ABSTRACT
The third chapter explores the spatial and temporal journeys of Sikh women who came of age in villages in undivided British Punjab. It examines a fundamental difference in the global migration experiences of Sikh men and women. In contrast to men, women experienced a double passage—first as young brides relocating from their natal to their in-laws’ villages, and subsequently, joining their husbands in California's Sacramento Valley. Women first experienced displacement at a young age after marriage. They had been culturally groomed from birth that they were “someone else's wealth” in order to prepare them for their relocation after marriage. The second journey across multiple oceans, by contrast, was unexpected and unimaginable. For the women in this book, the trauma of displacement was inversely correlated to the geographical distances they traversed. Women reported that their departure from their birth families after marriage in their girlhood was as or more painful than their subsequent journeys to California over 7400 miles away from Punjab. The chapter interweaves a close interpretation of wedding songs together with women's oral narratives. A clear theme emerged from Punjabi women's folk songs in which women were associated with flight and the fluidity of water, whereas men were fixed in place to inherited land. Women's mobility narratives emphasized local settings—like pearls scattered across the seas—separated by vast geographical distances rather than emphasizing national narratives of migration and cultural change. The Partition of 1947 added another layer of trauma to this generation of women's psyches, even though most remained in villages in India after 1947.
