Sikhs head for the barber and turn their backs on tradition

SHauKeeN GaBRu

Chardi Kala
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A traditional Sikh, with long beard and turban, taking a dip in front of the Golden Temple in Amritsar on the eve of one of the nine gurus’ holy days (Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images)</td> </tr> <tr> </tr></tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr> <td height="10"></td> </tr> <tr> <td>
Sikhs head for the barber and turn their backs on tradition

Jeremy Page, Amritsar
Western intolerance of religious symbols and a series of street attacks are prompting young men to shed their hair and turbans

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In a discreet corner of the northwest Indian town of Amritsar, Harkirat Waraich is about to do what would have been sacrilege to his father and every other male ancestor for the past 300 years.​
He is sitting in front of a cracked mirror in the inappropriately named Modern barber’s shop. And he is about to have a haircut.
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</td></tr></tbody></table>As a 34-year-old baptised Sikh man, Mr Waraich is supposed to grow his beard and his hair long and to wear the turban in public at all times — one of the five core tenets of Sikhism.
According to the rules laid down by the 10th Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, in 1699, he is also obliged to carry a sword and a wooden comb, and to wear loose cotton underwear and an iron band on his wrist. But half a millennium after the founding of Sikhism, attitudes are changing among its 23 million followers, some 90 per cent of whom live in India.
A growing number of young Sikh men are now unfurling their turbans, shaving their beards and trimming their locks into crew cuts, mullets, spikes and other more exotic coiffures.
Nor is the trend confined to the prosperous Sikh community overseas; it is happening here in the heartland of Punjab, and even in Amritsar, home to the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh site. “The thing is, everyone wants to look good these days,” said Mr Waraich, who is “in the gas station business” in Amritsar. “It’s a person-toperson thing now. I just find the turban heavy and uncomfortable. I put one on for weddings, but otherwise I choose not to.”
There are no official statistics to show how many Sikh men are cutting their hair but Mr Waraich and a dozen other young Sikhs estimated that 20 to 30 per cent of their friends had done so. Most barbers in Amritsar were reluctant to talk about it, although one said that up to 15 per cent of his customers were Sikhs.
Whatever the exact numbers, the issue is serious enough to have prompted the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), the community’s top decision-making body, to speak out. “This is a challenge to the traditional Sikh identity,” Avtar Singh Makkar, president of the SGPC, said. “Young boys are doing this because they want to look smart. They think this because of the influence of modern culture through the Western media,” he said. “It is our task to educate them about the sacrifices that have been made for their religion and to bring them back to their faith.”
The crisis at the heart of the Sikh community is one indicator of the social changes that are challenging traditions across India some 15 years after it began market-orientated economic reforms.
It also reflects the growing intolerance in the West towards overtly religious clothing — especially veils and turbans — five years after the attacks on America of September 11, 2001. Many young Sikh men who have cut their hair say that they did so to escape the humiliation of turban searches at Western airports or to avoid being mistaken for Muslims.
They cite Balbri Singh Sodi, a petrol station owner shot dead in Arizona on September 15, 2001. His American killer, bent on revenge for 9/11, thought that Mr Sodi’s turban indicated that he was an Arab.
The Sikh community was shocked again this month when a gang of youths shouting racial abuse beat up a 15-year-old boy and cut off his hair in a public park in Edinburgh.
“It’s stupid, but the fact is most Westerners don’t know the difference between us and other turban wearers,” said one 31-year-old lawyer, who lives between Delhi and London and no longer wears the turban. “I’d rather blend in and not allow people to tell my religion on sight.”
But worrying as racist attacks are, Sikh elders are even more concerned by a broader official crackdown on overt expressions of religious identity in the West, especially in Europe.
Turbans have been banned from French state schools, as have Muslim headscarves, under a “secularity” law that came into effect in 2004. Last month a court in Denmark upheld a ruling that an Indian Sikh had broken the law by carrying his ceremonial dagger, the kirpan, in public. And last week, the Dutch Government prompted outrage from civil liberties advocates when it proposed banning the wearing of the burka in public.

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Sikh community leaders now fear that the turban could be banned in Britain — home to about 500,000 Sikhs — after the recent impassioned debate about Muslim headscarves. The SGPC wrote to Tony Blair and other Western leaders this week to ask them to protect Sikhs’ right to wear the turban.
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</td></tr></tbody></table>“Sikhs in turbans gave their lives by the thousands to defend France and other Western countries in the First and Second World Wars,” Mr Singh, the SGPC leader, said. “Why should they be denied the freedoms that they fought and died for?” Sikhs have suffered popular and official persecution in India too, most notably after Indira Gandhi, then the Prime Minister, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. About 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the four days of rioting that followed.
Today, however, discrimination against Sikhs is rare in India, where they enjoy relatively high social status and occupy a disproportionate number of senior posts in the police and military. The problem facing the Sikh community in India is different and, in some ways, more intractable: young Sikh men are increasingly influenced by non-Sikh role models from India and the West, although there is no shortage of successful Sikhs to inspire them.
Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, is one. So is General J. J. Singh, the Indian Chief of Army Staff. There are two Sikh players in the Indian national cricket team. And Monty Panesar, the England cricket star, this year became the first Sikh to play cricket for a country other than India.
Yet even these luminaries struggle to compete with the myriad non-Sikh celebrities to whom young Sikhs are exposed every day through television, cinema and the internet.
Harbhajan Singh, one of the Sikhs in the Indian cricket team, said that part of the problem was that the Sikh community had failed to promote its role models. “We should have some conference, some function or some awards to raise awareness of who we are,” he said. “It is also up to parents to teach their children the value of Sikhism.” Singh, 26, who usually wears a turban, found himself at the centre of the debate his year when he appeared with his hair down in a liqour advertisement. Hundreds of Sikhs marched through Amritsar and even burnt his effigy in protest, forcing him eventually to give in to elders’ demands for an apology. “Where were they when I was doing well?” he said. “They were so worried about that [the advert], and by what was happening in France — what about people chopping their hair here?”
Patricia Uberoi, a professor of sociology at Delhi University, said that one of the main cultural influences on young Sikhs was the bhangra pop music that emerged in the British Punjabi community in the 1990s. Many of its stars are Sikh but do not wear the turban. But she said that the elders’ main fear was not westernisation, but that Sikhs in India — less than 2 per cent of the country’s population — would be swamped by the Hindu majority, from which they split five centuries ago. “If Sikh rituals are not followed properly, then what do they end up with but Hinduism again?”

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