People

The Making of a Sikh Scholar:
Part II

SIKHCHIC.COM

What makes a scholar? And what goes into the making of a Sikh scholar?

This new series on sikhchic.com explores these very questions by looking closely at the life of one particular Sikh scholar. The subject selected for the purpose of this examination is Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. 

The following is Part II in the series.

CHAPTER II - FROM SCIENCE TO THE HUMANITIES

sikhchic.com:  Last week, you said you lost interest in interfaith dialogue? What happened?

I soon realized that there was no ‘inter’ to interfaith. It was mainly a Christian talking shop. Actually, no! Let me retract that. It was an Abrahamic religions talking shop (Muslims and Jews felt far more comfortable than Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains).

They conducted in an Anglophone language, which meant that it would always be dominated by Christian concepts.

At that point I hadn’t understood how to counter the influence of Christianity, which for me was utterly tangible because of my schooling. It was at that point that it dawned on me that my training in the sciences was actually a handicap to me rather than an asset.

So I decided to retrain in the humanities and thought about places I could apply to. Friends and colleagues advised me to study Sikh history, and so I applied to work with historians like Judith Brown at Oxford and also corresponded briefly with Harjot Singh Oberoi in the days when he had just landed the Sikh Chair at the University of British Columbia.

However, the discipline of history simply didn’t cut it for me because I wanted much more than objective factual answers. I needed a method of contemplation that could provide subjective answers as well … a method for exploring Sikh subjectivity, beginning with my own subjective experience, a method that could speak to the complexities of my own lived existence.

Basically I needed a method that would provide me with a means to engage the world that Sikhs were embedded into. So I began a period of part-time study of philosophy, while at the same time undertaking a study of Sikh historical and literary sources and particularly the relevant languages.

So for the first few years I had this almost romantic idea that I could continue to work as a scientist but study Sikhism and philosophy on the side. But that didn’t work out.

So yes, my response was to turn towards intellectual pursuits in the hope of finding some answers and maybe, just maybe, even find a like-minded circle of individuals.

sikhchic.com: Was there any one incident or instance that brought you to this response?

It’s difficult to pin down any one instance. More like a whole bunch of factors that conspired to push me in a particular direction. Having said that, two instances do stand out for me from that period.

First was the timing and very quick demise of Sikh militancy in Punjab.

It wasn’t long after India decided to push forward with its plans for economic liberalization, and no sooner than this is announced, the government very quickly and with cold efficiency brought to a sudden end the militancy. This always intrigued me. It was as if the militancy had originally served some purpose for India’s ruling Congress Party but after 1992 no longer served that purpose.

It was like switching a machine on an off: militancy on, militancy off. And this gave me a chilling realization that the internal chaos of the Sikhs, just like the external chaos of Punjab, had been, and continued to be, cynically exploited by powers much greater than them.

The desire to understand this mechanism fed into my later research on the role of interpretive frameworks as they are adopted by media, politics and academia, especially frameworks such as religion versus the secular, or the frameworks through which violence was represented in media and academia such as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ violence.

sikhchic.com: Can you cite any one incident as an example?

OK, if I had to pin-point one … And this is a memory that keeps coming back to me.

At around that time, I think it was early 1992, I found myself outside my local gurdwara (Guru Nanak Parkash, Coventry) doing a very short live interview on local West Midlands TV.

It was completely surreal. A very big confrontation was brewing inside the gurdwara between the two main factions in the wake of a bitterly fought election. The civic authorities had been alerted to the potential for violence and there was a police helicopter circling overhead, and several vans outside the gurdwara carrying riot police who were entering the gurdwara as I was speaking.

As I finished the interview, a member of the sangat had managed to detain the riot police from actually entering the diwan hall (which wason the 3rd floor of the building and the elevator wasn’t working that day).

When I entered the premises, the police to my surprise were all partaking of langar … in full riot gear including helmets! I may even have a couple of the photographs I took.

