Queering colonial power: Sikh resistance in the Ghadr movement

ABSTRACT

This work contemplates gender, and how it shaped both colonial power and the anticolonial Ghadr movement. I will examine how the Sikhs of the Ghadr movement disrupted, or queered, the colonial gender binary of the ‘loyal Sikh masculine’ and the ‘disloyal Hindu feminine’ and how, despite this, the binary remains intact in Ghadr movement historiography, perpetuating colonial logics. I will then draw upon archival and non-archival texts to gather traces of gender, the ‘feminine,’ and the ‘queer,’ in the Ghadr movement, and in a manner parallel to the movement itself – queer (colonial power) in order to decolonize.

Acknowledgements

For their assistance in editing/revising my written work and guiding my thinking, I would like to thank my anonymous reviewer(s), Dr Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, Professor Keith Feldman, Kim Tran, Mallika Kaur and Tejpreet Kaur of SAFAR, Loveleen Kaur, Parambir Singh Gill, Amandeep Singh Gill, Randeep Singh Hothi, Raj Patel, Alberto Ledesma, Chelsea Elizabeth Clark, Kirandeep Sekhon, Gurjit Mundh, Clara Lingle, Arshinderpal Kaur, and Mr and Mrs Sitaram Bansal from Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall, Jalandhar. Though they are too numerous to name here, I would like to thank all my friends and family for their never-ending support, and particularly my parents: Harpal Kaur and Surinder Singh. I would like to dedicate this work to my grandmother, Amar Kaur.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Kanwalroop Kaur Singh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0335-0693

Notes

1 As one reviewer has pointed out, while it is true that the British perceived Sikhs as ‘emasculated’ due to their contact with Hindus, it may also be the case that Hindus sought to capitalize on the supposed ‘war-like disposition’ of the Sikhs – thus buying into colonially constructed gender-normative discourse. Though I have not examined it here, this is an important consideration for future discussions of gender and the Ghadr movement.

2 Some historians have claimed that Har Dayal later betrayed the Ghadr movement by becoming a colonial apologist. The final passage of his work, Forty-four months in Germany and Turkey, February 1915 to October 1918, a record of personal impressions, states,

England has much to give us besides protection and organisation. We are now heirs to all that the Englishman holds in fee as his birthright. England is free and great, and we can share in this freedom and greatness as worthy citizens of the greatest State that the world has yet seen. (1920, 103)

3 In her biography of Har Dayal, Emily Brown (1975, 140) writes,

Har Dayal's Hindu Association of the Pacific Coast was an uneasy coalition between Hindu intellectuals and Sikh farmers, peasants, and lumber mill workers. This does not mean that there were not both Muslims and Hindus of the lower classes who were members, but the Sikhs were in the majority and provided most of the financial support to the organization and its proposed program.

Though Maia Ramnath (2011, 4) admits that there can be no clear division between the ‘non-Sikh … blowhard intellectuals’ and the Sikh ‘salt-of-the-earth soldier-farmer-poets’ – she still claims that ‘these [the latter] men were at the heart of the movement; particularly in the second phase’ (4), thus contradicting herself by making the division she claims cannot be made. Rather than complicating the Hindu-Sikh binary, her claim that the Ghadr Movement ‘was born of its combinations’ (4) primarily becomes a way for her to de-emphasize the role of Sikhs in the movement, and the role of ‘ethno-religious identity,’ by claiming the movement was secular and spanned across ethnicity and religion. This argument, however, does not truly upend the problematic Hindu-Sikh binary used in the dominant narrative of the movement.

4 The book was published in 2014, by which time its author, Kesar Singh, was already deceased. It is unclear which year it was written in. Kesar Singh was a well-known Sikh writer who had written many books on the Ghadr movement in Punjabi.

5 ‘You (masculine) can wear burqas, and we (feminine) will wear swords.’

6 All these events in her life are historical ‘fact’ – corroborated by her fellow Ghadris, photographic evidence of her, and documented evidence of her actions preserved in the Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall of Jalandhar, Punjab

7 I will present an analysis of the poem, but I will not translate it. There are multiple reasons for this. First, much of the power of the turns of phrase, metaphors, colloquialisms, and sentiments expressed here would be lost were the poem to be rendered in English, and mistranslation could do violence to the original work. Second, today English is a language that carries much more linguistic currency than Punjabi, and the survival of Punjabi is endangered due to this. As a scholar, I hope to counter this trend in my intellectual work. Third, the revolutionaries of the Ghadr Movement were very conscious and deliberate in producing creative work during the colonial period in a language that was indigenous to them, and not imposed by the colonizer. Out of respect for the authors of the text, and in the interest of reaching the most insightful analysis, I will refrain from translation.

Additional information

Funding

The author’s research was supported by the US Department of State under its Critical Language Scholarship Program in Punjabi.