Young Sikhs and Literature

In a recent article about the study of the religious socialization of Sikhs, Eleanor Nesbitt recommended that researchers on Sikhism in Europe should “look at as wide a range of literature as possible” (Nesbitt, 2009, p. 53). She notes that “[B]iography, autobiography, novels, short stories and poetry offer valuable insights and can generate hypotheses and provide rich contexts of lived experience”, and asks how long it will be before “creative writing … produced by and about Sikhs in mainland Europe will become a focus of study?” (Nesbitt, 2009, p. 53). This chapter responds to this challenge and analyses books written by three Norwegian Sikhs, two born in India who migrated as children to Norway with their parents, and one born in Norway to Sikh parents from India. One is from an interfaith mixed-marriage family, in which the father is a Sikh and the mother is a Hindu. The books are two autobiographies and an autobiographical novel, the second volume of a trilogy. ¹ In this chapter I am not evaluating the literary quality of the books, but rather using them to analyse the history and experience of young Sikhs in Norway. The books give insights into the processes of growing up in between cultures, the clash of values between generations and between the Punjabi and the Norwegian cultures, the importance of locations and relations, the development of Indian Sikh immigrant culture in Norway and the impact on a personal level of the institutionalization of Sikh traditions in a new country. They problematize concepts such as “cultural” Sikh, “religious” Sikh, Norwegian Sikh and Punjabi Sikh. The books show the difficulties for the second generation to separate Punjabi culture from Sikhism as a religion. All three books describe persons moving away from Punjabi culture, and for some that also means moving away from Sikhism, but for one author there is, instead, an embracement of Sikhism.