Making sense of Sikh nationalism

ABSTRACT

Despite significant advances in Sikh studies, Sikh nationalism is still poorly understood. As a complex community with competing narratives of self-identity – as a religion, as an ethnicity, and as a global and national minority (in India and in the diaspora) – Sikh nationalism requires an integrated framework that recognises the rich symbolic heritage and how the nation and state-building projects of India and Pakistan have defined Sikh politics. Such a framework also needs to rethink the role of the diaspora as the agent of long-distance nationalism against the background of the rise of religious nationalisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Sikhs
• Nationalism
• Diaspora, India
• Pakistan
• Khalistan

Introduction

There are a few issues that are more vexatious in Sikh studies than Sikh nationalism. The growth of Sikh studies as an interdisciplinary field in the last four decades in the West has not been accompanied by corresponding advances in understanding Sikhs as a national community with its traditions, myths and memoirs, and the politics of self-determination in pursuit of autonomy, and at times, of independent statehood. Barring notable examples (Pettigrew 1995; Dusenbery 1999; Deol 2000; Singh 2000; Shani 2008), most scholars working on Sikhs have tended to steer clear of the thorny question of nationalism with its logical concomitant of an independent Sikh state, preferring instead to focus on identity, Sikhism as a religion, or the politics of multiculturalism. Since 1984, this shift has been underpinned by the post-structural turn that has led to the ascendency of critical theory in the field of Sikh studies and the rejection of militancy that had characterised the turbulent decade after 1984 in which over 30,000 lives were lost in Punjab and the surrounding states in India. This shift has been supported by three related theses: that the Sikhs are a unique community of faith whose tradition remains untranslatable into western concepts of ‘religion’ or the ‘nation’ (Mandair 2009); that Sikhs and Sikhism must be understood primarily within the Indic tradition as an integral part of Hindu society led by a succession of gurus (sampradaya) (Oberoi 1994); and that religion is the primary signifier of the community’s identity and therefore nationalism is alien to Sikhs and Sikhism (Singh-Kaur 2005, 2019). To these arguments, we can add a fourth: the general anathema against nationalism as an ideology since 1945, the rise of religious nationalism after 1979, and, more recently, neo-conservative nationalisms in the West that promote patriarchy, racism and neo-colonialism. Within this broad context, therefore, Sikh nationalism has been framed as the illegitimate child of malcontents ill-at-ease with socially complex globalised societies, in other words, those who are on the wrong side of the history of a progressive minority faith tradition that has pioneered the politics of multiculturalism.

However, these developments stand in sharp contrast to the study of Sikh nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s during the campaigns for a Punjabi Suba (a Punjabi-speaking state) and the regional autonomy within the Indian Union following the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) that underpinned the agitational politics of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). Paul Brass (1974, 277), in his pioneering work on North India that established the instrumentalist school of nationality formation, noted that ‘of all the ethnic groups in north India, the Sikhs come closest to satisfying the definition of a nationality or a nation’. What for Brass had distinguished Sikhs from other groups around them was that they had ‘succeeded in acquiring a high degree of internal social and political cohesion and subjective awareness’ and ‘achieved political significance as a group within the Indian Union’ (277). For Brass, the Punjabi-Suba movement was a nationality formation process in which Sikhs were transformed from a religious sect into a political nation (334). But in this process Sikh elites played a vital role in the construction of a Sikh national consciousness by selecting the symbols – linguistic, religious and cultural – that enabled the mobilisation to take place. Similarly, for Khushwant Singh there was little doubt about the uniqueness of Sikh nationality: Sikhs as a distinctive community could survive only in a ‘separate state in which they formed[ed] a compact group; where the teaching of Gurmukhi and the Sikh religion is compulsory; and where there is an atmosphere of respect for the traditions of their forefathers’ (1966, 205). The threat of resurgent Hinduism after independence was so strong that unless the Sikhs had a state of their own there was ‘little doubt that before the century has run its course Sikh religion will have become a branch of Hinduism and the Sikhs a part of the Hindu social system’ (Singh 1953, 185).

