Sundri, then and now

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Bhai Vir Singh's novella, Sundri (1898) from the context of the Singh Sabha reform movement (1880–1920). Sundri, Vir Singh's fictional heroine, became an important and idealized site of female identity construction during this time. Bhai Vir Singh's Sundri will be juxtaposed with a pixelated version, a recent animated film by the same name. Similar to the novella, the animated Sundri too can be understood as a highly particularized, contemporary construct of Sikh women's identity, created, more than a century later, but similarly, during a period of intense scrutiny of Sikh women's religious identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Bhai Vir Singh
• Sikh women
• gender construction
• naming practices
• women’s rituals and regulations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Directed by Dr. Lakha Lahiri, March 5, 2016, the play Sundri was performed at LTG Auditorium, Copernicus Marg, Mandi House, Delhi. See http://www.bvsss.org/events.html.

2 Interestingly, Kumar and Dagar have shown that with the period of Punjab’s militancy in the 1980s, female mobility was severely restricted, girls were married off early, and their dress and comportment were closely watched to align them with the codes of conduct prescribed by the Sikh militants (Kumar and Dagar 1995).

3 In a soon to be published volume, Sikh Studies scholar Eleanor Nesbitt has gathered little-known descriptions, narratives and artistic renderings of Sikhs by western women from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, including a brief commentary on Emily Eden’s 1838 watercolour of a mounted Akali woman wearing a blue turban and carrying a round shield on her back. See SIKH: Two Centuries of Western Women's Art and Writing (Nesbitt 2019, forthcoming). In another article, ‘Woman Seems to be Given her Proper Place’: Western Women’s Encounter with Sikh Women 1809–2012’, Professor Nesbitt goes beyond ‘the Sikh subject’ through western women’s lenses and highlights encounters and descriptions of Sikh women in particular. Nesbitt notes: “Whereas European and north American travellers frequently noted the distinctive appearance of male Sikhs – in particular Akali warriors – they mentioned no distinctively Sikh aspect of women’s appearance. Emily Eden’s watercolour showing a distinctively accoutred and turban-wearing woman in an Akali family is the one exception”(Nesbitt 2019).

As with Teja Singh Bhasaur’s female followers in the early twentieth century who donned turbans, the Nihangs described above stemming from the nineteenth century were on the fringes of Sikh society. While commentators and chroniclers pointed out their mysterious, sometimes fearfully exotic nature (see Caldwell where he describes an Akalin, ‘a most singular character', and, ‘the most dangerous looking lady I have ever seen' (1843, 304)), these women have simply slipped through the cracks of most histories of the Sikhs or of Punjab, whether they were written by Sikh or by western writers. Heavily armed, wild-looking Akali woman warriors wearing inordinately high turbans or even simply beturbaned women devotees of Bhasaur didn’t make it to the pages of history, firstly because they were women, and secondly, because they were part of marginal sects, and thirdly, because of their very small numbers. Clearly, these were not images of womanhood Vir Singh wished to foster in his writings.