Representation

As we are coming up to the Sikh New Year, it brings new awakenings, growth and light. My book of dreams (the equivalent of a vision board and combination scrapbook) has been completed and I’m excited to add to it over the years as I actually visit the places and do the things I plan to do. The advantage of making it a combination scrapbook is I included some memories in it already, like visiting Gurdwaras in Pakistan.  

As I was adding photos to the Women’s Day post, I decided to include some of those pictures of Sikh women in my book. I was thinking about how growing up, it wasn’t the case for me seeing any Sikh female doctors. Meanwhile a lot of the people I knew just followed their parents; one friend and her three siblings all became doctors because their father was a doctor. Furthermore, it’s not like TV shows or movies depict Punjabi Sikh women in these types of positions. I really enjoyed watching rare Bollywood movies like Mary Kom, Gunjan Saxena, and Dangal because at least it showed women from India working hard to achieve their goals and rising to a spectacular level in their field despite all odds, even if they weren't Punjabi. The role of Punjabi women in films is the love interest, or the matriarch. We hear about this often, how important it was and continues to be, in the United States for African Americans to see themselves represented on TV and in movies. It is known that people need representation. In Canada I think Kim’s Convenience has given us a similar chance to represent Korean Canadians. I wonder about our own ability to represent the stories of Sikhs growing up in Canada or the US. Our stories are diverse and complex. Each one of the women mentioned in my previous post are representing the diversity of what we can be and who we can be. Why was it so hard to find their images? Why is it so difficult to go searching to find ourselves represented? Even a google image search of Sikh female doctor shows only two real female physicians from India, and then a bunch of stock images and random unrelated pictures. 

 

As Sikhs we are a minority population no matter where we are living. We have done a good job of making ourselves seen in politics in Canada, of making our community seen, but I will argue that that is mostly the stories of men... where are we as modern Sikh women? Most articles we find online about Sikh women are historical, about Mai Bhago and Mata Gujri Ji. While inspiring, I think we need to tell more stories of different women today and our struggles. I often wonder what do other Sikh women’s lives look like? It is isolating not to know whether my fellow Sikh women out there are wondering things like I do about raising a family in the modern day, about balancing work life and career, about incorporating Sikhi into our lives, about maintaining our language. I wonder how we navigate the cultural freeze that occurred when parents immigrated and that India that they immigrated from no longer exists. They had to “integrate” into this society at a time when there was blatant racism. Their cultural values of being a Punjabi are ingrained in what it meant to be a Punjabi back in those days, but that Punjab is gone now. As second generations, we cannot relate to those who are immigrating now, because they have lived in a different version of being Punjabi than what we know, which has been passed down in our families. They live in a modernized westernized Punjab and then integrate here into a mosaic, where there might even be communities of majority Punjabis. Their stories also need telling, as do ours. I wonder what it is like for other Sikhs of this second-generation living day to day in the UK, US and Canada. I wonder if other women struggle with the same daily stuff like I do, the same dilemmas and how they deal with these same issues. Sometimes I work for a whole month without seeing any single other Punjabi person, or Sikh. I am realizing while we do not need a large group of friends, we at least need people in our circle who understand and can generate conversation on these topics and I am hungry for a sangat of Sikh women around my age. 

Regardless of gender, it can be isolating when only you know what kind of hardships you face. It feels awful as you aspire and dream big and then there’s no one to share it with, no one who gets it. Especially as you gain success in whatever area, it is lonely at the top. It is an alleviation to find another like us and to be in it together. To walk through the world knowing you are sharing a common experience and connection. I hope as we see more Sikhs in the media, and we create our own media, as we share our voices and see women as astronauts, mathematicians, artists, and kirtanis, we feel more connection. As we see Sikh women who are representing every aspect of diversity including those who are not Punjabi, we will see the diversity of who we are. As I look through my book full of dreams and aspirations, I hope that this is what we start to see in the world as we make it happen.