Since the 1950s, methodologically the study of nationalism has undergone a profound transformation (Smith 2001, 2010) with social change at the centre of the modernist approaches to explaining the cause and rise of nations and nationalism. Anthropologists like Gellner (1964) drew attention to the role of industrialisation in creating nations and nationalism; and coincidently, Marxist analyses of nationalist movement both in the developed and developing world highlighted the importance of economic and class-based explanations for the rise of such movements (Nairn 1977). At the same time, the political mobilisation of non-white minorities in the West (often termed ‘ethnic’ because of their allegedly distinctive cultural characteristics), led anthropologists and sociologists to reflect on the resilience of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the developed world. This phenomenon, it was suggested, could be better understood in terms of either primordialism (Shils 1957; Geertz 1963), the innate cultural characteristics of these movements, or instrumentalism (Brass 1974), the outcome of consciously made choices by a group’s elites. The primordialism–instrumentalism divide is a distinction that is common to most approaches to the study of ethnicity and nationalism.

The late 1970s and the early 1980s witnessed a resurgence of sub-national movements in the West and the developing world that belied the expectation that ethnicity and nationalism would ‘wither away’ with modernisation. A.D. Smith’s Ethnic Revival (1981) and The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) were a watershed moment in the study of the subject. In these, and subsequent publications, Smith outlined the ethno-symbolic approach to the origins of nations and nationalism in which their modernity was conceded but the mainspring of nationalist ideology was located in pre-modern cultural attachments such as ethnies.¹

While the work of Smith refocused attention on the cultural origins of nations and nationalism, in developing countries the universalising claims of the literature on ethnicity and nationalism were questioned by post-colonial theorists² who argued that scholarship was essentially Euro-centric. How colonialism had subverted the economic and cultural development of the colonised, post-colonial theorists argued, was important to understanding the practical limitation of conceptual categories such as ethnicity, nationalism and self-determination. Nationalism was consequently regarded as a discourse largely derivative of colonial rule (Chatterjee 1986).

The end of the Cold War in 1989 was marked by two paradoxical developments. First, the onset of globalisation³ led to the flow of new migrants from the South to the North who were better connected in their host lands with their homelands by new information and communications technologies. These dense connections gave rise to transnational movements that offered alternative ways of conceptualising diasporas and homeland politics that questioned the idea of a nation, how it was imagined and the need for a territorialised homeland (Appadurai 1990; Anderson 1992).

Second, simultaneously there was a rise in religious nationalism.⁴ This nationalism does not merely reflect the pre-existing cultures and values of national citizens: it is distinguished by unrelenting hostility to modernity, secularism, the secular state and the existing international order. It is associated closely with the global religious resurgence that has unleashed new passions and violence symbolised by the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001 (Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003).

Third, alongside this development, there has been a growth of the scholarship in the study of gender and the nation, of ‘nations and nationalisms as masculine organisations and projects’ (Smith 2003a, 208). Nationalism as a male phenomenon has led some to argue that men and women have different stakes in nations and nationalism, and this difference has been overlaid not only by male masculinities which perpetuate ‘Homonationalism’ but also suppress other social and sexual identities (Paur 2007).

In light of these methodological and political developments, a singular approach to the study of Sikh nationalism appears most unsatisfactory. How, for example, can we integrate the study of the diaspora and Sikh politics in India? If the primary manifestation of Sikh politics is one of identity, an identity that was arguably ‘constructed’ at the end of the nineteenth century (Oberoi 1994), then how can we speak of territorialisation and nation statehood? And as a complex social minority, are Sikhs first and foremost an ethnic group, a nation or a world religion – or all three?

These are significant challenges that have perhaps deterred scholars from undertaking the detailed task of probing the relationship between these concepts to build a more meaningful analytical framework for understanding Sikh nationalism within the well-established literature on ethnicity, nations and nationalism. This is all the more surprising because in the late 1970s Mark Juergensmeyer and Gerald Barrier (1979, 2) alerted us to the contradictory social qualities of Sikhs as both a religious and an ethnic group; and Verne Dusenbery (1999) writing on the late 1990s, highlighted the competing master narratives of Sikh identity of religion and nation, with the suggestion that Indic cognate terms such as Panth and Qaum perhaps provided more relevant concepts for the way ahead. Comparatively and empirically, however, this challenge has, for obvious reasons – not least the limited utility of Indic terms outside of South Asia – has been difficult to meet. A more pragmatic response is to examine the salience of modern Sikh identities, how they intersect and overlap, and how in historical and contemporary political formations they match comparative typologies of ethnic conflict management ranging from multiculturalism at the one end to a separate state at the other. In Sikh Nationalism (2021), we explore the politics of three Sikh identities – of religion, nation, and as a minority (both in South Asia and globally). We examine the intersections and overlaps between these identities and the way they have determined the community’s search for autonomy and self-determination, though not necessarily always articulating the creation of a separate state.