The commotion upstairs was still going on and there were plenty of arrests made later on. But the real surprise about this particular incident was that the police operation had been called by a Community Relations officer who in turn had been contacted by the Indian Community Center which was run by a Hindu, one P.L. Joshi.

Joshi, it was well known, was an active member of the Indian Congress Party, but was actively backing the Akali Dal faction in Coventry.

Barely 5 years later, when the losing Babbar faction created their own gurdwara  (the Cross Roads Gurdwara), P.L. Joshi became their most ardent backer.

Now, Joshi was an interesting character for another reason. He started out as a high school teacher in Punjab, and back in 1964 my father, who was the district examinations officer, caught him taking bribes from some of his students. He had to quit his job and came to the UK, settling, ironically in the same city as my dad, but still maintaining his corruptive influence.

And, oddly, became involved in Sikh politics.

I mention this incident because it helped crystallize in my mind the relationship between macro-politics (in Punjab) and the micro-politics (in the Punjabi diaspora), and how utterly intertwined was the micro-politics of religious identity with the macro-politics of secular governance, whether in India or in the West.

sikhchic.com:  It’s interesting that as you narrate your educational journey, you don’t seem to differentiate between your educational progress and being part of the community. Is that actually how it happened?

For me, yes, the two went together. In fact each provided a spur for the other. I guess what I wanted from my education was a way to intellectually think through the Punjab problem as well as the existential problems of being a Sikh in the West. For me the two were totally interconnected.

During those years of involvement in local politics, I decided to leave industry and move back to a university environment. I began by taking up a research fellowship at the University of Warwick, looking at superconductors.

The move to Warwick was fortuitous in a number of ways. First I was able to come into contact with like minded individuals in the form of a scholarly group called the Punjab Research Group (“PRG”) which met three times a year at the nearby Coventry University.

The PRG in those days was run by scholars such Gurharpal Singh, Darshan Singh Tatla, Pritam Singh, Shinder Thandi, and Eleanor Nesbitt. Another development was the creation of a group called the Sikh Cultural Society in 1989, again based in Coventry, and led by a group of Sikh professionals.

Being part of the Sikh Cultural Society helped me put some thought experiments into play, notably by starting up a print magazine called “Sikh Reformer” which was produced and edited by Shinder Thandi and myself, along with my brother
and comrade-in-arms, Navdeep.

The Reformer was something of an innovation, given the dearth of good critical writing by young Sikhs in those days. We created our own cartoons, our own fictional literature and provided meaningful commentary on what was happening in the Sikh world.

A group of us continued to run the Reformer for about 6 years from 1990 to 1996, after which it folded, partly because it had no financial support (the money largely came out of our own pockets) and partly because by that time my studies had become serious enough for me to go full time.

But the Reformer nevertheless had an impact on the existing Sikh student bodies at that time in a way that we had not imagined.

In addition to this, Warwick had a great Philosophy and Literature department just across the road from the Physics department where I was based. I soon realized that a combination of philosophy, religion, and cultural theory were the intellectual disciplines that best suited my needs.

I continued to work on superconductors for a couple of years, studying humanities on the side, but eventually I decided to move out of science all together. My science background had left me intellectually ill-equipped to understand the increasingly complex nature of social and political events within which the global Sikh community had become immersed since the 1980’s.

To do this, however, meant losing a substantial income for a number of years. With no solid job prospect in sight and with our first child on its way, this was something of a gamble, but one that I felt I simply had to take.

I ended up doing an MA in Philosophy and also develop some expertise in the theoretical study of Religions. This was followed by a second Ph.D jointly undertaken at the University of Warwick and the School of Oriental and African Studies (where I worked with Professor Christopher Shackle).

