Sikh women’s internet sites: development, content, mission

ABSTRACT

Sikhs have had a significant presence on the Internet since the 1990s. For the most part, early web sites were clearly gendered, highlighting male-focused history, identity, and concerns, with some sites including a ‘women’s section’. Sikh women’s specific sites were few. The scenario has changed considerably with a number of new sites developed by and for women. “Kaur Life”, “Kaurista”, the “Kaur Project”, and the “Sikh Feminist Research Institute” reflect the needs, practices, and concerns of a new generation of engaged, reflective, and activist Sikh women, here identified as “i-Kaurs”. I explore the development of Sikh women’s sites, examining changes in content, presentation, and mission between the earlier and later online milieu. To what extent do Sikh women’s sites offer opportunities to network, to provide safe spaces for women to exchange ideas and commentary? How do these online spaces intersect with offline Sikh religious environments? To what extent do these sites engage and reflect wider women’s concerns?

KEYWORDS:

• Sikh women
• gender
• WWW
• Sikh feminism
• online religious spaces
• activism
• fourth-wave feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In order to help readers keep track of authors whose surnames are ‘Singh’ or ‘Kaur’, their initials are added in all in-text references, in this case going against the conventions of the journal’s reference style.

2 While Sikh girls are now given the name ‘Kaur’ at birth, this practice was not widely in use during the developing Sikh tradition. Indeed, this naming issue was, at least for women, a long and convoluted process in terms of becoming a Sikh identity marker. It was only in 1950 that the Sikh code of conduct known as the “Sikh Rahit Maryada” came to stipulate that the name ‘Kaur’ be given to Sikh females at birth alongside ‘Singh’ for male babies (Dharam Parchar Committee 1994, 13). The process of standardising, legitimising, and ritually sanctioning the name ‘Kaur’ took place through an extensive re-writing of history, particularly during the Singh Sabha period in the early twentieth century within Sikh history. Earlier, Sikh women were given either only a single name or, similar to Hindu women, the name ‘Devi’. There were, however, instances where women appended the name ‘Kaur’ to their first names. ‘Kaur’ as the Punjabi equivalent of the Rajput term ‘prince’ (kanwar) had come to be loosely affiliated with females in aristocratic Sikh families (see Jakobsh, 2003, 220, 2017, 247–248).

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Notes on contributors

Doris Jakobsh

Doris Jakobsh is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of Relocating Gender in Sikh History (2003) and Sikhism (2011) and the editor of Sikhism and Women (2010) and Exploring Gender and Sikh Traditions (2021), besides numerous other publications. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Religious Studies, PAS 1054A, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, N2L3G1.