The Sikh Next Door by Manpreet J Singh;

Author:Manpreet J Singh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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Process of Becoming: The Sikh Woman

When we talk of Sikh women, it is easy to lapse into narratives constructed around their religious identity and the reformist intent of the Sikh religion. However, a nuanced understanding of how that tradition has translated into lived reality requires its contextualisation within the broader ethnic culture, its class and caste paradigms, and the historical ruptures which have impacted it. This lived reality also needs to be scanned for how it has been influenced by demographic transitions and the cultural shifts which have marked Sikh history. A close analysis of these placed within broader debates on feminism would perhaps yield a trajectory, which could provide an objective understanding of the Sikh woman’s experience. It would also focus on a selectively used Sikh religious and intellectual tradition, with a feminist potential far greater than what it has been used for. As the Sikh woman learns to articulate her experiences, to question the gap between the professed and the performed, she also learns to optimise this legacy, to push the boundaries towards a more empowered self.

A Liberal Religious Tradition

According to Margaret Somers, ‘All of us come to be who we are however ephemeral, multiple, and changing, by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making’ (1994: 606). The Sikh woman emerged from a social landscape which had entrenched practices against her gender. North Indian culture had long let go of the dignified and important position given to women within the Vedic social and religious systems. Interpretations of Manusmriti and other religious scriptures relegated women among the lowest in the social order. The potential for fertility, which had once been worshipped, was seen as a polluting and dirty biological function that demanded the woman’s exclusion from religious spaces and by corollary denied her the possibility of spiritual liberation. Within this broader framework was the specific social milieu in Punjab. Its occupational structures, class and caste positioning and social pressures gave this degradation of female life its peculiar forms.

Though it might not have been an absolute norm, the injunctions of the gurus indicate that women in the existing social order had been subjected to a discriminatory and suffocating social atmosphere. Guru Nanak’s objective assessment of the position of women, a realisation of the wrongs it entailed and his clear abrogation of the same must have been iconoclastic for the times he lived in. His focus on several of the issues not only brought them into the open but also questioned the social sanctions underlining them. It was perhaps common to kill daughters at birth. Depending on the strata and occupation, methods of controlling women varied in forms of marriage customs, coercion of widows, cloistering women in purdah, treating them as peripheral beings on the patriarchal chart. Nanak insisted that women and men have the same rights to spiritual liberation and equal potential to achieve it. He spoke against traditions which deprived them equal access to religious spheres. He emphasised that a woman’s reproductive cycle and its associated biological functions did not make her impure.

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