Feeding the cattle on the Temora common: The public atonement and death of the Punjabi hawker Gujjar Singh in 1902

ABSTRACT

Punjabi hawkers provided an essential service to rural communities and isolated farms in south-eastern Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Living a marginalised existence, they were perceived as unwelcome competition and often vilified, ethnically different, the cultural and spiritual requirements of many Punjabi were alien concepts to the host communities. Even more so were cases of religious penance, which in extreme cases could result in death by starvation. This paper describes the unique circumstances surrounding the death of Gujjar Singh at Temora in 1902 and projects them onto the spiritual and cultural background of the Punjabi community.

KEYWORDS:

• Punjabi diaspora
• Jain
• cremation
• suicide
• Sallekhanā
• hawking

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Dr Gurinder Singh (Global Institute for Sikh Studies, New York), Dr Narendra Parson (former vice-chair, Siddhachalam Jain Tirth, now Bowers, CA) and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on the paper. I am further indebted to Deanna Duffy (Spatial Analysis Network, Charles Sturt University) for the creation of the distribution map that illustrates this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the press of the day, the name is variously given as Googa Singh (Anonymous 1902d), ‘Goodga’ Singh (Tubman 1902), ‘Goodya’ Singh (Anonymous 1902f) and ‘Goodyer’ Singh (Anonymous 1902h). The official death certificate spells his name ‘Googa Singh’ (NSW BDM 16130/1902).

2 It was common for Punjabi hawkers to camp on camping reserves or town commons in the Riverina, as they were unwelcome in the towns themselves (Spennemann 2018b).

3 One of the newspaper accounts even considered the gravest offence ‘An Indian hawker, of Temora, N.S. Wales, gave all his goods away, killed his horses, spent all his money on feeding stray cattle, and then starved himself to death. Pity he killed the horses’ (Anonymous 1902r).

4 The data used in this paper were extracted from the digitised issues of Australian and New Zealand newspapers (National Library of Australia 2016; National Library of New Zealand 2017). A discussion of the limitations of such full text searches can be found in (Spennemann 2018a).