ABSTRACT
This chapter undertakes an ethnographic analysis of the shifting meanings that the dastar (turban), as a gendered body marker, may represent for Sikh diaspora in countries of resettlement. Drawing from fieldworks in Italy and the United Kingdom, this chapter focuses on the transnational disruption between first and further migrant generations, discussing lived accounts of turban wearing among Sikh young women and men, from eager adoption to reluctant rejection. Historically, the dastar has been the prerogative of baptised Sikh males. Contemporary concerns include choice or pressure in wearing unshorn hair and the dastar, Sikh media imaginary and the dominant discourse on performing a minority politics of resistance, discrimination that the turban might prompt in diaspora contexts and recent advocacy turns including the rise of Sikh feminism. Young diaspora Sikhs are flanked between the personal and political relevance of dastar wearing, which is meant to re-cast on one’s flesh the spiritual union with God, but may often invoke other values, which are always gender specific and context dependent, yet rarely acknowledged. Explicitly, Sikh hyper-masculinity runs parallel to the upsurge of women’s dastar dress, revealing the emergence of assertive feminine subjectivities. Rather than representing one sacred dress code, this religious garment engenders multiple positionalities, where body aesthetics convey layers of competing social ethics.
