whispering sikhs: race religion and politics

sandeep said:
the situation with women and sikhism is interesting. go to a gurudwara and you see the divide. women on one side men on the other. children sometimes sit with the women. sometimes they sit with the men. in our dayton ohio gurudwara mostly women prepare the food. when the gurudwara had a shortlived sunday school it was mostly manned by women.

sikhism has rules on hair, sometimes which feel more lax on the women, as far as what is currently accepted. a woman can trim her hair and it wont affect her standing in the community. only if rubbing shoulders with the most religious of the community would any such criticism arise, and when i was younger, pointing out hypocrisies, i never once heard anyone beside myself point out this fact. similarly with leg shaving.

i ended up cutting my hair six years ago. i had many issues with the community. i felt that the hair was a ritual in common day use much like many of the other sikh tenants none of which were meant to be used in such a way. when action is taught without meaning ritual forms.

women don't really seem free in INDIAN communities which Sikhs are apart of. In my old town of Dayton, many of the sikhs are invited and encouraged to participate in larger further reaching cultural organizations of Indian alliance. Festivals, dances, speaches. Dinners. If you've ever brushed shoulders in the community you know what i'm talking about. alot of rules of social decorum from these sorts of gatherings, expatriots, first and second generation immigrants, as Indians have immigrated worldwide only recently in bulk. basically people want to maintain ties with their fellow excountrymen. and sometimes that puts them at odds with their own cultural beliefs. survival as an immigrant and a minority in a host country can sometimes depend on whom you know and how well you network. so while we stand upon this frontier despite perhaps having been born in the country certain people probably wouldn't dream of making themselves social pariahs in the larger Indian community. the modesty of women is one of those tenants.

My father has taken me to some of the more famous Sikh settlements in America and if you go out west you see many more Sikh leaders interestingly enough with white skin. For those who maybe don't know, Sikhism doesn't really try to convert so the majority of members tend to be descendants from India, and more often then not from the state of Punjab, where Sikhs are most prevalent. (sortof an israel contained within another country) But it seems like the western notions of women filter in to the religion there and the entire "Indian" influece is confined to that of the text of the Guru Granth Sahib.

Essentially, the culture of India is in effect contaminating the water for Sikhs and has them inadvertedly facing opposite many Sikh beliefs as a default position. This obviously will change over time as the Sikh diaspora comes less to be defined with a tie to India and moreso on the shoulders of it's own religious tenants. At least these are my thoughts on the matter.

Posted on 21 April 2010 at 9:46 AM

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2010/04/sikhism_-_a_fem