Sikhs In Southeast Asia

This volume attempts to entice researchers to further explore possibilities of taking up research in the area of Sikh Studies in Southeast Asia. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists as well as economists have contributed to this volume, each attempting to highlight their fragment of understanding of Sikh communities in Southeast Asia spanning from the colonial to the contemporary era.

This book is the second in a global trilogy looking at the unreported Sikh diaspora comprising mainly the non-English speaking countries. The first one in the Sikh Global Village series was Sikhs in Latin America published by Manohar. This volume covers Sikhs in Asia Pacific countries. The third will be on Sikhs in Europe. The Asia Pacific region is a vital and under-recognized home for the Sikh diaspora. Before 1947, most Sikhs migrated East. In addition to the commonly known destinations, the author also examines lesser known cases of Sikh migration to China, Korea, Japan and the Philippines. The book covers various aspects of the diaspora including the history of migration relating to the British Indian Army police force. The British gave preference in recruiting Sikhs, and encouraged them to build gurdwaras and supported them to keep their Sikh identity. Soon after arrival, these early immigrants encouraged their village compatriots and relatives to migrate in large numbers to avail of the various opportunities for gainful employment or business. Not only is this wave of migration important in its own right, but Sikh migration to North America finds its origins in the Asia-Pacific Sikh diaspora, specifically from Shanghai. The decolonization of Asian countries slowed down the migration and in some cases resulted even in exodus of Indians/Sikhs at the same time as new destinations to North America and UK opened up. Migration to each country has a unique profile, traced vividly in the book. Additionally the author has made an effort to outline the similarities and differences in migration of Sikhs to the East against present migration to the West. Case studies are extensively used.

This book analyses Sikh communal identity as it was established in the Far East under the auspices of the British Empire. Focusing on Singapore with a comparative case study with Malaysia, where Sikh communities form a significant minority in terms of numbers and visibility and have had significant interaction with their respective post colonial states, the author charts the trajectory of assimilation of Sikh communal identity in Singapore and Malaya. Sikhs were part of the key events and occurrences in Southeast Asia such as the Japanese Occupation, the attainment of Independence and post independence. The book examines the way forward for Sikh communities in these nations as communal identities are fast becoming blurred under the advent of global trends, such as the influence of Arabic versions of Islam on Malaysia, and globalisation. This is the first booklength study of Sikh settlements in Southeast Asia. It will be of intererst to scholars of diaspora and minority studies, post colonialism, multiculturalism and South and Southeast Asian studies.

In Indian Communities in Southeast Asia thirty-one scholars provide an analytical commentary on the contemporary position of ethnic Indians in Southeast Asia. The book is the outcome of a ten-year project undertaken by the editors at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. It is multi-disciplinary in focus and multi-faceted in approach, providing a comprehensive account of the way people originating from the Indian subcontinent have integrated themselves in the various Southeast Asian countires. The study provides insights into understanding how Indians, an intra-ethnically diverse immigrant group, have intermingled in Southeast Asia, a region that itself is ethnically diverse.

In From Policemen to Revolutionaries, Yin Cao elaborates the rise and fall of the Sikh community in Shanghai by the turn of the twentieth century.

This is the first major study of a Sikh community in Central Punjab to appear in the modern anthropological literature. Perhaps because this historically and economically important people and region have been so long neglected, they present certain important contradictions or paradoxes in terms of commonly accepted generalization about Indian village life. Thus, the villagers describe their Sikh religion as Hindu, yet insist that it forbids observance of caste restrictions. They are sincere in their beliefs and scrupulous in their performance to ritual, yet retain caste identifications and in certain contexts use caste terms for address. They have a strong factional organization, but it cuts across both kin and caste lines; moreover, many villagers remain aloof from factions, and those sho do belong frequently "forget" their quarrels and cooperate. Finally, the villagers are intensely concerned with trade and profit-making, yet resort ot many practices in a labor-intensive system that scholars have termed characteristic of a "subsistence" or "traditional" economy as distinct from a "market" or a "traditional" one. Instead of attempting to resolve these contradictions or to attribute them to a process of social breakdown, Leaf takes the view that they represent a stable, pervasive condition of social life. He capitalizes on their clarity in a particular village to draw attention to two elements of social theory that he regards as of general importance. His overall strategy of analysis places each seemingly contradictory element in its proper context, and then ascertains how these contexts are related to one another and to the behavior of the villagers. The first of the theoretical concepts that he develops for this purpose is a modified version of the idea of a "message source," used in information theory, permitting observation and isolation of socially defined conventions that result from behavior and affect it in turn. The second concept is a view of behavior as individual actions that respond to such social constraints, obtain support, and ultimately feed back into the social system--a cyclical model of social communication on an individual level. Use of these two concepts sets aside "total system theory," which has attracted mounting criticism by social and cultural anthropologists, in favor of what may be termed a "multiple system theory." Two important practical results of this shift in perspective are general heightening of empirical accuracy of analysis and an enhance insights into the ways that dynamica change, cooperation, and competition inhere in all social organization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.