Making sense of Sikh nationalism

ABSTRACT

Despite significant advances in Sikh studies, Sikh nationalism is still poorly understood. As a complex community with competing narratives of self-identity – as a religion, as an ethnicity, and as a global and national minority (in India and in the diaspora) – Sikh nationalism requires an integrated framework that recognises the rich symbolic heritage and how the nation and state-building projects of India and Pakistan have defined Sikh politics. Such a framework also needs to rethink the role of the diaspora as the agent of long-distance nationalism against the background of the rise of religious nationalisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Sikhs
• Nationalism
• Diaspora, India
• Pakistan
• Khalistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An ethnie is a French term for an ethnic community. Such a community is ‘distinguished by both members and outsiders as possessing the attributes of: (1) an identifying name or emblem; (2) a myth of common ancestry; (3) shared historical memories and traditions; (4) one or element of a common culture; a link with an historic territory or ‘homeland’; (5) a measure of solidarity, at least among the elites’ (Smith 1999, 13).

2 By postcolonialism, we refer to any approach which seeks to examine the impact of colonisation in former colonies from the perspective of the colonised. Although influenced by poststructuralism, postcolonialism has a more pronounced normative commitment to decolonisation, see Seth, Gandhi, and Dutton (1998, 7–11).

3 Globalisation is a contested term but refers to how we now live in one world. The argument made by globalisation theorists in the late twentieth century was that advances in information and communication technology and the concomitant deregulation of the global markets had created an embryonic global civil society which transcended the borders of nation-states. For an introduction to the globalisation debate, see Held and McGrew (2000).

4 To be precise, this is dated from the Iranian revolution in 1979. However, the intensity of this phenomenon coincides with the end of the Cold War (1989) and the onset of globalisation.

5 For further discussion of the limits of the gender-centric and feminist critiques of nationalism, see Smith (2003a, 210).

6 See footnote 1 above for a definition of ethnie.

7 Historically, the Sikhs, like Ulster Unionists, and Indians and Chinese in Africa and East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are sometimes referred to as ‘dominant minorities’ who exercised political or economic control because of colonisation or their economic power. Under the Raj, the metaphors of ‘Ulster’ for the Punjab and ‘Protestant’ for Sikhs were regularly used in colonial thinking.