An integrated framework

Following from the preliminary step of identifying the operational social characteristics of the Sikh community, the question arises of the relevant methodological approach. No singular methodology seems appropriate for what Smith has called the ‘nationalism of small peoples’ (1999, 203). This requires the need to address the dilemmas of minorities surrounded by greater national traditions, the importance of diasporas, where they are relevant, and an understanding of religious nationalism in shaping minority nationalism and the character and politics of the greater traditions. Arguably, gender-centric concerns do not necessarily pose such a methodological dilemma and can be addressed within the relevant case-study, though this structural division perhaps opens up a broader debate (Paur 2007).⁵

The main schools of thought in the study of nationalism are modernist (Gellner 1964; Anderson 1991) that view nations and nationalism as a modern phenomenon, the bi-product of capitalism, industrialisation and the growth of the modern state with its mass education. Marxist approaches also belong to the modernist school of thought, though they emphasise the primacy of class factors in which nationalism like religions is a state of false consciousness. The utility of these methodologies for the Sikh case has been questioned (Singh and Shani 2021, Ch.1). Smith, who locates himself broadly within the modernist school but highlights the ethno-symbolic origins of nations and nationalism, the significance of the historical symbols of ethnies, provides a more fruitful point of departure.⁶ Ethno-symbolism, as the term suggests, is concerned with the subjective identification of peoples with the historical symbols of ethnies. In the words of Smith, it seeks to move away from the focus on elites and ‘enter into and comprehend the ‘inner world’ of ethnicity and nationalism’ (2010, 61). In understanding the subject, the ‘passion and attachments evoked by nations and nationalism is a central problem’, as is the ‘continuing hold exercised by modern national communities on so many people, even today’ (62). For Smith, nationalism is an essential ‘political ideology with a cultural doctrine at its centre’ (1999, 74). It is this cultural core that accounts for the persistence of the ‘ethnonational bond’, even in highly developed nation-states where it takes the form of cultural nationalism. Simply put, the ethno-symbolic approach places emphasis on the cultural limits to elite manipulation and, by doing so, draws attention to the reciprocal relationship between ‘elites’ and the ‘masses’. The importance of this approach is on the long duree analysis of the persistence of structures and processes by locating ethnies and nations in history.

The Sikhs, with their rich symbolic tradition and past that includes the creation of the Khalsa and the myth of election as a ‘chosen people’, a distinctive identity marked by physical appearance, the rise to political power in the Punjab in the eighteenth century and Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Empire, provide an ideal case for ethno-symbolic methodology. While this fit is not without some serious qualifications, notably the capacity of Sikh elites at the end of the nineteenth century to retrospectively ‘construct’ the myths and memories of the nation, scholars working on the community have generally preferred Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach to modernist theories (Deol 2000; Singh 2000; Shani 2008; Singh and Shani 2021). Accordingly, in Sikh Nationalism (2021), we draw on ethno-symbolism to explore the inner world of Sikh nationalism, its reformation in the late nineteenth century around the identity of the Khalsa, and its modern political manifestations.

In addition to the ethno-symbolic approach, for the reasons outlined above, Sikh Nationalism (2021) draws on three closely related dimensions. Firstly, the narrative of a minority has very much been shaped by the world around the Sikhs, especially in the Punjab. Like the Baluchis, Kashmiris, Nagas, Tamils (in Sri Lanka), and Kurds in the Middle East, the rise of majority nationalisms and nation-state formation around these communities as the principal ‘other[s]’, particularly the nation-building efforts of the Congress and the Muslim League in the Punjab before 1947, has fostered a reactive, minority response for autonomy and self-determination. In the case of the Sikhs, as a small religious minority with a strong religious ethic to neither ‘dominate nor be dominated’, this narrative has deep historical roots. Modern manifestations of this minority consciousness, even as ‘dominant minority’ during the Sikh empire,⁷ have included the veneration of the Punjab’s social and religious pluralism, and under colonialism, support for political power-sharing and multiculturalism. And within the diaspora, the Sikhs have pioneered campaigns to ensure better protection of minority cultural rights. The idea of Sikhs as a minority, therefore, is central to any discussion of Sikh nationalism: it ranges from a ‘dominant minority’ at the one extreme to diasporic cultural minorities in the West at the other.

