Britain’s Sikhs, long seen as a minority
success story, are plagued by a faction of young men ‘defending’ their vision
of the culture – and seeking to impose their views by attacking the nuptials of
women who marry ‘out’
It was meant to be the happiest
day of their lives – a celebration of modern multicultural Britain at the
biggest Sikh gurdwara (temple) in the Western world. On 7 August 2015, in west
London, a British Sikh bride and her Polish Christian groom sat together and
absorbed the religious blessings at their wedding ceremony. She wore a cream
and red dress, while he wore a red turban, in keeping with Sikh traditions.
But that morning, 20 uninvited men were determined to put a stop
to the wedding. They stormed upstairs to the main hall and demanded that the
priests end the ceremony, hurling insults at people who objected. One of them
told a priest that, if their demands weren’t met, he would get 1,000 of his
friends to come to the temple within the hour. The police were called and
eventually the couple were forced to proceed into a hurried ceremony, while the
protesters watched and took pictures of them to publish online.
This was not an isolated
incident. The next weekend an interfaith wedding in Lozells, Birmingham, nearly
turned into a mass brawl after protesters tried to stop it and, again, the
police had to be called. The following weekend, another wedding in Coventry
only managed to go ahead after some negotiations with the disrupters. In each
case, the bride was a Sikh woman and the groom a non-Sikh man.
Under the media radar, such disruptions of interfaith marriages
at Sikh gurdwaras have become worryingly commonplace across Britain. In July
2013, a Sikh woman and her Christian husband in Swindon were locked out of
their own wedding by 40 protesters, who afterwards posted a gleeful video
online of the bride’s mother pleading with them to stop. When the BBC Asian
Network looked into the controversy that year, its reporter met a family who’d
had their windows smashed as a warning about an upcoming marriage. Most were
too afraid to say anything in public.
But not Sim Kaur. One of the very few Sikh women willing to
speak about her experience, she says: “Our gurdwaras are run by men and the
protesters are all men. All the cancellations I’ve heard about have been of
Sikh women marrying non-Sikh men or men not born into the Sikh religion and I
doubt that’s a coincidence. I do believe it’s a faith issue, but it’s also
about gender and race.”
Her wedding to her partner,
Sam, was disrupted earlier this year, even though he had made an effort to
learn about Sikhism and adopted Singh in his name, under guidelines laid out by
the Sikh Council UK, an organisation set up in 2010 to deal with issues
affecting the Sikh community in Britain and Europe. “Isn’t it better,” she
asks, “that we teach our partners and their friends and family about this
ceremony and invite them in, rather than building a wall and creating a
divide?”
Sikh radicalism is rarely debated in the media. British Sikhs –
who number about 400,000 – are largely seen as a model minority who aren’t
embroiled in controversies or plagued by extremists as Muslims are. But scratch
the surface and there are signs of a growing divide between the liberal and
more conservative Sikhs here, and the controversy around interfaith marriages
goes to the heart of the problem.
Until I posted several videos of wedding disruptions to my
Facebook page last month, there seemed to be barely any debate about why they
were happening. Immediately, I was subjected to a torrent of abuse and threats,
but also heard from dozens of Sikhs (mostly women) who had faced a similar kind
of intimidation. Most British Sikhs I have spoken to feel shocked and
embarrassed that weddings in the UK are being disrupted in this way, but are
usually too worried about the backlash from fundamentalists to say so openly –
and it is a very British phenomenon. The controversy has barely affected India,
home to 90 per cent of the world’s 20 million Sikhs, where interfaith marriages
(especially to Hindus) are common.
One might, then, conclude that this issue was about race and the
diaspora – but the experience of North America, where nearly a million Sikhs
live, says differently. Amardeep Singh, associate professor at Lehigh
University in Philadelphia, says that they have a more relaxed approach there,
largely because there aren’t such concentrations of Sikhs as there are in
London and Birmingham. “Sikh communities in the US are so suburban and
spatially dispersed. Most of us commute some distance by car just to reach the
nearest gurdwara.”
In the UK, then, we seem to be
dealing with people who believe they have sufficient density of numbers to
preserve some kind of cultural purity if they cleave to the example of the Sikh
homeland (where, in fact, such fundamentalism is rare). However, those who
support the disruptions say they are not opposed to interfaith marriages per
se, but are only trying to enforce religious guidelines.
In 1950, Sikh scholars and priests in India agreed on a code of
conduct, after multiple attempts, to define what it meant to be a Sikh and what
obligations should be placed on followers. It stated that the Sikh wedding
ceremony (the Anand Karaj) could only take place between two Sikhs of the
opposite sex.
Shamsher Singh, of the National Sikh Youth Federation, says it
objects to this religious ceremony being appropriated by non-Sikhs. “They can
have prayers inside the gurdwara, they can have part of the function inside a
gurdwara, just not the religious ceremony. That’s reserved for those of the
Sikh faith.”
Others say this attitude ignores Sikh history. Amandeep Madra,
co-founder of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, says that, until recently
“Sikh traditions were highly pluralistic, with a willingness to learn and
coexist with other concordant traditions. This is one of the most culturally
appealing aspects of Sikhism in a modern, multicultural world. However, there
has always been a more fearful voice that is threatened by the danger of being
assimilated and indistinguishable from others.”
