London Sikh Youth as British Citizenry

In 1967 Gurdip Singh Aurora described first-generation Sikhs in London as “frontiersmen” due to three challenges they faced (Aurora, 1967). Nearly five decades later Britain’s Sikhs are less concerned about employment and housing, but “cultural distance” still persists. This prohibits socio-psychological acculturation and prevents Sikhs being rightly perceived as citizenry by some of their non-Sikh peers. Much of this erroneous perception is based on earlier settler Sikh generations who do still retain some elements of being “unsettled citizens”, although most of their youth overwhelmingly self-label as British. One consequence of this complication is that the community’s position within national identity politics is both allochtoon and autochtoon or “foreign” and “born of the soil”. ¹