Clifford Geertz’s idea of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life,” (Geertz 2000 p.89) shapes much of my thinking on the idea of a common group culture. In my work, I hope to elicit the whys and wherefores of the social categorisation and construction of  Peraktown Sikh common identification. Roger Brubaker highlights a dependence on ‘groupism’ and the importance of treating a group not just as a unit of social analysis but as a “contextually fluctuating conceptual variable,” (Brubaker, R. 2004. p. 11) requiring explanation of why in this particular space and moment did this sense of commonality occur and how it evolves in meaning over time and space.

 I started my research interviewing three elderly women I barely knew. The pilot study focused on the Japanese Occupation of Malaysia. The initial interview took the form of a conversation between the three, reminiscing on their shared experiences of this period in history and their recollection of the major events as they lived them. They spoke openly of traumatic occourences, hardships and family drama with no hesitation despite my presence and the bulky recording devices. As my thesis took shape, the initial informants sourced additional subjects for my work. Each new interviewee agreed to meet me as the community grapevine spread the news that the Headmaster’s granddaughter wanted to study the Peraktown Sikhs for a PhD. They articulated the same message;  I was one of their own, as the granddaughter and daughter of Peraktown Sikhs, and this was for further postgraduate study, it was important to them to ensure that I had access to their stories, no mater how compromising or unflattering they were.

I inherited a clearly defined place within this community despite not speaking their language or even English with the same accent, not being familiar with their religious texts nor demonstrating a shared belief through my appearance and most intriguingly, having never met many of them before. As Anthony  Cohen explained, belonging “implies much more than having been born in a place – it suggests we are part of the fabric of community – we see it in the forms of social organisation and association in the community.”  They felt I had a right to sift through their memories, their ephemera and to participate in their lives, as their histories were also my own history. As I continued my research gathering, I attended family gatherings and functions at Gurdwaras, private homes and restaurants in Kuala Lumpur. The Peraktown Sikh community introduced me to other Sikhs,  as coming from a good family and currently at university reading for a PhD. They described me as well-read on the Sikh religion and usually commented on how I looked very nice in my Punjabi suit. They assigned significance to certain aspects of my identity; my primordial ethnic and cultural affiliation, the family I was born in to, my practice of the Sikh religion including the appropriate dress and finally, my educational level, all of which form part of my sense of self-definition.

In this naming, of myself and by others, I was situated within a family, a caste, a social position and a religion, assigned a place in the fabric of the Sikh community and claimed in belonging as a Peraktown Sikh. The easy disregard for language or common religious practice fore fronted the question of what else defined membership to the Sikh community of Peraktown. These encapsulate the primordial definition of their group identity, best described by Geertz as  

an attachment that stems from the subject’s, not the observer’s, sense of the “givens” of social existence—speaking a particular language, following a particular religion, being born into a particular family, emerging out of a particular history, living in a particular place; the basic facts, viewed again from the actor’s perspective, of blood, speech, custom, faith, residence, history, physical appearance, and so on. (Geertz 1993)

The Peraktown Sikhs evolved beyond the fixity of primordial definition, willingly discarding or altering norms and values in pursuit of the ultimate goal of bettering the family position. They incorporated English and the colonial education system as a marker of status.  Women felt greater freedom beyond the home and hearth, with the encouragement and support for further studies and careers. Religious practices relaxed with acceptance for the cutting of hair for example. Yet despite moving beyond the rural inheritance to embrace their new physical and mental environments, the Peraktown Sikhs remained in the interstices, no longer fitting in to “back there” nor integrating fully in to life here. 

The parking lot offers a snapshot of socio-economic status and geographical settlement of the congregation. Where Gurdhwaras (1) served a local population in the past and walking or bicycling to service was common, the affluence of the Sikhs into this area meant moving further away to leafier suburbs. The government infrastructure budget created more roads and highways and flyovers to nowhere in particular, taking away well-worn pedestrian routes between home and Gurdhwara. The concrete jungle makes the weather less appealing and air conditioned travel is preferable and very much the mode. Displaying the range of class positions in the congregation, local protons are parked along side Mercedes and BMWs.  

It’s after four on a Thursday afternoon, and the regular women’s service is on. In the prayer hall, twenty-one women sit, including the Gyani (2) who is reciting the sacred verses. A single man stands just outside following the service, isolated in his devotion.  The women are spread out, heads tipped forward and faces shadowed by dupattas (3). The older women tend towards browns and greys and maroons, with simple patterns or florals. The only splashes of colour mark out the two younger women present.  A few walking sticks are in evidence, and some of the more elderly, including the eighty-six year old birthday girl, sit on stools rather than the traditional curled legs on the floor. The older women speak the words of prayer in concert, following the rituals with long ease of practice. The rituals retain meaning for them, marking the continuity of their lives. The genuflection before the holy book, accompanied by an offering of money plays both the role of showing respect and acknowledgement for the religious teachings but also serves the practical purpose of maintaining the institution.