Secondly, the role of the diaspora in the development of Sikh nationalism is integral to any study of the subject. Somewhat unusually, the Sikh diaspora emerged simultaneously with the rise of modern Sikh nationalism, and almost a century later, the diaspora and the homeland remain mutually dependent – a dependence reinforced by common religious institutions and transnational networks of business, family and religious and non-religious philanthropy that has remained largely unmapped. This dependence has been overshadowed by the literature after 1984 in which the Sikh diaspora is reinterpreted as an exemplar of long-distance diasporic nationalism (Appadurai 1990; Anderson 1992; Tatla 1999; Axel 2001). While these studies captured descriptively the new activism of migrant communities from the South in the increasingly globalised West, they are unable to explain the rise and fall of Sikh nationalists’ activism in the West or India. More seriously, they largely reproduce the official narratives of successive governments of India that portrayed the regional autonomy movement led by the SAD in the Punjab as diaspora and Pakistan-led, to the neglect of the legitimate constitutional, economic, political and cultural demands. As the recent farmers’ agitation in the Punjab and northern India has illustrated (June 2019–November 2021), the diaspora remains a weather vane, ever subject to, and dependent on, events from South Asia rather than an independent variable that shapes them (Singh 1999).

Thirdly, the rise of religious nationalism since the end of the Cold War offers a critique of Indian nationalism and the secular state as the guarantor of minority religious rights. Since independence, the Sikh question in Indian politics has posed a sharp counterpoint to Congress’s civic conception of nationalism (Nayar 1966). Yet the relative ease with which this vision has been now supplanted by Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party requires us to rethink the origins of religious nationalism in India before 1947 and how the institutional structures created after 1947 to manage religious diversity worked to reinforce domination and control over religious minorities (van der Veer 1994; Kim 2017). One consequence of this policy was to strengthen the close nexus between religion and nationalism among these communities by frustrating the development of viable civil society, an outcome that has seriously limited the political autonomy of religious minority elites (Kim 2019).

The literature on religious nationalism requires a critique of secularism both as an ideology of nationalism and of the secular state in managing the religious and political demands of the Sikhs in post-1947 India. But it would be misleading to view Sikhism as a political religion a la Islam. Instead, the close fusion of religion and nationalism has produced something akin to a sense of ‘sacred communion’ that is ‘devoted to the cult of authenticity and the ideals of national autonomy, unity and identity in a historic homeland’ (Smith 2003b, 254). This unique fusion of religion and attachment to the Punjab helps explain the intensity of feeling, the loyalty and violence which so often characterises Sikh nationalism; it also, importantly, accounts for the limits on Sikh elites’ ability to manipulate the community’s identity for their political ends.

Applying the integrated approach

Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach provides a useful overarching way to locate the emergence of modern Sikh nationalism around the Khalsa ethnie, why this identity above all others came to be the differentiator of Sikhs from Hindu society as well as the driver for self-governance, autonomy and self-determination. Moreover, it is important to recognise the significance of Sikhs as a minority both in the Punjab and the global diaspora, a distinctive minority whose outlook has very much been shaped by the wider world around them. The nation and state-building efforts of the Congress and the Muslim League before 1947 and of India and Pakistan after 1947 have significantly influenced the political character of modern Sikh nationalism, its accommodation to the division of the Punjab and India on religious lines against the preferred ideal of a religiously plural and multicultural post-colonial Punjab with a substantial Muslim population. Furthermore, it is necessary to read the diaspora and the politics of the Sikhs in the Punjab as mutually dependent. The bias in the existing academic literature and policy analysis of Sikh activism in the West on the relative autonomy of the diaspora as an agent of change in shaping, defining and determining the nature of modern Sikh nationalism needs to be corrected by a serious analysis of its continued inter-dependence on the homeland. And finally, the rise of religious nationalism in India and elsewhere since 1979 calls into question the nature of secular nationalism and the secular state in India after 1947, how non-Hindu religious minorities have been politically managed.

The three main narratives of modern Sikh identity noted above which now shape the community’s outlook are deeply braided: they intersect and overlap in complex ways in different contexts. However, this overlap does not mean, as Brass (1974) pointed out, that Sikh nationalism as a sociological and political phenomenon is beyond the realms of analysis. Thus, until the Equality Act (2010) in the United Kingdom only the Jews and the Sikhs of the country’s religious communities were recognised as an ‘ethnic group’ protected under the Race Relations Act (1976). Like in the case of the Jews, a reading of modern nationalism among Sikhs is possible if its religious and ethnic roots and character are acknowledged.

