**Nicola Mooney**

Department of Social, Cultural and Media Studies & South Asian Studies Institute, University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M8, Canada; nicola.mooney@ufv.ca

Received: 24 December 2019; Accepted: 7 February 2020; Published: 19 February 2020

**Abstract:** Sikhism is widely understood and celebrated as san egalitarian religion. This follows from its interpretation as a challenge to the caste schema of Hinduism as well as readings which sugges<sup>t</sup> its gender equality. This paper explores the intersection of caste and gender in Sikh society in relation to Guru Nanak's tenet that Sikhs be householders. Nanak's view that householding is the basis of religious life and spiritual liberation—as opposed to the caste Hindu framework in which householding relates only to the specific stage of life in which one is married and concerned with domestic affairs—was one of the most important social and ritual reforms he introduced. By eliminating the need for an asceticism supported by householders, or in other words the binary framework of lay and renunciant persons, Nanak envisioned the possibility that the rewards of ascetism could accrue to householders. For Sikhs living at Kartarpur, the first intentional Sikh community, established by Guru Nanak as a place of gathering and meditation, Nanak's egalitarian ideals were practiced so that women and members of all castes were equal participants. Guru Nanak's model for social and ritual life presents a radical challenge to the hierarchies and exclusions of Hinduism, and yet, contains within it the basis for ongoing caste and gender disparity for Sikhs, since most Sikhs continue to arrange their householding around caste endogamous marriages and social and domestic arrangements which privilege men. Taking the position shared by a number of Sikh ethnographic informants, and supported by a number of feminist scholars, that the realization of an equal Sikh society remains incomplete, I juxtapose the continued acquiescence to caste and gender with the vision of an ideal and socially just society put forward by the Gurus.

**Keywords:** gender; caste; intersectionality; householding; Sikhism

Ethnographers have long been trained to attend to the gaps between what is said and what is done, or in other words, the ideal and the real, for these third spaces are instructive sites for analysis and critique. As an ethnographer among Sikhs in India and the diaspora over the past two decades, I have often been struck by incommensurabilities between Sikh doctrine and actual social practice. Indeed, these contradictions, especially manifest around the egalitarian principles that we are told outline a casteless and genderless Sikh society, are noted by most scholars. While Sikhs certainly demonstrate Sikhi(sm)'s social justice credentials in some obvious ways in society at large, as we see in the Sikh institutions of seva and langar, it is also clear that caste and gender hierarchies are ongoing. As a member by marriage of the Jat Sikh community, I have frequently had my attention drawn to their social centrality and supposedly superior status among Punjabis, a trope that continues into the popular cultural sphere. And, having met Jat Sikhs in at least their several hundreds, I can count on one hand the number who use just Singh as their only surname, one of the consummate Sikh practices to erase caste consciousness. As well, I have often heard Sikh women (and particularly Jat Sikh women) describe a range of oppressions and lament that the gurus' egalitarian utopia is not manifest; collectively, they lend their voices to the title of this paper: 'in our whole society, there is no equality'.