This Ph.D dissertation was entitled “Thinking Between Cultures: Metaphysics and Cultural Translation”. It was basically an examination of the historical and intellectual encounter between East and West, or in my case between Sikhs and the West.

sikhchic.com:  Perhaps we can explore that theme in more detail a little later since it became the seed of your monograph, right? Earlier you said that it was a gamble to have given up your first career. Did the gamble pay off? Was it plain sailing after that?

Goodness me, no! It was never really plain sailing, as you put it. Community politics seemed to haunt me all the way through the duration of my research period. In fact only two months before I was due to start my second Ph.D, I had a phone call from the West Midlands police.

They said they were sending two officers attached to their community liason section, to interview me. Apparently someone from the Indian Community Center had filed a complaint against me, something to the effect that I was writing things that were offensive to the Sikhs and that I was about to begin research that would create tension between different communities, etc., etc. The idea was to somehow discredit me before I even began my research, get it into the papers, and thereby prevent me from getting any funding.

sikhchic.com:  How did you feel? How did you react?

As you can imagine, it caused me a lot of anxiety. I had just given up my job, had no funds, and a family to support, and here I was being targeted for no reason by people who appeared to be members of my own community.

So these two officers turned up and interviewed me. I made sure that I had a witness present (my former colleague, Shinder Thandi, was kind enough to stand in as a witness in this regard).

After almost an hour of conversation they found nothing incriminating and realized that someone, or some group with a vendetta, was simply trying to stitch me up. So that was the end of that.

I was able to formally start the research in 1994, completed it in 1998 and by early 1999 was awarded a second doctorate.

sikhchic.com: Was this period free of involvement in politics?

Umm! Not exactly … I guess it depends how you define politics. I prefer to call it community seva but on a wider level. You see, I had always thought that one of the answers to the problem of the misrepresentation of Sikhs, was community building and education. In fact, for me education, or the provision of it, was the key.

I was fortunate enough to come into contact with a different group of people who had similar motivations to myself.

sikhchic.com:  What kinds of things did you get up to?

Oh, lots of things, some of which I can barely remember. Basically I continued to work at the grass roots level with the community. For example, I worked with the Sikh Human Rights Group.

They were a particularly innovative group and I was also able to get exposure to human rights work, the highlight of which was a panel organized at the UN in Geneva.

On a more local level, a group of us formed an organization called SEWA (Sikh Educational and Welfare Association). This was one of my happiest associations in many ways. The people who worked in SEWA (Dav Panesar, Neelu Kalsi, Gurbinder Kalsi, Sarabjit Lotay and others) were a great bunch, all solid professionals who brought their skills to bear on problems facing the Sikhs in the West Midlands area.

The pinnacle of our work was the creation of a document called the “Sikh Action Plan”, which was designed as a kind of blueprint for education and community development in UK gurdwaras. The Sikh Action Plan was the focal point of a broader community education and re-generation program led by SEWA.

It created a unique and timely platform of linking and supporting, Sikh and South-Asian cultural-religious education on the one hand, with the entrepreneurial strengths of Sikhs and South Asians and their natural global networks especially in India.

The Sikh Action Plan defined the needs of the Sikh community from the “cradle to grave” perspective. (For example, the provision that every gurdwara develop childcare provision right through to social housing for the elderly).

The Plan was agreed and signed by the President and Secretary of every gurdwara in Coventry (totaling 7 at that time) and launched by the major politicians of the day.

An important and innovative venture for the Sikh Community involving many different parties, it was an ongoing project leading up to the establishment of a Sikh Studies program at Coventry University. The idea was based on the fact that the Sikh institutions had a certain financial and social worth which could be used to partner with the City Council and a local university and other higher education colleges to leverage funds from Europe and elsewhere.

In Dav Panesar we had a really astute and forward thinking project manager, and in partnership with several organizations, including the Council of Sikh Gurdwaras, Coventry, he was able to successfully get funds to run a full fledged program in Sikh studies.

This would have been a great achievement if it hadn’t been killed by certain ‘members’ of the community.


Continued ...

To read Part I, please CLICK here.

April 20, 2013

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