Sikh Masculinity, Religion, and Diaspora in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons and Other Stories

Abstract

Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons and Other Stories (1999) focuses on the previously neglected Sikh male as the subject of its narratives. The construction of Sikh masculinity is mapped onto the wider historical contexts of immigration to North America, and globalization and consumerism in India. In Sikhism, the Khalsa male, because of his turban, is the marked body signaling difference. But in the diaspora, religious markers such as the turban shape the performance of a specific kind of gendered identity and also define the manner in which integration into a religious, cultural, and ethnic identity proceeds. The family, specifically the hetero-normative family, is at the heart of the performance, the pedagogy, and the continuity of specific notions of a religio-cultural masculinity, which speaks sometimes in concert with and sometimes against the feminist grain. Religious identifications such as the turban that bear the moral burden of older value systems and notions of masculinity and femininity collide with changing survival systems, and women and men may have to negotiate different moral compasses.