Becoming Men in the Global Village

The historical production of Punjabi masculinities, largely viewed as disjunctive with Indian hegemonic masculinity, has received considerable academic attention in the past two decades. The production of Sikh masculinity in relation to the metaphor of “the saint warrior” (sant-sipahi) in the khalsa discourse of Sikhism, of “the martial races” in British imperialism and of “the hardy cultivator” in Indian nationalism has been revealed to be crossed over by sect and caste in addition to gender and race. Historians have thrown considerable light on the social and ideological construction of certain colonized bodies as the martial races and traced the construction of the Sikhs as a martial race to Sikh loyalty to the British during the First War of Independence in 1857 (Sinha, 1995; Chowdhury, 1998; Streets, 2004). In contrast to postcolonial historians who have largely focused on the ideologies of race and gender in producing Sikh masculinity, Sikh scholars have situated it in the androcentric hermeneutics governing Sikh studies in interpreting Sikh scriptures (Kaur Singh, 1993). More recent work has uncovered the workings of gender within Sikh religious identity (Jakobsh, 2005; Dhavan, 2011), or the imbrication of caste with gender and religion (Mooney, 2011). It is only lately that the complicity of other Punjabi masculinities in producing hegemonic Sikh masculinity and its relation to non-hegemonic Sikh masculinities has been uncovered (Ram, 2008). Together, these studies complicate the unified narrative of Sikh/Punjabi masculinity that has dominated both descriptions of Sikhs in the national imaginary and in Sikh self-ascriptions and demonstrate that Sikh masculinity has been produced through the emasculation of Hindu trading (Bania), learned (Brahmin), artisanal and scavenger castes (Das, 2001). How do young Sikhs negotiate the intersections or disjunctions between multiple, multi-layered identity discourses through which Sikh masculinity has been historically constituted as they navigate complex modernities and postmodernities? How do certain Sikh masculinities enable young Sikhs to produce a discourse of masculinity through which they resist other hegemonic masculinities structured by race, religion, caste and gender relations? Young Sikhs respond to the crisis in Sikh masculinity triggered by the increasing movement of Sikhs through multiple geographies and masculinities by affirming their allegiance to primordial identifications attached to specifically Jat Sikh identities. This chapter examines contemporary bhangra ¹ texts that converge on the Jat, often interchangeable with the Sikh, narrative of masculinity through which young Sikhs dispersed across the world perform masculinities in the global era.