The room takes on the strong fragrance of sugar and warm ghee, a sign that the service is nearing an end. The congregation following the motions, palms together in prayer, bow and stand up. Bole So Nihaal, Sat Sri Akaal (4) is called out in near unison. The detachment of language from daily life distances the younger generation, many who are not fluent in the language, from the meaning of the service, but some Gurdhwaras now use screens with subtitles. The practice of religion adapts to the demands of modernity. The women start to shuffle a little. Handbags are opened and tissues pulled out in anticipation. The stainless steel basins come out, carried by two middle-aged women, doling out generous servings of Prashad, (5) a sweet and rich ghee and flour pudding to all. Lips and palms glisten and the prepared tissues put to use. Movement out towards the langar hall begins and the last Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh (6) rings out. The sharing of food and conversation follows the shared time of ritualized prayer. The tradition of the langar hall (7) offers connectivity in contrast to nuclear families, work commitments and performance of secular identities in daily Malaysian life. The conversations keep them in synchronisation with the rhythms of the community, bonding time for a community that previously shared geographical space but is now dispersed.

Geertz discusses how we expect Asian religions “to prosper or decline; we do not expect them to change.” Similar to his experience of Balinese religious practice, the Sikh religion and its congregation adapt to the growing secularization of our time. Translations of the holy book are more freely available and the cable television broadcasts of the daily services at the Golden Temple in Amritsar bring the community back in contact with the practice of faith. Temple priests and elders are more accepting of modern dress and the bandanna is substitutable for a turban and long hair. Through acceptance, the younger generation is prevented from being alienated and distanced. Youth groups are popular in Gurdhwaras around the country and there is resurgence in self-identification as a Sikh. The fundamental processes of rationalization in the religion is well under way and the eventual outcome offers insight to the performance and practice of identity within the community.

My PhD started as an examination of a community, over time, who used their cultural and social capital to negotiate their socio-economic status. I use oral histories and memoirs as data to explore the change in status and the underlying strategies used in building capital. As I continue the data collection process, my thesis adapts in response to new understanding or ideas I may discover.  I hope to use this blog to explore some of the changes within my topic, but also to understand my own sense of identity and belonging to the community I study. In Border Country, Williams describes the return ‘home’ of Matthew Price, an academic, from a Welsh, working class background. The book details the internal sense of ‘exile’ that Matthew feels and his disconnectedness from the rhythms of life in the village and from his parents and old friends. On reading the book, it struck me that the experience of a working class boy from a small village in rural Wales, going off to university in England echoed both my experiences as a student, going from an Asian to a Western city for university and that of the informants in my PhD study, leaving a small town for the large cities and foreign countries, where their culture and appearance marked them distinct. Identity and belonging become mutable, as you travel further away from the world you know, carrying the weight of family and community aspirations and the inheritance of their memories and constructed identities.

Crossing borders requires a continuous re-negotiation of identity and an acceptance of a position as an exile.  I spent seventeen years as Said’s exotic, oriental ‘other’ in a predominantly White society, balancing the difference between my inheritance of cultural norms and values with the new and alien of my adopted home. My skin colour, name and religion defined my difference, yet my language, education and manners allowed me to fit in. As a great grand child of migrants and as a migrant myself, this inheritance is a complex one as there is the nostalgia and longing for the culture, society and identity I hold in my place of birth as well as in the imagined homeland of my ancestors. I inscribe my sense of identity as a dialectical narrative of belonging between the construct of ‘home’ and ‘not home,’ creating a new position of ‘sometimes home.’ In September 2010, after seventeen years, I returned home, or at least to my imagined idea of home, looking forward to belonging without the constant attention and conciliation of my identity. Like Dorothy, I believed “there’s no place like home” sufficient to allow a return to ‘my’ world. Yet as Rushdie wrote, “the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that “there’s no place like home,” but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.”  

Learning or re-learning how to fit in took time, and my rusty Malay returned as did my ability to appropriate the right social language and mores in the different groups of people I mixed with. I continued to feel much like that proverbial square peg with old school-friends. In contrast, from the beginning, with my family, while I had changed, it seemed that my place and identity within the family had altered to accommodate the ‘new’ me without apparent effort. In beginning my PhD research, I’ve found another place where fitting in is not a challenge. The community my research focuses on negotiate belonging and identity fluidly and are able to return despite years of exile. As a ‘legacy’ of the community and despite years of living abroad, they welcomed me and actively engaged with my research, offering themselves as subjects and putting me in contact with others who could help. In Border Country, Matthew finds his ‘return’ to be complicated and flawed. The ‘myth of return’ featured in much of diaspora and/or migrant literature I read. For the Indian diaspora, lately the debate emerged in the form of an article in the New York Times and the response by Chetan Bhagat, a writer. Return is problematic due to expectations, and this desire of return to our idea of what ‘home’ was and therefore, to our exiled selves, what it should be. Perhaps the answer of why some can go back and many can’t is in our management of our expectations and willingness to continue in flux, negotiating our hybridised identities to suit time, place and people. Alternatively, it may relate to the amount of cultural capital or ‘habitus’ that some retain in contrast to assimilation in the new society they now belong to. Thinking about all of this means some changes to my methodology and having to draft up questions for semi-structured interviews but it potentially may add to the knowledge in my thesis and it will definitely make it more interesting to read. I am too early on in the process of PhDing to know if this will end up in the thesis but it is making the research process more personally enriching. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend Border Country, not just for thesis purposes but because it was a book I found hard to put down.