ABSTRACT
The Khalsa Samachar (KS), a weekly in Punjabi, was started by Bhai Vir Singh on 17 November, 1899 from Amritsar with goals of arousing love of religion among Sikhs, propagating the Punjabi language, advocating for the Singh Sabha ideals, establishing separate socio-religious and political identities for the Sikh community and proving loyalty toward the British. This chapter will critically analyze the treatment of women's issues in the periodical and a special column called “Istri Sudhar” (“the improvement of women,” a narrative of a then-Punjabi society steeped in social evils pertaining to women) published in the first year of the publication of KS. The goal of this chapter is to understand how new roles and possibilities were made open to women in these discourses and the ways that these new roles were at the same time configured within both existing and novel forms of patriarchal control. The KS, it is argued, utilized “women's issues” to establish the superiority of Sikh identity, in service of the perceived greater good of the Sikh community. Both men and women were made accountable if they were to contribute to the progress of Qaum, without significant change to patriarchal norms and practices.
