Reviews for Fighting for faith and nation

The average rating for Fighting for faith and nation based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-23 00:00:00 Mark Evans Growing up in a city with many Sikhs I had an outsized idea of their prevalence in the world and thought it natural that everyone should know what "Khalistan", the desired Sikh national homeland, was. As it turns out Sikhs are a very small (albeit famous) minority in the world and even in India. The Sikh diaspora is also probably disproportionately militant since it consists of many people who have been driven into exile from India. Nonetheless, the history of their movement is important and dramatic and this book offers a great primer. The author spends time with Sikh militants and their supporters in the diaspora to give an understanding of their view of the world. She is transparent about fighting back feelings of sympathy and identification with them. For an academic book it is surprisingly captivating. The thing that came across most strongly was the level of oppression perceived by some Sikhs in India. I am only starting to understand the nature of Brahmin racial sentiments and how they might be felt as exclusionary to minorities. Sikhs are neither Muslim nor Hindu, and they tend to recoil at often being included in the latter category. This is not out of xenophobia but out of a desire to maintain the distinctness of their tradition and identity. The Brahmin attitude is willing to concede people in India their religion, as long as they include it under an expansive idea of Hinduism. The requirement is that Sikhism, Buddhism and even Islam in India somehow be considered as "Hindu" or at least "Hindu-influenced" religions. The book did not really fully explain the motives of the followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the icon of Sikh militancy, other than greater autonomy in Punjab and some religious concessions. It did however do a good job at explaining why people joined the militancy after the Indian Army killed Bhindranwale and besieged the sacred Golden Temple. The accounts of the pogroms that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi were harrowing. There has been a lot of suffering in Sikh history. Many of their Gurus were horribly killed by Mughal emperors, while in the present day they have suffered torture and mass killings at the hands of the Indian state. They have developed a cult of martyrdom and military brotherhood in response to this history. The glorification of martyrdom, suffering and resistance to oppression reminds me very much of Shiism. It was jarring to consider how many Mughal emperors, who most South Asians Muslims view positively, played very cruel roles in Sikh history — acting something like Yazids to the Guru Husayn's. Sikh militants also have a countercultural attitude of not recognizing the law of modern India, which they view as an unjust state. Despite this they tend to be rather law-abiding in their Western diaspora. Most of the current and former militants the author meets are living ordinary lives in the West today, albeit cloistered within insular Sikh communities. Their private histories are filled with tragedy, heroism and ideological longing. You never know what kind of dramatic things are going on under the surface of immigrant communities until you take a look.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-21 00:00:00 David Norstrom I read this book a few years after its initial publication, and decided to re-read it a month ago. The first time I read it, I was enthralled because of the insight into the mindset of the Sikh militancy, which was paradoxically beautiful, mostly unified and inspiring. You simply didn't get this sort of content anywhere back then, and for the most part, you still don't. I believe that my excitement over this elusive information overshadowed at least one major deficiency in the book. The author, an ethnographic anthropologist, spends quite a bit of time talking about her academic discipline and its various theories. That's fine -- this is an academic book, after all. However, I believe she allowed her integrity to be compromised to a certain but significant degree. There are a number of potential factors: fear of being viewed as sympathetic, or even objective towards a group of people that most call "terrorists" mostly due to propaganda; her own issues and experience with violence in her life (she talks about it briefly in the book); etc. I don't profess to know which one, but the symptoms litter the book. In fact after two chapters I grabbed a highlighter and marked in the margins where I saw these symptoms. Let's just say I haven't highlighted that much since my undergrad days. When she has something positive to say about the Sikh militancy (and often Sikhs in general), it is generally somewhat curt and almost always qualified. When she has something negative to say, she seems to dwell on it longer than it needs to be, and often lacks any sort of footnotes. She also contradicts herself on a regular basis, and most times it is because she appears to be trying to please her academic colleagues. Unfortunately, this deficiency is a critical one. Despite this, I urge Sikhs to read it. I think that one thing that will startle you is how much propaganda there is about Bhindranwale, even among Sikhs. I say that because you will learn that, per the evidence out there, Bhindranwale did virtually nothing wrong but love his people -- quite literally -- to death. You will also learn that even in this book, where the author unfortunately shows a strong bias, evidence of violence towards innocent people is scarce. So again, if you're a Sikh or want to learn more about a tragically overlooked incident in world history, check this book out. One final note -- I recently read a more recent book by the author about the role of women in Sikhism. In the introduction, she complains about the heartbreak caused to her by the lack of any serious feedback or communication from the Sikh community after the publication of "Fighting for Faith and Nation." I suspect that most of the people she speaks of agree with me. 4.5/10 *** but, a must-read for Sikhs despite this rating