This book examines the social and cultural textures of contemporary Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas in respect to experiences and memories of violence. It takes the form of an ethnography of precarious subject positions and vulnerable social relations that is grounded in methods of anthropological fieldwork and qualitative sociological research. Fieldwork and close to seventy-five in-depth narrative interviews with members of both communities in Frankfurt and Toronto were conducted in intermittent phases between 2003 and 2013. It is through the materials gathered in this ten-year period that the book is able to capture the different ways in which violence has entered the lives of my interlocutors, especially those situated at social and political margins. My work dovetails with newer diaspora studies that have paid close attention to the precarization of lifeworlds and the differentiating effects of specific violent events around which diasporic groups have mobilized and the extent to which this mobilization is contingent on local, institutional, and other sociological factors such as class, gender, race, and age, among others. Age has recently come to the forefront of some of these studies in the form of the new interest in the political subject of youth and through a reconsideration of intergenerational transmission. Yet despite the centrality and longstanding interest in the subject of generational transfers, says Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, âthe diverse ways in which children and youth âinherit,â contest and negotiate diasporic identities have infrequently been examinedâ (ibid. 877). By putting the theme of generations and diasporic youth identities at the center, the book aims to show how younger generations of Ahmadis and Sikhs have had to negotiate both the legacies of past violence and the objectifying categorizations and normative regulations of current citizenship regimes.
The constellation of generational change and heightened anxieties around religious otherness frames how experiences and memories of past events that coalesce in the year 1984 are evaluated in their respective role for processes of transnational migration. To those knowledgeable in the field of Sikh and Punjab Studies, one need not point out that the violence of the 1980s in Punjab led to significant changes in the demographic and political map of Sikh and Ahmadiyya communities worldwide. This topic has been discussed at length in the scholarship on Sikh diasporas and, to a lesser extent, by those working on the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamat (AMJ). By bringing together perspectives from both communities, this book rejects the exclusive use of âPunjabiâ to signify âSikhâ in diaspora studies and steers away from methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002). Instead, it provides an inquiry into precarious religious subjectivities, something that has attracted little attention and conceptual elaboration despite the longstanding scholarly interest in social marginality in diaspora studies and precarity in the sociology of labor migration. There have been numerous excellent studies in these areas that will be referenced in this book. Similarly, I am indebted to newer contributions in anti-racism and postcolonialism that have tackled the prevailing suspicion against racialized religious others among anti-immigrant movements and in the context of the ongoing global war on terror. Yet I find there is often little differentiation within critical scholarship as to how categories of religion are internally produced and disputed. Moreover, the many anthropological and sociological studies on the revival of Islam among Muslim youth in Europe and North America, which are interested in precisely such modes of production and contestation, rarely expand their conclusions on how to rethink specific genealogies of diaspora and the diasporic. Here too there is far less transparency about the specific nodal points where societal norms of recognition and regulation intersect with the prevailing identity politics of hegemonic diasporas and transnational religious organizations.
Hegemonic diasporas are the consequence of the specific conditions under which migrant groups create social imaginaries of belonging that link past and present, homelands and new lands. They are formed through a variety of cultural and political practices, reflecting the agentive role of social actors of a broad societal spectrum, not just the power elites. But those who occupy key positions in religious organizations, cultural associations, activist groups, and other such sites of institutionalization, assume important roles through their strategic acts in mobilizing specific sectors within increasingly global communities. They might either dissuade or persuade group members from acknowledging heterodox positions and pluralism in values, practices, and cultural articulations; they might seek new alliances or espouse more clear-cut separations among different groups. Hegemonies are thus never unquestioned and have increasingly become âscattered,â to borrow a concept from Grewal and Kaplanâs (1994) work on transnational feminism. The voices of gendered and racialized subjects in migration are not only audible today, but also formative for how alternative projects of diasporas have been imagined (El-Tayeb 2011). This is not always recognized in the current debates on immigration and diasporas. Current public debates often remain exclusively focused on religious extremism and socially deviant youth. In post-9/11 contexts, this issue is widely discussed in regard to the phenomenon of second-generation migrant youth being drawn to join groups such as Salafists or explicitly militant organizations in Syria and elsewhereâan issue that continues to dominate debates in Western publics. Liberal governments have actively supported and enabled moderate and tolerant forms of Islam to be officially recognized and incorporated into the nation-state. In both Canada and Germany, the visibility of moderate Islam is justified with reference to the messages of peace and tolerance that are promoted by communities such as the AMJ. Hisham Aidi (2014) argues that this search for tolerant religious others poses its own conundrum insofar as genealogies of religion and religiosity are selectively read and rendered useful for political purposes within the ideological fabric of reigning global powers. The search for the âpacifist Sikhâ as opposed to the âterrorist Sikhâ has been part of precisely the same political process (Bhogal 2011; Mandair 2011).This book thus poses the question: At such nodal points of scattered hegemony, how do specific representations and responses to violence and suffering carry an agentive role?
