break connections with their homeland. Others exalted them to venerated positions. “In Singapore, for instance,” Singh’s daughter Harnidh tells us, “because of contentious history, some communities are not allowed positions in the armed forces. But Sikhs take up many important posts in the police and positions of national security. “In China,” she adds, in a way to egg her mother to begin her next project, “Statuettes of Sikh guardians were carved on the tombs of prominent people to protect them in the afterlife [A reflection of a substantial Sikh presence as British police, and many others who worked as security men in civil life].” The daughter is hoping her mother captures these vignettes of China and Singapore in her next book.
This title is simply dedicated to her spouse, Jai Jeet, with a reference to “his alienation as the only turbaned boy in a school in Bihar, his early recognition that he did not belong in Punjab—the promised land, his discomfiture at being slotted into a type which he was not, his obsession with rooting himself through Gurmukhi language, Punjabi literature and music, are important strains underlying this work.” The 1990-batch IPS officer is currently posted as Commissioner of Police, Thane City. So, the book is not just an offering of academic rigour or tribute to one’s community, it is the deep intimate seeing of a loved one, made palpable.
Jai Jeet’s grandmother, a widow with four children, was put on a train from Punjab during the Partition, with no knowledge of the destination. The journey ended in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, where she raised her children. Jai Jeet’s father became a judge, and the family moved a lot.
In our deeply insightful conversation, what manages to change the most about how we think is Dr Singh’s explanation about the anatomy of a joke and politics of humour. It starts with the carnivalistic portrayal of Sikhs in mainstream cinema—always dressed in a certain way and portrayed to be laughed at or deliver humour.
“I believe humour is a serious matter,” Dr Singh says. “It is a socially accepted way to release anxiety. There is underlying angst in ethnic humour all across the world—it’s an attempt at establishing the normative and othering, communicating that the differences make you stand out and laughable. I have never enjoyed a Sikh joke, and the hundreds of Sikhs that I have interviewed for the book have not either.” A Instagram post made to communicate the same by her other daughter, musician Sukhnidh Kaur, in 2020 said, “Have you ever come across a Sardar joke? Let’s talk about that. [Excerpt] A male Sikh in Indian Cinema is loud, boisterous, his gregariousness a genial indicator of his underdeveloped social etiquette. He is generally the drunken wedding guest, the neighbourhood uncle always in ‘balleballe’ mode, the taxi driver who speaks with an alien accent, the fat young adult who is infantilised in his obsession with eating...”
And then there is the test of laughter. “The theory of humour describes laughter over identity as a form of social control,” dissects Dr Singh. “If you laugh along at a joke made at your expense, you are accepted as part of the group. Nobody wants to not be part of a group.”
Now put this in the context of a community of refugees, hustling away to make a living. Selling things on patris in the capital, taking up space in the socio-economic order.
Dr Singh is the first to admit that the latest generation of storytellers—Sikhs and non-Sikhs—have been sensitive to overturning this trope. Kohrra, streaming now on Netflix, is an example she cites.
As we leave, Manpreet says this: “I already feel anxiety putting this out there.” We wonder if she also feels the anxiety on behalf of a community that has laughed along because they’ve not had a choice.
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