Documentary practices: Race, bureaucracy, and the legal regulation of gurdwaras in British Columbia

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, disputes over the political leadership of gurdwaras in British Columbia have formed the basis of a substantial body of case law, which has afforded courts different forms of authority over the affairs of these Sikh institutions. By analyzing 55 legal decisions related to gurdwara leadership, this article examines how law has transformed the political conditions of local Sikh populations by enfolding litigants in bureaucratic practices of documentation. Particular attention is paid to how these documentary practices are often animated by the racial spectre of fraudulence, which shapes how local Sikhs are governed as religious and racialized minorities.

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from the research assistance of Jasmeet Bahia and the generous engagements of the anonymous reviewers, Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Pashaura Singh, and the other participants at the 5th Dr. Jasbir Singh Saini Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies Conference at the University of California, Riverside. The ideas in this article have also been refine through ongoing conversations about bureaucracy with Luis Aguiar, Heidi Bickis, Brigitte Le Normand, Renisa Mawani, Ondine Park, Jessica Stites, and Peter Urmetzer. The research for this article was funded by the UBC Hampton Research Endowment Fund.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The bulk of the case law analyzed in this article considers violations of the BC Society Act (1996), which has since been repealed by the legislation of the BC Societies Act in 2015. Although the new Societies Act instigated several changes in the legal governance of societies, which are beyond the scope of this paper, the change in the title of act is strictly nominal.

2 According to Asad (2003), notions of the sacred that are foundational to these conceptions of religion are an artifact of nineteenth Century European thought, which reconfigured a heterogenous field of ideas and practices into the singular category of ‘religion’. ‘The sacred’, Asad (2003) explains,

became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane actions, […] at once a transcendent force that imposed itself on the subject nd a space that must never, under threat of dire consequences, be violated – that is profaned. (33)