CULTURE FILES // STRENGTH IN COMMUNITY A WORLD APART
‘You can’t break me’
A Sikh woman from Afghanistan begins a new life with old traditions
words and images by Ildi Tillmann
EXCERPT //
Two major concepts of Sikhism are chardi kala and seva. The first is the principle of eternal optimism and resilience in the face of challenges; it is the idea that one will maintain, as Canadian community advocate and former politician Gurratan Singh put it, an attitude of “rising spirits in the face of adversity. So, not just having rising spirits because it’s a beautiful day and you’re having a great time, but having rising spirits in the face of tumultuous, tough times. ... You can't break me.” The second principle is that of selfless giving, providing for others without any expectation of result, acknowledgment, or gratitude in return.
In line with the teachings of spiritual equality, everyone, regardless of social status or religious belonging, can enter a Sikh temple and is welcome to sit on the floor with community members and share a meal with them.
While the exact numbers are hard to verify, there are about half a million Sikhs living in the United States (estimates range from 200,000 to 1 million), most of them in Northern California or the larger New York Metropolitan area. As U.S. census questionnaires demand that people self-identify by ‘race’ rather than by religion or ethnicity, Sikhs living in the United States are routinely streamlined into the category of Asian-American, ‘black-and-brown people’ or ‘people of color’ and thus often remain invisible as a distinct social group. “It used to irritate me a lot, to be called a brown person or a person of color, as those labels mean nothing to me,” Kaur said. “They are North American inventions. But now, I don’t even care. … I have better things to do than worry about that.”
Her childhood unfolded against the historical backdrop of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the resulting mujahideen resistance against it. Being a Muslim-majority country with deeply traditional social norms, the resistance movement against the Soviets had a distinctly religious, Islamic element to it. By the 1980s, a faction of the resistance movement, called the Taliban (the name meaning ‘seekers of truth’ or ‘students of truth’) was leading an increasingly violent campaign against people who were not Muslims, or who entered into commercial relations with the Soviet-backed government. Sikhs, having traditionally been members of the merchant class, engaged in extensive commercial relations with both the pre-Soviet and the Soviet governments.
“As the Taliban rose in power, our situation got worse,” remembers Kaur. “Our houses were searched, our families intimidated. When I was thirteen, a girl close to my age, whom I knew from the gurdwara, was kidnapped, raped, and beaten to death, her body dropped in front of her parents’ house. … It was a message, the meaning of which was hard to misunderstand. If you fail to join us, you will suffer the same fate. After my father had been beaten almost to death by Taliban soldiers, we decided to leave Afghanistan. We crossed through Pakistan, staying at various Sikh temples along the way, helped by other Sikhs my father knew. Sikh people always help each other out—it is our tradition. … We went to India, where the government offered refugee visas to Sikhs and Hindus persecuted in Muslim-majority countries.
“We lived in New Delhi for the next six years, where my father rebuilt his business as a pharmacist. But politics turned against the Sikhs in India as well, and we were never granted citizenship rights. We still couldn’t have a full life. … When my uncle introduced his younger friend who lived in the United States to my father, as a potential husband for one of his daughters, the next step on my life-path was set. I arrived in Pennsylvania to get married, and I lived there for the next fifteen years of my life.”
Kaur’s description of her first years in the United States tells two conflicting stories: one about liberation, peace, and self-examination, but also one about the forces of custom and tradition, the entanglements of which can be hard to put aside.
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