During fieldwork interviews in the late 1990s among Sikh women in northwest India (who were primarily but not exclusively Jat), I commonly met with statements like: 'a boy does not have to behave virtuously, like a girl'; 'Jat men do not listen to their wives'; 'in our society, women are inferior to men'; 'taking birth as a man is better'; and 'our religion says we are equal, but in reality, we are not'. And while older women were rather more likely to insist that conditions were improving (Mooney 2010), they still said things like 'a woman won't have too many problems if she takes care of the household'; 'if we go out, here and there, our men will criticize us'; 'in good families, they don't trouble the women that much, but elsewhere, they are kept down'; and 'we must try to make our kids understand that they should not marry beyond our caste'. In the years since, my nieces, nephews, students, and friends (again, primarily but not exclusively Jat) have also reminded me of the continued operation of gender and caste, both enmeshed within a dynamics of honour and shame, and in diaspora inflected with new inequalities—and potentials for transgression—as concerns with race and Western nuances of class are introduced. (Colleagues such as Jakobsh and Nesbitt (2010) and Kamala Elizabeth Nayar (2010) have also noted similar encounters). Some Sikh youth have been raised without explicit caste awareness and are variously puzzled, intrigued, or shocked to find that the caste system is still operational among Sikhs (or indeed at all). Others have grown up in castecentric and even casteist settings with a(n anti-Sikh) sense of their own status and distinction. Still others fall in the middle, living an everyday life that is largely untouched by caste but aware that it will enter their lives when they consider marriage. A relative few have shared tales of outcasting related to marriage beyond the caste group. Not only marriages but psyches and lives can be made or broken in these intersections of gender and caste. For Jats, there is or will be much pressure to marry another Jat; while marriage outside of the community is only sanctioned if to somebody white. Jat boys, whose fitness for marriage no longer rests on village land, must demonstrate wealth via material markers that evoke class, but may be bereft of its finer distinctions. Meanwhile Jat girls, attuned to the gender imbalances and traditional expectations of their homes, and well aware that these are likely to force upon them a life trajectory more limited than those of their brothers, often strategically remain in school for as long as possible so as to avoid marriage. Clearly, caste and gender inequalities in Sikh society are ongoing, even though they may take di fferent shapes as they traverse the moving spaces and sundry places of contemporary Sikh society. Inderpal Grewal has observed that "the question of how millennial modern subjects are being made by disavowing the existence of patriarchy even as gendered subordination and violence continues is crucially important for feminist research, both theoretically and empirically" (Grewal 2013, p. 3). This proposal might be productively reframed to suggest, as I do here, that it is critical to further understand the ways in which contemporary Sikh subjects are produced via assertions of religious reform and social equality at the same time as gender and caste hierarchies continue to be present and even resurgent.

If the standard narrative of Guru Nanak's egalitarian intent is more than "ideological self-image" (Jodhka 2016, p. 585), why, five hundred and fifty years since his birth, and given the otherwise successful establishment of his vision for religious and social reform, do such inequalities persist among Sikhs? In this paper, I explore some of the dimensions of this question. Observing that gender and caste intersect is scarcely groundbreaking: the feminist study of gender and caste practices and hierarchies in India is a substantial field (e.g., Basu 1999, 2005; Caplan 1985; Chakravarti [2003] 2018; Channa 2013; Chowdhry 1994, 2007; Dube 1997; Grewal 2013; Harlan 1992; Je ffery and Je ffery 1996; Kapadia 1995, 2002; Kolenda 2003; Liddle and Joshi 1989; Minturn 1993; Oldenburg 2002; Puri 1999; Raheja and Gold 1994; Sangari and Vaid 1990; Wadley 2002), and within it, attention to Punjab is growing (e.g., Grewal 2010; Jakobsh 2003, 2010; Malhotra 2002, 2010; Mooney 2010, 2013b; Purewal 2010). However, there are few studies that explicitly link caste and gender inequalities, as occurring simultaneously and produced and experienced in intersection with each other, and thus in an intersectional frame, to Sikhism. The continuation of caste and gender inequities also points to the vexed nexus of religion and culture, aspects of social architecture and worldview that are also complexly intersected. Taking such an intersectional approach, I sugges<sup>t</sup> that the household is a central aspect of

these ongoing inequities among Sikhs for the key locus of Guru Nanak's new religion ye<sup>t</sup> remains the site of unreformed traditional patriarchal kinship practices that depend on the intersection of gender and caste and thus reproduce their hierarchies. Rather than being a strictly empirical paper, I attempt to think through the gap between the egalitarian ideal and lived practice among Sikhs. While some of what I write here may seem obvious to the reader familiar with Punjab, Sikhism, and Sikhs (and perhaps especially Jats), there are few studies of the nexus of these inequalities. Moreover, for the reader that is relatively unfamiliar with the region and its people—as well as for students grappling with the complexities of gender, caste, and Sikhism in their own lives—there are few concise sources that attempt to account for these pressing issues. While what I accomplish here is far from comprehensive, it is one point of entry into some of these challenges.

