I got an opportunity to make a concerted study around the community through a post-doctoral project. Exploring existing research on the community provided many answers but also left certain gaps. While there is a focus on the religious identity of Sikhs, there is less work on its social trajectories. As a result, there is not much context around the community’s contemporary social profiles or the transitions which have led to them. The book is titled The Sikh Next Door precisely because I wanted to talk of Sikhs in normal everyday urban contexts, even as I traced the trajectories which have led them there.

The book maintains a balance between academic language and a conversational tone. Was that a conscious decision aimed at making the work more accessible to a wider readership?

Yes. The point of writing the book was to have people read it. A lot of good academic work gets confined to libraries. My purpose was to build a broader perspective on the community, and contribute to its integration within social cognition.

Many who have read it, have noticed that the preface and the introduction to the book are very personal in nature and address the reader directly. The focus on creating an urban framework was also intended to provide context to the community’s immediate lives, which sometimes gets lost in the focus on particular parts of history, which have come to define it.

The book talks of the community’s undermined heterogeneity, its transitions through time, and the need to bring these into the frame. Simple conversational language was best suited to it. Perhaps that is the reason it has succeeded in making a crossover from being an academic work to one which is being well received by the general reader. The recently released paperback version is testimony to this.

How did you go about narrowing down the strands that you have chosen as your chapters in the book? Were there some you had envisioned but didn’t make it to the final publication stage?

The strands chosen are the ones around which I found the greatest discrepancies existing. We continue to perceive the community through a historical lens. History focuses on certain defining turns, involving particular sections of the community. Many other, in the process, get relegated to the background. The other problem with this approach is that it does not take into account the transitions through time and space. The shifts incurred through urbanization, the changes relating to the movement out of Punjab, the mutations resulting from shifts out of the country, are some of these. While a strong religious affiliation persists through these shifts, the individual trajectories and shaping influences of each of them has had its impact.

A separate focus on Sikh women was initiated by a desire to break through the general tendency to equate Sikh identity with the more visible male turbaned identity. Sikh women have had their own history of negotiating through a conservative social structure and a modern intellectual tradition created by the Gurus. How this has played out in the present, makes an interesting study.

The section on stereotypes around the Sikhs was inspired by contradiction between how the community is supposed to respond to it and how it actually does. Delving into how humour operates makes us look into social anxieties and group boundaries. If you must laugh at yourself to be part of a group, then humour becomes a tool of social control.

Yes, there is much that I wrote which did not make its way into the book. Among this is a full chapter on literary representations around the community. I believe literature is an effective medium for exploring experience, whether personal or collective. However, that chapter did not seem to fit with the rest of the book. Hopefully it will be used in a future project.

The chapter entitled Nudged Out of the Narrative: The Trader/Professional Sikh is a history of how the religion evolved to its present institutionalised form without recourse to any language of mysticism. Did you, in the process of writing the book, fear facing resistance from the community?

I don’t think the community would have any issues with what I have written. The philosophy integral to the Sikh religion, and the tenets incorporated into the community’s everyday life practices remain of utmost important to anyone professing the faith. The last chapter also talks of the tenacious common thread binding together the community, despite its diversity and shifting demography. If I have not used a language of mysticism, it is because the focus of this book is Sikh social identity, and mysticism is not a subject I would venture into lightly. It is a separate area of study, and there are people better equipped to deal with it.

Please walk us through your research methodology and the archival sources you drew on to reconstruct narratives of how the colonial gaze led to a lot of the current stereotypes around the Sikh identity.

Most of the information on the construction of Sikh identity through the colonial interaction comes from secondary sources chosen with care for their own primary research. It has been to my benefit that serious work has been done on many facets of Sikh identity. Placing the insights accrued to construct a larger story which fills in the blanks was my primary focus. There are different in-group narratives within the community. To discover links which could bridge them together was important.

Apart from collating existing research, there was also first-hand collection of information. Interaction with the community within India involved unstructured conversations, separate questionaries for men, women and the relatively younger generation of boys and girls. Talking to the older generation made me realize what we are losing out by not collating what they have to say. I have since had my father maintain a notebook in which he is writing of his memories of childhood spent in Quetta, Baluchistan, of living in a flour mill in Sirhind post-Partition, of shifting between cities with no place to call home, and eventually settling down in Delhi etc. To understand what was lost in terms of culture and roots is to understand how it has impacted subsequent generations.

I am thankful to a lot of people who have helped me source material on the community outside India, particularly in areas like South East Asia, because generally the focus remains on the diaspora in the West. The history of Sikhs in Shanghai is a story that remains to be told. Analysing popular culture, including music, cinema, and social media has offered interesting insights too.

Which chapters were particularly challenging?

I think it was the chapter on the trader Sikhs. It is surprising that there is hardly any research on them despite the fact that they are a significant presence in places like Delhi and other north Indian cities. They were also, at one time, a significant and prominent part of the evolving religious identity of Sikhs.

I found very little on them. I had to piece together personal information with works of literature, vet them with information from research works whose primary focus was not the community, and contextualize the information within the conversations I was having with people.

The very lack of information reflects the losses they have suffered in terms of their social and cultural identity. Historical processes, including the colonial experience and Partition, displaced them from their once entrenched lives and also from the place within the community.

You mention how, in the lead up to the 1984 pogrom, there was a construction of the Sikh as the antagonistic and dangerous ‘Other’ via the ideological state apparatus. Do contemporary media narratives constructed, for instance, during the farmers’ protests, continue to help in creating narratives of the terrorist, separatist Sikh as well as contributing to the existing focus on the agricultural Sikh as the representative of a complex religious community? In the current socio-political climate, how important is such an exposition of the nuances and complexities of Sikh traditions?

The Sikh Next Door aims at acquainting the reader with the person behind the image. It introduces sections of people who belong to the community but do not fit into the general understanding of what a Sikh is like. It also invites the reader to participate in the reformulation of understanding around the community’s social profile. One of the advantages of writing the book in English is that one can hope to be read by a larger number of people.

What are you working on next?

A work of fiction around the community, which is, however, a long-term project.

Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.