So the rise of Sikh fundamentalism in the UK isn’t just an
attempt to enforce rules: it is also the expression of a worry among young
rank-and-file males that Sikhs are becoming too integrated. To them, it is
profoundly disturbing that a recent poll of members by City Sikhs, a
6,000-strong organisation representing professional Sikhs in the UK, should
show an overwhelming majority in favour of gurdwaras allowing interfaith
marriages.
To understand this, one must look to the history of Sikhi [the
Sikh faith], the youngest of the world’s major religions, founded by Guru Nanak
Dev Ji in the late 1400s. He was the first of 10 gurus (teachers) who left
behind their collective wisdom in the holy scriptures, the Sri Guru Granth
Sahib, also known as “The Living Guru”. In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh Ji decided
to give Sikhs a visual identity to distinguish them from others. From then on,
the Khalsa (baptised) Sikhs were required to carry five articles of faith at
all times: uncut hair, a sword, comb, clean clothes and a metal bracelet. A
large proportion of Sikhs remain unbaptised, freeing themselves from one or
more requirements – they are usually called sahajdari, which could
translate as “slow adopters” – but they still practise the religion in other
ways.
Since Sikhi was founded, its
adherents in India have faced persecution from Mughal emperors, Hindu kings and
the British Raj. Thirty years ago, thousands were killed by Indian troops in an
anti-separatist attack on its Golden Temple, and in the pogroms that followed
the retaliatory assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Among some, this
has led to a defensive mentality – exacerbated by worries that the religion is
being diluted as new converts come into the fold – and this is what lies behind
their radical puritanism.
So, while many Sikhs are integrating into British culture,
others gravitate towards religion as their main primary identity. Shamsher
Singh is one. “We’re dealing with complex issues of identity,” he says. “The
intersection of our sense of self with coloniality has created this hybrid,
stateless individual that struggles at every juncture with validation and
having to constantly justify their beliefs and the practice of their religion
to a Westernised audience. I’m living in an age where individuals on the
periphery, with tenuous links to the community, are telling those of us who
have committed to the Sikh way how we must interpret and practice Sikhi.”
Many worry that such attitudes will eventually shrink the
community here, not strengthen it. Pippa Virdee, a senior lecturer on South
Asian History at De Montfort University, says: “There has generally been a
greater assertion of what it is to be Sikh in the last 10 to 15 years. That
identity has become exclusive and serves to exclude people who see themselves
as Sikhs but may not be practising. Increasingly, I feel we are told – often by
men and by so-called leaders of the faith – what is a good Sikh. This will
serve only to alienate people.”
As I can attest. After I posted videos of wedding disruptions, I
was personally threatened and slandered on Sikh websites. People made up lies
about me and I was accused of being a “traitor”. And my experience wasn’t rare.
Two years ago, Kamalroop Singh, a turban-wearing and fully baptised Sikh, had
his car windows smashed after he criticised Sikh fanaticism on a web forum. The
incident left his children terrified and his wife ended up having a
miscarriage, which the couple attributed to the stress. It wasn’t the first
time he had been threatened and such incidents aren’t uncommon, he says. “They
[Sikh radicals] really are just thugs who use the religion as their
justification for intimidation and violence.” And last year Dr Gurnam Singh,
principal lecturer at Coventry University, had to stop presenting a show
on the Birmingham-based Sikh Channel after signing an online petition to stop
“radicalisation of young, British-born Punjabi/Sikh males”.
And it is males at the heart of this issue. Many Sikhs see the
bid to stop inter-religious marriages as an attempt by men to control Sikh
women and stop them from marrying “out”. This sexist mentality surely has its
roots in the (60 per cent Sikh) state of Punjab, which has among the lowest
ratios of women to men in India due gender-selective abortions, infanticide, neglect
of girls, rape and dowry-related murders. In some areas there are just 300
women to 1,000 men. There are laws against gender selection; there is an
increasing number of educational campaigns; there are even media “stings “ in
which doctors are filmed helping parents to abort female foetuses. Yet the
ratio of girls to boys under the age of six has continued to decline.
Some Sikhs see the sexist
attitudes in Britain and ask why there is an obsessive focus on interfaith
marriages here when the larger Sikh community faces far more pressing problems.
“If they so love Sikhi, why not question the high rate of female foeticide
within the Sikh community as a hindrance ... rather than attempting to
bar non-Sikhs from the marriage ceremony?” asks writer and journalist Herpreet
Kaur Grewal.
Meanwhile, this controversy isn’t going to go away soon. The
2011 British Census found that 1.8 per cent of Sikhs (7,600 people) identified
as white, while 1.2 per cent (5,000) identified as mixed-race, and it’s likely
a large proportion of them do so through marriage to Sikhs, rather than
conversion. If those numbers grow, and as some grow more liberal, the
differences with more radical Sikhs will grow starker.
Jonathan Evans, who calls himself Jonny Singh, emailed me about
his experience of moving closer to Sikhism after his marriage to a British Sikh
woman. “If my wife and I were forced to abandon our Anand Karaj like couples in
the UK are being forced to now, would I have felt the same about the vision of
Sikhism as I do now?” he asks. “As humans we are shaped by our experiences. I
would never have become a Sikh if I was not married in the gurdwara.”