Implicit in the Sikh community's discourse on equality as noted above is the idea that the Guru's Sikhi successfully reformed the religious domain inherited from Hinduism, but not the—gendered, castecentric, and casteist—cultural one. However, the egalitarian reading of Sikhism is normative. Sikhs widely assert that Sikhism is an egalitarian religion while academics argue that Sikhism challenges the caste schema of Hinduism (e.g., McLeod 1989; Takhar [2005] 2016), and advocates gender equality (e.g., Mahmood and Brady 2000; Singh 2005). Guru Nanak's universalistic and humanitarian Sikhi proposed a utopian reform of society contingent upon the eradication of caste-based priestly authority and the elaborate rites of the Hindu life course, as well as the life cycle stages of everyday life, which compartmentalize spiritual and social pursuits such that only some people—none lower caste, and very few women—might attain mok´sa (or freedom from the karmic cycle). The Guru proposed instead that all Sikhs, regardless of gender or caste, could perform the few rituals of Sikhism, and moreover that Sikhs should be householders permanently engaged in both society and spirituality as the means to mukti (or spiritual liberation). Regardless of the actualities of these tenets, a matter that is at the crux of this paper, Sikhism proposes critical socioreligious engagemen<sup>t</sup> in marriage and family life at all (adult) ages across the life course for women and men of all castes even as both women and men are to be equally and simultaneously engaged, as individuals and soul partners in religious practice and spiritual pursuit, "one light in two bodies" (Guru Granth Sahib, 788; cited in (Singh 2005, p. 133)). For instance, even as they sugges<sup>t</sup> gendered di fference, the Sikh surnames of Kaur and Singh challenge patrilineality and assert gender and caste equality, while Sikh first names are largely gender-neutral. Despite these egalitarian social and religious formations, caste and gender di fferences and inequities continued to manifest in Guru Nanak's new society. Scholars point out that women are far from equal in Sikh institutions (Jhutti-Johal 2010); the Guru's message may be out of step with contemporary feminist perspectives (Nayar 2010, p. 269); and—perhaps most critically—the masculinized, and Khalsacentric, Sikh body is not only normative but hegemonic (Axel 2001). Meanwhile, Sikhs continue to assert caste privilege and prejudice and even casteism: beyond unequal marriage and reproductive arrangements, caste is pronounced and widely observed in everything from patterns of village settlement to national elections (Jodhka 2016, p. 583). Encounters with the West under the raj, in diaspora, and amid modernity and globalization have entrenched and exacerbated inequalities by introducing new economic and status pressures which map onto gender, kinship, and household dynamics (e.g., Mooney 2011; Padhi 2012).

In this paper, I argue that ongoing inequalities of gender and caste among Sikhs are related to the Sikh practice of householding, which was a key aspect of Guru Nanak's reframing of Hinduism. Rather than becoming the key site of Sikh spiritual development, householding has remained the prosaic—and deeply unequal—site of kinship, and thus the intersection of gender and caste. From this site, the profound and pressing inequalities of gender subordination and caste hierarchy emanate. Viewing Sikhism as a reform movement with aims to establish a new model society that was otherwise largely successful, as evidenced by the establishment and growth of Sikhism, I examine the promise and paradox of Sikh egalitarianism, arguably, a key proposition of the promised transformation. I begin by describing Guru Nanak's revitalization of Hinduism and the routinization of Sikhi(sm), paying particular attention to the doctrine of householding, or gr,hastha, in which ongoing inequities

of caste and gender are located. I then articulate some of the key contexts of gender and caste among Sikhs so as to demonstrate their significant divergence from the Sikh ideal of social equality. I propose that the necessary intersection of gender and caste within the traditional kinship and marriage system, which remain relatively untouched by Sikh revitalization, has prevented social equality from becoming manifest and indeed even reproduces regional and diasporic forms of intersectional disparity and domination.

