This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity.
This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh women who are either virtually erased from narratives, bodily eliminated through honor killings, or constructed and represented as invisible. It looks at the role of violence during critical junctures in Sikh history, including the Mughal rule, the British colonial period, the Partition of India, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, and the terror of 9/11 in the United States. The author analyzes how violence reconstitutes gender roles and sexuality within various cultural and national spaces in India and the diaspora. She also highlights questions related to women’s agency and their negotiation of traumatic memories for empowering identities.
The book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of postcolonial English literature, contemporary Indian literature, Sikh studies, diaspora studies, global studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, history, sociology, media and films studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies.
Introduction
1. Cultural Syncretism vs. Collective Psychic
Fragmentation: The Construction of Sikh Gendered Identity
2. Mughal India and
Colonialism: Revising History, Gender Identity and Violence in Bhai Veer
Singhs Sundri
3. Communal and Gender Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwins What
the Body Remembers
4. Gendered Violence and Partition Memory in Postcolonial
Novels and Films
5. Partition Narratives and Sikh Gendered Identity
Construction: Memory of Violence in Khushwant Singhs 1956 Novel Train to
Pakistan
6. Gender and Memories of Trauma in Amrita Pritams 1950 Novella
Pinjar and Poems
7. Violence, State Terror, and Gendered Sikh Identity: The
Aftermath of Operation Blue Star in Gulzars 1996 Hindi film, Maachis
(Matches) and Anurag Singhs 2013 Punjabi Film, Punjab 1984
8. Traumatized
Sikh Male and Female Subjects: Representations of Trauma and Memory in Amitoj
Manns 2003 Punjabi Film Hawayein
9. (En)Gendering Nations in Manoj Punjs
2004 Punjabi Film, Des Hoyaa Prades: When Ones Nation Becomes a Foreign
Territory
10. Perpetrator Nation and the Cultural Memorialization of Sikh
Trauma in Shonali Boses Novel, Amu (2004)
11. Once Again, the Turban: Terror
and Gendered Sikh Identity in Liam Delzells Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singhs
Taaj, and Sarab Singh Neelams Ocean of Pearls
12. Gendering the Sikh
Diaspora and Transnational Feminism: The Construction of Sexuality in the
Poems of Sukhjeet Kaur Khalsa (2016), Sharapal Ruprai (2014) and Rupi Kaur
(2015 and 2017). Bibliography
Jaspal Kaur Singh is Professor of English Literature at Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan, USA. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, UCLA and a Fulbright Nehru Senior Scholar in India. Her publications include a monograph, a coauthored book, and three coedited books: Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women Writers at Home and in the Diaspora (2008); Narrating the New Nation: South African Indian Writing (2018); Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas (2010); Trauma, Resistance, Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Writing (2010); and Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey (2016).
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