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RSS FeedSeptember 7th, 2009
What it is and what it is not
It is in vogue these days to explain things by saying what it is and what it is not. “Oh, let me start by telling you what our software does not do. It doesn’t do your laundry!” “Before I tell you about this movie, let me start by saying that ‘Alien Exterminator’ is not your average chick flic.” Answering questions that no one ever had, I have yet to see a lot of good come from these statements. Mostly, they simply set a negative tone.
During a Sikh wedding, the priest went on to clarify that the palla ceremony symbolizes bride’s father’s blessing of the union, and is not the same as kanyadaan. Then, the priest went on to expound the gender equality in Sikhism. Blessed be thee, sir priest and blessed be thine and mine religion! But what good is a loud statement in bold, if it comes at the expense of someone else? And does it not open itself for further introspection (perhaps for good) – why for example do the bride and the groom not walk together around the holy book, instead of the groom leading the bride?
I am no rebel, but nor am I a silent acceptor of traditions. It doesn’t make me a friend of the establishment, since the establishment thrives on tradition. My marching orders (from what, one might ask) could be well in place if I were to recommend the smallest deviation from the set protocol. But make no mistake, that the custodians of any philosophy are the thinkers that question the very legs we stand on, not the establishment that formalizes and reformalizes traditions so that it can have a blank check to go after anyone else.
May 27th, 2009
"Sikh society is a classless society?" You gotta be kidding me.
You only need to look at the matrimonial classified section of newspapers to find out about the classes within Sikhism. What Hinduism institutionalized, and Sikhism tried to dissolve is now present more in Sikh society than perhaps even in Hindu society. Our first Guru gave his entire life trying to eliminate the rigors of caste system, but five hundred years later, the class based society in Sikhs lives boldly on. We are ready to die for our Gurus, but we are not ready to live for them (by their ideals). True, we will all sit down and have langar in the same file (pangat) as anyone else, but those are minor adjustments and inconveniences that we will put up with. We can be forced to live next to anyone as per the laws and regulations of modern India, but we can deftly handle that too. The sad reality is that the only thing that can possibly eliminate casteism and regionalism in India, cross caste and cross state marriages, have simply not happened to any meaningful extent yet.
All that said, a marriage is not something that can be forced upon a society or a generation, and it is simply against the laws of probability that within one generation of us letting go, we will have a mish mash society where classes based on castes will have become absent suddenly. Still, if the current Sikh society does become a bit more relaxed when evaluating a potential mate in terms of their class structure and placement in the caste hierarchy, then the mishmash will indeed grow. At least let us start reiterating to ourselves that education and nature are indeed much more important than caste. At least, let us not start the very matrimonial search and placement by the dreaded three word caste description. At least let us not talk about a candidate by first describing the caste. The day some of this happens, we may finally claim to be Sikhs again.