For 20-year-old Valarie Kaur, the Sept 11 tragedy and the violence against the Sikhs in its aftermath came as a rude awakening. “My email was flooded by stories of Sikhs who were being attacked, abused and shunned and it was then that I realized the magnitude of what was happening to the Sikhs.”

It was more than a week before the Bush administration stepped up to acknowledge that the Sikhs were also Americans and Valarie says she began to recall her school history projects designed to acquaint her classmates about partition, about 1984, events that had gone undocumented in history books. She began wondering if these atrocities on her community would also face the same historical fate. “Growing up in my small home town of Clovis in California, where every one knew each other, I was never conscious of my color and yet as I ploughed through the country I realized I’m much more a part of my community than I had realized earlier.”

With her cousin brother Amandeep, Valarie traveled all over the United States for four months, videotaping and recording the experiences of Sikh Americans, many of whom recounted horrific tales of the backlash. She learnt about a Sikh man who reached out to help near the twin towers area and had to run for his life as people turned on him accusing him of terrorism. She met a Sikh woman who was stabbed because of her color and told, “This is what you get for what your people have done to us.” It hit close to home when people began yelling at her turbaned brother and her at a gas station in Washington DC to go back to her country.

Presently Valarie is studying the effects of violence on religion at Harvard University, where she is also producing a documentary film based on her video documentation. Says Valarie of the traumatic aftermath of Sept 11: “I became a part of the dark history of terror, violence and hatred that was being created, and it has become a mission to speak up. The Sikhs must stand up and fight for themselves, because now the difference between speaking up and staying silent becomes the difference between life and death.”

Indira Assassination

Even before 9/11, Sikhs experienced hostility in the United States during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, when they were mistaken for Iranians. The Sikh separatist movement by a segment of Sikh hardliners, the government assault against rebels at the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 cast a dark shadow of suspicion over the entire Sikh population both in India and the United States.

Rana Sodhi recalls how his family in Punjab was caught up in the turmoil. “If you didn’t agree with those Sikhs who wanted to create a separate state, they came after you and, on the other hand, our businesses were closed because the government would target the Sikhs and impose indefinite curfews. So how does one survive?”

Assimilation
Because of their distinctive looks and turbans, assimilation has never been easy for Sikhs in America. The specter of terrorism, with which all Sikhs were broadly tarred, oftentimes through Indian government propaganda, made life especially hard even for Sikhs living overseas. Nevertheless, alienated as many Sikhs were from India in the 1980s, they became ever more determined to find their new identity in their adopted homeland.

Today an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Indian Sikhs live in America and another 150,000 in Canada. In addition, there are several thousand American adherents of the faith, mostly followers of Yogi Bhajan and his 3HO Foundation. Sikhs are the second largest group within the Indian community, after only the Gujaratis, constituting 10 percent of the Indian American population, which is almost five times their proportion in India.

Sikhs pioneered Indian immigration to the United States in the early 1900s, where they labored in lumber mills, railroads and forestry, concentrating specially in Yuba City and the Imperial Valley in California. Until fairly recently, Yuba City had the largest proportion of Indians in any city in the United States. Because the laborers were barred in the 1900s from bringing family, many of them ended up marrying Mexican women and today these Sikh Mexicans continue to have a very visible presence in the Imperial Valley. Indeed, the mayor of El Centro, David Singh Dhillon, is a third generation Punjabi Mexican American.

Sikhs R Us
Jeet Bindra, presently president of global refining at Chevron, arrived in Seattle in 1969 with $8. “It was a very strange feeling to be dumped in a land where no one looks like you. You wonder if they have the remotest idea where you are from, and will they treat you nicely?” Bindra, who worked as a cook and a research assistant to support his education, recalls: “I got questions like what is under the turban, why does your beard stick to your face since I tied it with a thread. It got more difficult to keep my hair when I started to work at Chevron in 1977.”

When he broke into management at Chevron, Bindra had to cut his hair to conform to the company’s safety requirements, which was heartbreaking for him. “My son didn’t recognize me when I walked through the door. When I called his name, he looked taken aback and asked tentatively, ‘Is that you daddy?’ I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for weeks.”

Jagtar Singh, who came to the United States from Punjab in 1985 at age 10, similarly found the transition rough. “One time someone tried to pull off my turban, another time a girl even cut off some of my hair, and I didn’t know English, so I would get into fights all the time.”

Jagtar decided to channel that frustration and aggression by excelling in academics and extra curricular activities. For a time, he was pursued relentlessly by the armed forces, until he told them he was a turbaned Sikh and had to explain Sikhism to them. The calls quickly ended and the recruiters began offering excuses why the army was not the right fit for him. “One of the people telling me why I couldn’t be accepted was a woman. I said to her, ‘You of all the people should know about inequality and discrimination,’ recalls Jagtar, who is presently studying anesthesiology at Yale Medical School

Chicago’s Maninder Singh says, “When I went to nursery school, no one wore a patka (cloth head gear for Sikh youths) or was even Indian.” Later in elementary school Maninder says he was bullied, his patka squeezed and he was taunted with names like turbie. “I would get off at the bus stop weeping.”

