Group Identity in an Emigrant Worker Community: The Example of Sikhs in early Twentieth-Century British Columbia

Abstract

This article investigates the multiple identities of Sikh workers employed in the expanding resource-based economy of British Columbia before . These workers went through a process of identity definition and redefinition common to many immigrants, even though their particular case had specific historical and local contexts. In British Columbia they naturally associated among themselves according to kinship, caste, and village affiliation, but their circumstances encouraged them to broaden their sense of who they were. Their experience in a foreign, but British, colonial setting, and their distance from the constraining influences of home (both the regulation of village and family and the supervision of the state) encouraged them to expand their horizons. In their overseas setting, these workers were exposed to panIndian nationalism and to developing Sikh ethno-nationalism in a more open and vital way than they would have been at home. Tensions between their community and the British regime in India were growing; and these tensions found their fullest expression in their overseas environment. Sikh workers on the Pacific coast of North America were at the leading edge of change in attitudes and loyalties among their compatriots at home and abroad, and, for this reason, they were – out of all proportion to their numbers – a source of concern to British imperial authorities. One could describe Sikh pioneers in British Columbia as a diaspora community, but with a major qualification. They were an immigrant population comprised of mostly transient workers, or, to use a generally accepted social science term, sojourners.1 Their demographics, strategies,