The Sikh Next Door: An Identity in Transition

The Sikhs have been a people in transition. Unwanted displacements, willing movements and a changing world have led them through demographic, occupational and experiential shifts. While this has led to the evolution of new facets within the community, it has also evoked mixed responses from outside.

As new generations of Sikhs engage with the world through sensibilities defined by their contemporary contexts, they find themselves constructed in images dissonant with their lived realities. The Sikh Next Door: An Identity in Transition traces these changes while also making an incisive analysis of old stereotypes-some heroic, some menacing and some farcical.

It simultaneously brings into focus the real people behind these images, their varying social stances and their collective commitment to a common religious identity.

The work attempts to reframe the Sikhs, bending a few existing narratives and offering an impetus for a more nuanced understanding of the community.

Dr Manpreet J. Singh has done her PhD in English Literature from University of Mumbai. Most recently, she taught with the Department of English, Mata Sundri College for Women, University of Delhi.

In 2014, the centenary year of the Komagata Maru incident, she was awarded senior fellowship for research on the Sikh community by the Indo-Canadian Studies Centre, University of Mumbai. It was funded by British Columbia province, Canada. Her report on the Sikh diaspora in British Columbia is being published in a forthcoming title by CoHaB, Indian Diaspora Centre, University of Mumbai (2020).

Her interests centre around contemporary literature, gender studies, ethnic identities, popular culture, postcolonial perspectives and their intersections. Her previous works include a collection of poems titled The Golden Arc (1991) and Male Image Female Gaze: Men in the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande (2012).

She currently resides in Mumbai, India.