Before commencing, a few further words on my approach to the argumen<sup>t</sup> are in order. I take the perspective that there is no essential Sikh and no essential form of Sikhism, just as there is no essential Sikh woman or man, nor Jat nor Mazhabi nor Khatri, (just as there is no one form of Hinduism), and, that Sikh subject formation transcends these categories; in this, religious principle coheres with cultural theory. This reflects a constructivist approach which seeks to avoid deterministic and bounded interpretations by viewing culture and religion as the unfixed, fluid, and evolving products of particular periods, encounters, expectations, and experiences (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Cli fford 1988; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Although it is in some ways an unsatisfactory paradigm, I largely view religion as an aspect of culture: Western secular framing treats religion and culture as theoretically separable (e.g., Asad 1993; Geertz 1973)—the whole of the one (religion) constituting the part of the other (culture)—and ye<sup>t</sup> I am also aware that they are mutually imbricated and enmeshed phenomena, as clearly evidenced in the idea of worldview. Political and other domains of culture are also part of this complex cultural whole (e.g., Asad 2003), in keeping with the holistic paradigm of anthropology. Proceeding from this, while for the purposes of this broad and exploratory comparison I treat both Hinduism and Sikhism as mutually exclusive, distinct and isolable traditions, at the same time, I recognize that in Punjab they emerge from and coexist within a shared regional culture in which religion has historically overlapped so that these distinctions are, at certain times and within certain contexts, not only analytically problematic but also socially contentious. This approach blurs the di fferences within Sikhism, and there are certainly other, particular forms of Sikhi, such as the Khalsa formulation, that go unexplored here. Fortunately, other scholars (e.g., Jakobsh 2003; Mahmood and Brady 2000; Singh 1996, 2005) have explored at least their gender dimensions closely. Another proviso is that readings of the religious traditions of South Asia—such as the idea that India is 'spiritual', the distinction between 'other worldly' and 'this worldly' and the very category 'Hindu'—have historically been deeply embedded in complicated processes of translation that have produced orientalist frames (King 1999; Said 1979), whether prejudicial or romantic (Inden 1986), even though engaging with such readings remains foundational to contemporary scholarship such as my own.

Beyond modes of religious understanding and being, modes of social organization such as caste and gender are also susceptible to considerable distortion, if not outright colonization, if read through an ethnocentric lens (and again, via a process of translation). Critical, non-canonical perspectives on religion by academics and particularly 'outsiders' are often unwelcome. These sensitivities in part reflect the fact that Sikhism was and continues to be colonized in multiple ways during the long centuries after its founding in encounters with Islam, the raj, modernity, development, Hindu nationalism, and globalization. The urge of these 'others' to categorize, fix, reduce, and suppress has understandably produced anxieties over diversity of form: "the process of creating a self through opposition to an other always entails the violence of repressing or ignoring other forms of di fference" (Abu-Lughod 1991, p. 140). To observe that Sikhs have disavowed the Guru's commitments to equality is perhaps inevitably confronting given that both gender and caste were reconfigured in these historical processes, so as to become much less aligned with Guru Nanak's poetics and praxes of equality and much more subject to sexism and casteism. Given that the West is ye<sup>t</sup> to address its own rampant sexism, racism, and severe and growing inequalities, there is no scope for superiority here. Reading Sikhism through feminist, intersectional, and even antiracist perspectives—particularly by a Western scholar—may be problematic for those members of the Sikh community who are sensitized to these histories and thus concerned with misreading and misrepresentation. Others may dismiss

such interpretations as part of a "tangential lexicon" (Singh 2016, p. 606). Such refusals would sugges<sup>t</sup> the continued need to commit to, and take on, the challenging work of decolonization, incumbent on us all. In this, I am as enamoured of Sikhi's potential for radical equality and transformative social change as are many Sikhs.

