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

hi, im an indian like you.

some kid walks upto me last night saying this bullshit. and its like dude who the fuck are you and why the fuck do you think that im a) indian abd b) like you. i told him dude im welsh, and he's like ,oh, well i was born in idaho. and its like... what the fuck does that mean? he knows damn well he calls himself indian and i dont. thatjoke just soured it for me from the get go. my girlfriend dint warn me about this kid and well nobody did really walking into that place but this guy ws a vivek clone trying to impress folk and uptight with all the mental trapings of my dad but the nervous gut feeling that he had to try really hard to be unlikehimself. perhaps he recognized what he was ,the conservative parent package that'd gotten into his psyche, wasnt the best thing in the world to use to get laid, unless say you were out in punjab. so, with that, he decided the best thing to do was to go psychadelic. why? because well, he's indian, and being indians weird, so what else is weird? psychadelia. so lets make the connection there. walk around with big glasses ,exaggerate dances like bhangra esque disco and attract the laidies... wait... he has a girlfriend, and turns out those "ladies" are his friends .what is this kid on about? wha tis he trying to accomplish with all of this show?

i meaen im just standing back wondering why he'd bother to do all this crap for zero return. but thats that. the indian clai mthat we with brown skin share kinship. and its like, what the fuck is wrong with you comig to me like i know you. you think my esecret decoder ring got misplaced and they sent me this brown skin suit instead? i belong to no club, i have no interest, no pull or drive, no guiding force that brings me to identify with a country on the other side of the world i wasnt born in never lived amidst or will ever end up at. that spot has nothing to do with me. you might as well say, hey, im africa nlike you. walk up to a black dude, be like, hey man, im african, we're brothers. see if you dont get a look. count your blessings you dont get backhanded. this fucker walks up and is like, oh, hi, im indian! and its like... dude. what the fuck is wrong with you. dont you think thats a bit presumptuous and also derogitory. you thikn yo ucan put together someones origin just by their skin? their nose? their what. you tihnk youve got all that info stored away? im not fucking indian, dont fucking try and brand me with that shit. fucking rediculous ass shit. this is racism in the truest form. these fuckers walk up and breath, "indian" out and its like... go fall on a rake, please.