Maninder was raised in a gurudwara in Calgary, which he says made it easier to embrace everything at face value, because everybody else did the same thing, but that changed when his family moved to Toronto and later to Michigan. Maninder says as he grew older, he found it harder as he discovered himself pulled in many different directions. “There were the fundamentalists, the scholars, the secular, the Sikhs without the hair and turban, and then the non Sikhs. Through it all I had to strive to be the Sikh, who didn’t drink, smoke or cut his hair — the oddity within the minority. I forced myself to mingle, to become more outgoing, to break cultural barriers out of a need for self preservation.”

Maninder’s parents dealt with racism through assimilation. “Dad armed himself with whatever was needed to fight bigotry, Mom learnt more about the social norms and they asked us to help improve their accent. Interestingly, it was us helping our parents assimilate and not the other way around! But somewhere along the way we were losing our communication with them and could no longer see them as people who understood what we were going through.”

Dr Inderjit Singh, who came to United States and presently teaches at New York University, says he found greater acceptance in Oregon than in New York. “Sometimes when I was lonely I would go and sit in a diner near a church on a Sunday and after church as people trooped in for lunch, someone’s missionary zeal would be aroused and I would be approached, so that my soul could be saved.” In the process not only did he learn more about Christianity and Judaism, he also learnt a lot about Sikhism, because he was invited to make presentations at churches.

What Lies Ahead
Many Sikhs, who were alienated from India in the 1980s, see a fresh opportunity for reconciliation under the new administration of Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh prime minister. The wounds inflicted after the Indira Gandhi assassination have started to heal and the turban has taken on a new, positive identity, with the prime minister’s face and headdress gracing leading publications and beaming on television worldwide.

Mohanbir Sawhney, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management, says when he came to the United States in 1991, India was not a factor in Sikh identity. “We may have crowed about our 5,000 years of culture but no one gave a rat. Today, it is cool to be an Indian and a Sikh.”

Sawhney adds that although the economic clout of the community is far greater than its political clout, that too is starting to change as the community becomes more engaged with the mainstream political process. “The younger generation is working in campaigns and running for political offices. We have tried to support our local politicians and nobody in Illinois gets elected today without acknowledging the Sikhs and the Indian community.”

Ujjal Singh Dosanjh the first Indian and Sikh Prime Minister of British Columbia is currently Canada’s health minister. Dosanjh says that the Canadian political system is much more akin structurally to the Indian political system and easier for the Sikhs to navigate than the U.S. system. “I also get the sense that the U.S. political system is much less open to the inclusion of diversity. Money and contacts seem to play a greater role than real activism. In Canada many of us rose from the ranks fighting for equality against racism, rights for the farmers and succeeded. I don’t see that in the USA.”

Says Atlanta businessman Surinder Singh: “We have come a long way globally. In 1913 we could not even travel in buses or rent a hotel room in Canada or sit in a movie theater. My grandfather Giani Bhagwan Singh would often spent nights sitting on a railway bench at the train station. Sometimes they would let dogs loose on him. My grandfather fought against that bigotry in court and won, opening doors so the future generations could thrive.”

The Sikh community in America has been shaken out of its complacency after 9/11. The new generation, which took its American identity and place in the American society for granted, is stepping up to the challenge, working on expanding awareness of the Sikh community in the mainstream. Says Rajwant Singh: “The younger generation of Sikhs has always perceived themselves as Americans and not Indians. For them to see the violence and the discrimination against their community in a country they call home has been a shocking experience. For the first time they felt like they didn’t belong. My generation had the same feeling after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.”

SALDEF (Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund ) had already been created before 9/11and the Sikh Coalition was formed after 9/11 to monitor and expose hate and bias incidents against the community. Chevron’s Bindra recalls a SALT (South Asian Leaders of Tomorrow) survey on hate crimes, which identified nearly 600 hate crimes against Sikhs, Muslims and Middle Easterners in the first 30 days after 9/11. “We immediately prepared and distributed hate crime videos to all non profit organizations, stressed on education and saw a significant and positive shift in understanding.” Law enforcement agencies and district attorney offices hired Sikhs and they were also brought into advisory committees.

After the 9/11 backlash against Sikhs the Bush White House stepped up its public support for Sikhs, which Rajwant Singh cites as a creditable development for the community. Another major milestone was reached on Aug 18, 2004 at the White House, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs.

Rajwant Singh credits the Clinton administration for inviting Sikhs formally to the White House, which helped to dispel the negative propaganda against the community. “That has created a lot of recognition and credibility for the community and began the initial recognition and dialogue process. Mainstream America took note as well.”

Uttam Dhillon, chief counsel and deputy staff director of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, says the administration is acutely aware of the Sikh community’s concern about racial profiling and is responsive to those needs.

The U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in collaboration with SALDEF recently issued a poster to explain key elements of Sikhism and its followers to Americans, depicting traditional Sikh headgear and advocating respect and toward Sikhs during security checks.

Dhillon, who is of mixed Sikh and Mexican heritage, says he is excited to see the Sikh community become such an important part of the mainstream in recent years. “There are a lot of Sikhs and Indians on the Hill, something you didn’t see a few years ago.” Sikhs, he says, understand the need to form strong coalitions with other ethnic communities, do more outreach programs and get the younger generation involved in mainstream issues.