#### **1. Guru Nanak's Equal Society**

Sikhs are celebrating the 550th year since their founder Guru Nanak's birth in 2019. The hagiography we have of Guru Nanak holds that he was born in the village of Talwandi, later renamed Nankana Sahib in honour of the Guru, in present-day Pakistan on 15 April 1469. Undivided Punjab at this time was an "enchanted universe" (Oberoi 1994) of pluralistic and heterogeneous folk traditions that we might characterize as broadly Hindu, but was colonized by the Moghul empire and as such both influenced by regional traditions of Sufism and threatened by the spectre of conversion (although there was considerable diversity within both the Muslim and Hindu communities). Beyond the rituals of everyday agricultural life and the rites of passage, bhakti Hinduism expressed devotion to the deities, while mystics of the sant, nath, and Sufi traditions sought communion with the divine through a range of practices including asceticism. Guru Nanak's Sikhi bears the influence of his religious contemporaries, bhakts, sants, and Sufis, and ye<sup>t</sup> expounds a unique tradition that is neither Hindu nor Muslim.

The janam sakhis (birth stories) outline a dramatic foundational episode when Guru Nanak was swept into a river while bathing, transported by divine revelation, and feared drowned. Three days later, he returned with his universal message 'na koi Hindu, na koi Mussalman', (there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim). Although it has been read this way, this statement was less a refutation of both religions, or an invitation to conversion to an as ye<sup>t</sup> amorphous Sikhi, and more a means to establish a third, and common, ecumenical, universalist—and even feminist (Singh 2005)—truth. Having received this inspiration, Guru Nanak travelled throughout the Indian subcontinent and beyond, preaching "a common humanity ... [transcending] all racial, social, religious and gender barriers" (Singh 1996, p. 22) before establishing the first Sikh settlement and community at Kartarpur in 1515. It should be noted that Guru Nanak's egalitarian reforms, later reiterated in Guru Gobind Singh's founding of the Khalsa, are part of a long trajectory of protest against the hierarchies of caste Hinduism and its distinction between worldly and spiritual life, whether in Siddhartha Gautama's ancient assertion that caste (and gender) were inconsequential in pursuing the middle path between worldliness and renunciation (Omvedt 2003); medieval, and ongoing, Nath traditions encompassing householding, ritual inversion, and asceticism (Nath and Gold 1992); or modern critiques of the caste status quo, inspired by social reformers such as Ambedkar, that recuperate the value of work of all kinds in a practice of 'disciplined householding' among the Dalit-Bahujan (Ilaiah 2009, p. 91).

Although Guru Nanak's Sikhism—pluralist, quietist, and mystical—was forced to adjust to the pressures of its routinization and growth under the sharpening of Mughal attention under later gurus, culminating with the birth of the Khalsa in 1699 under the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, Guru Nanak clearly laid the foundations for Sikhi and Sikh society within his lifetime. Sikhi rests on mindfulness and meditation on the name (nam) of the singular ye<sup>t</sup> formless divine (ek onkar) alongside simultaneous ¯ social engagement, as practiced in honest labour and conduct, humility and selflessness, unity and equality, service and shared prosperity. Guru Nanak's legacy is encapsulated in the exhortations: va n. d. chhako (sharing and assisting the needy), kirat kar ¯ o (earning an honest living through one's own ¯ labour), and nam jap ¯ o (contemplation and recitation of the names of god, also known as n ¯ am simran). ¯ This meditative practice sought to confront and overcome the spiritual and social problem of haumai (ego), or individual identity, and all of its potential accretions—lobh (greed), kama (lust), krodh (anger), ¯ hankar (pride), and moh (attachment).

