Diasporic citizenship and militarization: Punjabi soldiers in the world wars

Abstract

This article delves into the uses of history and examines how the enlisting of Indian soldiers – particularly from Punjab – into the British Indian Army during the First and Second World Wars has been memorialized and remembered in contemporary Britain. This issue has become particularly salient in the light of the politics of the so-called ‘war on terror’ or ‘new imperialism’, which Paul Gilroy and Vron Ware argue has heightened tendencies towards militarism in British society. Using examples from the public sphere – remembrance day events, TV documentaries and army recruitment fairs – as well as interview material, I argue that Britain's Punjabi communities have been organizing in order to weave themselves into the national tapestry by memorializing role played by Punjabis in the First and Second World Wars – iconic to the national fantasy, using this forgotten history to demand recognition from the state and stake a claim for citizenship. In the ‘new imperialism’, however, it is not equally possible for Sikh and Muslim Punjabis to argue for their inclusion on the terms of militarized citizenship, and the various chords within the diaspora seem to be increasingly disharmonious, effacing their composite and shared colonial history.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• bad/good migrant
• securitization
• politics
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

The research upon which this article is based was funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I am grateful to both funding bodies, as to Filippo Osella, V.J. Varghese, Mike Collyer, Benji Zeitlyn, Ben Rogaly, Nukhbah Langah, Vron Ware and the anonymous reviewers of Citizenship Studies for discussions and critical readings, and to Dal Singh Dhesi, Zad Padda and Nasir Mehmood for their invaluable help in Birmingham. Versions of this paper were previously presented at a seminar at Forman Christian College, Lahore (11 May 2011), at the conference South Asia in Transition at Oxford University (26 November 2011), the workshop Soldiers, Minorities, Migrants, Citizens at the Open University (9 March 2012) and the conference Unofficial Histories at the Bishopsgate Institute (19 May 2012). I would like to thank Imam Asim Hafiz, Muslim Chaplain to HM Forces, for the important interventions he argued with me at Soldiers, Minorities, Migrants, Citizens, and apologise that, because it was already in press by the time we spoke, I wasn't able to build his reactions into this paper. I would also like to thank Kamalroop Singh, whose critical blog on Remembrance: A Sikh Story made me wish it could have been possible to include a fulsome reception history of the documentary among British Sikhs.

Notes

^1. A detailed account of the research and its participants is given in Qureshi et al. (2012).

^2. A detailed account is given in Collyer et al. (2011).

^3. Although, for an exception, see Butt (2009).

^4. It is worth noting that this military history has had ramifications for racialized formations of citizenship in post-colonial India and Pakistan as well as in Britain. Punjabi Sikhs remain dominant in the Indian army, which maintains a Sikh regiment to date. In the 1980s and 1990s, when a separatist insurgency was unfolding in Punjab, the ambiguous situation in which the contested border zone was both defended and resisted by Sikhs became a point of concern for the ruling classes in India (Axel 2001). In Pakistan, the dominance of Punjabis in the army is famously a cause for resentment in the other provinces and was even deployed against the Bengalis in 1971 as their under-representation in the country's armed forces – due to their ‘short statures’, thus unfit for a martial race – became a rationale for discounting their electoral majority as they lacked the moral claim to rule (Morgahi 2002).

^5. In 2011, the same footage was used in a bhangra music video, Sher Soorma by Gupsy Aujla, which was sponsored by the Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trust to try and communicate the message to young Sikhs using the Internet; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 6k4226dL8tg (Khabra 2011).