Precarious and model minorities: Sikh identities in the ‘new’ global politics of religion

ABSTRACT

In many parts of the world, Sikhs have come to be perceived as a ‘model' minority – so much so that some have critiqued the Sikh community for taking up positions that are perceived as assimilationist. Such critiques, however, gloss over the sense of precarity, and the litany of hardships, racial discrimination and legal battles in which Sikhs have been forced to be engage in a post-9/11 world. Ultimately, this discrimination is enabled and justified by historical western notions of the incommensurability of the sacred and secular. Engaging with recent critical debates over the on-going meanings of the sacred and the secular, this paper argues that the contemporary moment requires a cosmopolitan religious outlook. Such debates reveal the separation between the public and the private, and between the sacred and the secular, to be ‘zombie categories' that fail to capture contemporary realities. Hence, conceptualizing Sikh identities as precarious, vulnerable ‘model minorities' in a post-Brexit/Trump era allows us to explore a Sikh ethics underpinned by the universal message of SGGS Ji. This is so because such ethics have never been conceptualized as simply being ‘other-worldly’, but rather as precisely grounded in the world that has been entrusted to us.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularism
• Sikh Ethics
• model minorities
• ethnic precarity
• SGGS Ji

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This paper was first presented as a Keynote in 2017 at the Sikh Studies Conference at Riverside, California. I am most grateful to the organisers and in particular Pashaura Singh and Arvind Mandair. I would also like to thank Dr. Marius Chan for his most helpful comments.

2 I am indebted to Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh for his deep insights and exposition of this position.