As a religious minority within its homeland and the diaspora, the history of the Sikhs offers important areas for comparative reflection.

Socially complex minorities, like the Jews and the Sikhs, which are often defined by religion, are not unamenable to frameworks of ethnicity and nationalism (Smith 1999, 203–224). For such minorities, religion occludes other subjectivities and patterns of behaviour. Religion provides Sikh nationalism’s ethnie but it is very much a modern nationalism constructed by the conditions of colonial modernity. Sikhism itself has struggled to produce a modern, trans-local community of culture. The melding of religion with the identity of a nation has formed a powerful counterpoint to the idea of India as a secular nation and state; crucially, it also problematises recent reflections on religious nationalism that view it as a totalising phenomenon (Friedland 2002).

As a colonial, postcolonial and, indeed, a diaspora minority, the Sikh case also demonstrates how minorities have been influenced, and in turn shaped, the regimes that have managed them. The gradual democratisation by the Raj forced the Sikhs to reflect on their position as a once-dominant minority, to negotiate the dilemmas of mass democracy by embracing consociationalism, multiculturalism and ideas of a non-majoritarian post-colonial national government – ideas that were accommodated by plural conceptions of Sikh sovereignty. In the diaspora, the Sikh case also refocuses attention on the contribution of minorities from the global South in the cultural democratisation of the public sphere in western liberal democracies, including the acceptance of polyethnic rights (Kymlicka 1995; Singh and Tatla 2006). And equally important is the need for more comparative research on how transnational communities like the Sikhs have been able to foster new imaginaries of de-territorialised nationalism.

Furthermore, the Sikhs, like the Baluchis, Kashmiris, Nagas, Tamils (in Sri Lanka) Scots, Catalans, and until recently, the Kurds, are what Guibernau (1999) has called ‘nations without states’. In particular, the Sikh case suggests the need for a more systematic evaluation of how such nations and ‘nationalism of small peoples’ both negotiate the dilemmas of ‘post sovereignty’ while being subject to what Connor (1972) termed ‘nation-destroying’. Since 1947 in India this process has unfolded within the framework of democratic majoritarianism with an assertive nation and state-building in the peripheral regions. The rise of Hindu nationalism, with its symbolic abrogation of Article 370, signals a strategic shift in how some religious minorities are to be managed in the future – a development with profound implications for the post-1947 order.

Finally, the integrated framework applied in Sikh Nationalism suggests the need to reflect on the utility of critical theory that has dominated Sikh Studies. At best it offers a critique, not a fully-developed perspective that can adequately explain the social and political dimensions of Sikh nationalism. It is now time to take the study of Sikh nationalism seriously.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An ethnie is a French term for an ethnic community. Such a community is ‘distinguished by both members and outsiders as possessing the attributes of: (1) an identifying name or emblem; (2) a myth of common ancestry; (3) shared historical memories and traditions; (4) one or element of a common culture; a link with an historic territory or ‘homeland’; (5) a measure of solidarity, at least among the elites’ (Smith 1999, 13).

2 By postcolonialism, we refer to any approach which seeks to examine the impact of colonisation in former colonies from the perspective of the colonised. Although influenced by poststructuralism, postcolonialism has a more pronounced normative commitment to decolonisation, see Seth, Gandhi, and Dutton (1998, 7–11).

3 Globalisation is a contested term but refers to how we now live in one world. The argument made by globalisation theorists in the late twentieth century was that advances in information and communication technology and the concomitant deregulation of the global markets had created an embryonic global civil society which transcended the borders of nation-states. For an introduction to the globalisation debate, see Held and McGrew (2000).

4 To be precise, this is dated from the Iranian revolution in 1979. However, the intensity of this phenomenon coincides with the end of the Cold War (1989) and the onset of globalisation.

5 For further discussion of the limits of the gender-centric and feminist critiques of nationalism, see Smith (2003a, 210).

6 See footnote 1 above for a definition of ethnie.

7 Historically, the Sikhs, like Ulster Unionists, and Indians and Chinese in Africa and East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are sometimes referred to as ‘dominant minorities’ who exercised political or economic control because of colonisation or their economic power. Under the Raj, the metaphors of ‘Ulster’ for the Punjab and ‘Protestant’ for Sikhs were regularly used in colonial thinking.