Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption

ABSTRACT

This article examines the rights-based discourse deployed by Sikh advocacy organizations, the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense & Education Fund, in order to carve an inclusive space within the United States. We interrogate the deep violence of forgetting embedded within this politics that not only sanctions American values and their regulatory might globally, but also integrates the foundational anti-blackness of Western subjectivity into the conceptual structure of Sikhism. Reconsidering these attachments to the American political project and the white-settler state, we argue Sikh organizations fasten Sikhs to ways of life that are inimical to their own flourishing.

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

For feedback on earlier versions of this essay, we are grateful to Juan Enrique Flores, Zara Jean Pickett, Abigail Reyes, and Jaswinder Singh. We would also like to thank Avtar Singh and Manjit Singh for providing a wonderful collaborative space to write in Moranwali Pind, Hoshiarpur District.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is the case historically. Wilderson (2010) argues ‘The circulation of Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile and progressive moments in history (e.g., the French, English, and American revolutions) produces dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on the Black, and more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of human liberation in any era heretofore’ (22).

2. Following Saba Mahmood (2016), we invoke Marx not to question, as she writes, ‘how modern society can expunge religion from social life (as Marx envisioned) but how to account for its ongoing power and productivity in material and discursive terms’ (15).

3. The Sikh Coalition’s conceptual footing, attempting to bind Nanak to America, grows ever weaker, for if Guru Nanak is at the White House, as Simran Jeet Singh attests, he now resides with Donald Trump. Or, perhaps, Guru Nanak left the White House and now awaits the 2020 election?

4. Our point, however, is not to argue that violence against Sikhs does not exist within the Indian nation-state formation. Rather, we want to interrogate why violence against minority Sikhs within Western nation-states is considered an anomalous and ‘unfortunate’ occurrence within secular governance that can be accommodated, but constitutive of the postcolonial state formation. For example, Amandeep Singh Sidhu, founder and Chair, Sikh Coalition Advisory Committee and Member, Board of Advisors argues that

The Sikh Coalition was born out of a need to support the Sikh American community and educate our fellow citizens in response to the unfortunate backlash that followed the September 11th attacks. While as Americans we mourned with our fellow citizens after our country was attacked, we also gained strength from the unity, tolerance and fundamental rights that define our nation’s core values.

5. The Sacramento Bee reported: ‘One witness said he saw Shergill raise his right hand and take “three or four steps quickly toward” the officers. At least two others said Shergill never lunged at police’ (30 December 2014).

6. We owe this translation to Dr Jaswinder Singh in Guru Gobind Singh Department of Religious Studies at Punjabi University, Patiala.