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Telling Our Story
WSN Network
 In Even as the
Diaspora Sikhs have been working hard to tell the world the Sikh
story by making films and holding Sikh Film festivals, about their
faith and their community, a rather pernicious debate is raging in
a section of the media that is trying to argue that it is not
healthy perhaps for a community to focus on a painful past and
present itself to the world as a suffering and wronged people.
It is true that
the trigger for such a cultural capital formation could be the
community’s collective angst over developments such as the Indian
Army attack on Sri Darbar Sahib 1984, the genocidal carnage that
followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the recent turban ban in
France but the larger truth is that the Sikh story has been not
properly told over decades to the world.
Just last week,
the Sikh Art and Film Foundation (SAFF) in
New York
organized the Annual Sikh Film Festival, which acquired especially
grand tones for the first time in its 10-year history. There was a
red carpet and it was attended by more than 1,000 people. Meanwhile,
Visions of Truth, a two-month-long traveling film festival with
movies about 1984, was on in
California.
It was organized by Jakara, a California Sikhs’ club. In addition,
Sikhnet, a website dedicated to building bridges between Sikhs
abroad, announced its 2009 Youth Online Film Festival, inviting Sikh
youth to share videos about “being a Sikh”.
Rajya Sabha MP
Tarlochan Singh said, “There are 25 million Sikhs worldwide, with
more than a million in America and Canada, and about half a million
in UK. An acute identity crisis in the post 9/11 world has compelled
them to tell people that there is a difference between a Sikh and an
Iranian or the Taliban.”
Prof S P Singh,
former V-C of Amritsar’s Guru Nanak Dev University, explains it as a
consequence of “the wounds inflicted on the collective Sikh psyche
(which) have not been addressed so far. Time doesn’t heal the injury
that hasn’t been redressed. Otherwise, Udham Singh wouldn’t have
avenged Jallianwala Bagh massacre 25 years later!”
Perhaps. The
film Storming the Temple, part of Visions of Truth, lays out the
events that ended in the Army entering the Temple; Reaching for Home
is a fictional account around the incident and Amu addresses issues
of identity with 1984 as the backdrop.
So too the New
York film festival, which kicked off with 1984 and the Via Dolorosa,
an attempt to portray Sikh suffering in the context of the Christian
belief in the pain Christ suffered while carrying the cross.
So, does the
community collectively alternate between self-congratulation and
suffering then? SAFF president Tejinder Singh Bindra explains, “We
celebrate the heritage of Sikhs and their immigrant experience and
promote Sikhism in a land where people persecuted us in the wake of
9/11.”
Gurumustak Singh
Khalsa, an American Sikh, who founded SikhNet told STOI from New
Mexico that it would be wrong to see the festivals as navel-gazing
hype. “Most people don’t have a clue who Sikhs are. The genesis of
the festival came from the proliferation of short videos on websites
and enabled us to reach out to more people.”
30
September 2009
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