In order to tackle this question we must first shift attention to the boundary-setting and boundary-transgressing practices of particular religious formations by reconsidering them as the product of a deep genealogy of cultural and political encounters with âthe Westâ that coalesced in colonial and postcolonial discourses on religious identity. The application of this lens reveals the aftereffects of the violent partition of India, which has left its deep mark on so-called âcommunal relationsâ in India and Pakistan after 1947. One motivation for writing this book, which I share with many of my colleagues in the field, is to carve out the material and discursive forces of violent partitions and their ideological segregations, the consequences of which are still deeply felt among South Asians across the globe. The specific sites of diaspora formation examined in this book are shaped by this historical predicament. My initial remarks thus also serve to make explicit what little interest I have in a comparative project that would juxtapose two groups around fixed (religious) identity parameters or benchmark achievements in social and cultural incorporation on the basis of ideological stances, normative assumptions, or some measurable social or economic characteristics. We need to scrutinize the immigrant success and model minority discourse that gives rise to such comparisons and tends to bolster precisely those voices that assert key positions in representing their respective communities as âmodel minoritiesâ (Sian 2013). As my chapters in this book will explicate, this is not to ignore differences in the forms of institutionalization, social incorporation, and the exclusion of âethnicâ and âreligious minorities.â Close attention must be paid to the specific genealogies and forms of religious and political transnationalism, as well as the unique histories of each communityâs respective encounters with the postcolonial state and the Western liberal state. Historical experiences continue to affect diasporic imaginaries and transnational social and political engagements in ways that are specific to Sikh and Ahmadiyya communities. Challenging the tendency to treat these perspectives in separate bodies of scholarship, I examine the interconnected histories through which we can reconsider the societal and cultural processes of global migration as well as the particularities of events and temporalities. This is, for me, an ongoing labor.
1984
From these different vantage points, I ask how we can approach and contextualize a historical date thatâespecially in the discourses of my Sikh intervieweesâhas become somewhat of a paradox. In some accounts, 1984 is the dominant organizing idiom for identity narratives; in others, it is more of an impasse for future-oriented community work and engagement with the teachings of the Sikh Gurus. There is no doubt that 1984 signals an open wound due to the complete lack of justice served for the mass murder (and what could arguably be called a genocide) and because the Indian State continues to actively inhibit reconciliation efforts more than thirty years later. Much of the thirtieth year anniversary events in the diaspora have lamented this fact. At the same time, 1984 has also acquired the status of a founding story or myth in Sikh diaspora representationsâone that tends to freeze time in images of horror and the spectacular that, as Veena Das (2007) has demonstrated, are notoriously difficult to work through ethnographically.
A few anecdotal insights illustrate the paradoxical position of 1984 in accounts: A friend of mine who at one point had the chance to speak as a young representative of Sikhs at the United Nations was, rather than being lauded for his achievement, rebuked by his father for omitting 1984 from his speech. Sukhbirâs father, himself a post-1984 refugee who struggled for many years to acquire citizenship in his new country couldnât get over the fact that Sukhbir did not use this opportunity to speak to the prime political cause. Gurjot recalling his education at Sikh youth camps, expressed the feeling that âall history seems to ends with 1984,â while Harjant referred to 1984 as a âred herringâ that prevented Sikh youth movements to step out of âethnic enclave politicsâ and offered an interpretation of how to read those events as part of an ongoing project of neocolonial violence. It is the normative burden of 1984 that is expressed here: as a requisite reference for diasporic representation on the world stage, as an affective category that evokes a sense of frozen time, and as a politicized trump card that problematizes heterodox perspectives and consolidates separations between groups. There are thus a number of issues buried here, including the questions of historical memory and colonialism, continuities and change in religious knowledge and how to decipher biographies of violence and suffering, all of which will be addressed further on.
The year 1984 is not an arbitrary reference point: neither for the generation that had witnessed the violent upheavals in Punjab on a personal level, nor for the next generation that has dealt with stories and silences pervading social spaces of family and community. In Sikh discourses, 1984 marks a key moment of being projected as terrorists in the global public sphere. The events of the Indian Armyâs attack on the Sikh Golden Temple (in June 1984), which were followed (in October and November 1984) by the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and the subsequent politically orchestrated Delhi riots against Sikhs, had the effect of victimizing and mobilizing large sectors of the global Sikh community. A decade of political violence ensued that saw the rise of Sikh militancy and the Indian stateâs brutal repression of widespread unrest and violence through anti-terrorism operations such as forced detainment, widespread disappearances of young male Sikhs, and systemic torture of both male and female detainees in Punjabâs prisons. The role of 1984 in Sikh diaspora discourses has been the subject of several seminal contributions in the field (e.g. Axel 2001; Bhogal 2011; Mahmood 2010; Shani 2010; Tatla 2006). The issue has led to vicious divides within Sikh Studies, as âconstructivistâ arguments by âWestern academicsâ that seemed to undermine Sikh identity claims were forcefully rejected in the 1990s by a range of political actors in Punjab and its diasporas. 1 A generation later, it has also triggered new intellectual, artistic, and political responsesâthe subject of later chapters. These interventions render visible what has transpired for this generation as a stigma and challenge, but also an opportunity: While youth have had experiences after 9/11 that heightened their sense of being associated with a suspicious religious identity, they also grasp new potentials for translocal social justice work as part of their engagement in religion. Whereas youth events that cater to a prevailing sentiment of 1984 justice issues are to some extent the out...