It has been proposed that this apparent founding of a new religion was likely unintentional, and rather, what became Sikhism was initially a Hindu reform movement (McLeod 1989). This is in part how I read Sikh householding and egalitarianism here. It is interesting to consider just how forcefully Guru Nanak, "a pious god-loving Hindu of gentle disposition" (Madan 1986, p. 258), refuted the extant traditions with his famous unitary dictum, there is 'neither Hindu nor Muslim'. While this position refuses the claims that either might make to exclusive practice or identity, it also thereby suggests that Nanak was as interested in reforming social and religious categories as in spiritual liberation. Indeed, to some, Nanak was a revolutionary (e.g., Singh 1988), who found little "in contemporary politics, society or religion ... commendable" (Grewal [1990] 1997, p. 28). Sikh texts and practices demand "no priests, no commentators, no hierarchies between reciters/singers and listeners, no social or gender obstacles" (Singh 1996, p. 8), and moreover, as is widely noted, include verses from both Hindu and Muslim saints. Guru Nanak's unitary theology was inclusive and pluralistic. One recent interpretation suggests Guru Nanak, as 'enlightenment personified', was a harbinger of several core aspects of twenty-first century social justice, including multiculturalism, women's liberation, human rights, and socialism (Singh 2019). Despite this, Guru Nanak counselled Hindus to follow Hindu tenets, and Muslims to follow Islamic tenets (Singh 1996, p. 22). And ye<sup>t</sup> for those Hindus who would become Sikhs, Guru Nanak outlined a transformative religious and social vision.

Importantly, Sikhism can be (re-)interpreted through a feminist lens, even if gender equality is not the prevailing condition of Sikh society. Certainly, Guru Nanak's rejection of the androcentrism of the Hindu model of the stages of life can be read as challenging patriarchy (Nayar and Sandhu 2007, p. 108). It is interesting, too, to consider that the Guru Granth Sahib may metaphorically link gender and caste equality. A widely cited passage on gender equality emphasizes women's roles in birth and social reproduction:

From woman, man is born; within woman, man is conceived; to woman he is engaged and married. Woman becomes his friend; through woman, the future generations come. When his woman dies, he seeks another woman; to woman he is bound. So why call her bad? From her, kings are born. From woman, woman is born; without woman, there would be no one at all. O Nanak, only the True Lord is without a woman (473).

Elsewhere in the Granth, women's childbearing bodies are viewed as the site of an originary and perfect social equality: "In the dwelling of the womb, there is no ancestry or social status. All have originated from the Seed of God" (324). Moreover, nonbinary gender metaphors are featured throughout the writings of the Gurus to communicate divine transcendence. According to Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, the Gurus used "the language of intimate human relationships" (Singh 1996, p. 3), and of marriage in particular, to describe human relations to the divine. She writes: "The Gurus often speak from the point of view of a woman, a bride awaiting her divine Groom, who addresses the Formless One as 'Beloved'" (4). This is exemplified in gurbani, such as in the stanzas of the anand karaj (Sikh marriage rite, literally 'blissful union'), which describe the bride and groom as 'one soul in two bodies' who are enjoined together to pursue divine peace. Singh argues that Sikhism thus rejects distinctions between male and female in comprehending divinity, and by extension, in human society. Marriage is both a metaphor for divine union and a spiritual tool for its realization, which bride and groom are to utilize equally, as partners. Singh amply demonstrates that if we read and translate gurbani in feminist (and humanist) ways, the Gurus envisioned, idealized, and urged us to realize an equal society. While this is no doubt a moving and inspiring interpretation of equality in Sikh marriage, it must be pointed out (as Singh herself does) that ritual, symbolic, and social inequalities between brides and grooms and their families remain. For instance, during the four lavan (circumambulations) during ¯ the anand karaj (Sikh wedding), brides must follow their grooms around the Guru Granth Sahib. More onerously, the bride and her family are the groom and his family's inferiors throughout the wedding arrangements, at the ceremony, and into the marriage thereafter, as the troubling custom of dahej (dowry practice) makes plain. (Even more disturbing, there is also a scarcity of Sikh brides, given pronounced sex ratio imbalances arising in female foeticide; e.g., Purewal 2010, p. 38). Similarly, there are ritual constraints on women's equality in the Khalsa initiation ceremonies (Singh 2005, pp. 139–40). Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the Guru's compositions also express the ideal of caste equality, this too goes unrealized.
