British Sikhs and the wedding smashers

Sunny Hundal

It was meant to be the happiest day of their lives — a celebration of modern multicultural Britain at the biggest gurdwara in the western world. On August 7, in west London, a British Sikh bride and her Polish Christian groom sat together and absorbed the religious blessings at their wedding ceremony. She wore a cream and red dress, while he wore a red turban, in keeping with Sikh traditions.

But that morning, 20 uninvited men were determined to put a stop to the wedding. They demanded that the priests end the ceremony, hurling insults at people who objected. The police were called and eventually the couple were forced to proceed into a hurried ceremony, while the protesters took pictures to publish online.

This was not an isolated incident. The next weekend, an interfaith wedding in Lozells, Birmingham, nearly turned into a mass brawl after protesters tried to stop it and, again, the police had to be called. The following weekend, another wedding in Coventry only managed to go ahead after negotiations with the disrupters. In each case, the bride was a Sikh woman and the groom a non-Sikh man.

Under the media radar, such disruptions of interfaith weddings at gurdwaras have become worryingly commonplace across Britain. In July, 2013, a Sikh woman and her Christian husband in Swindon were locked out of their own wedding by 40 protesters, who afterwards posted a video online of the bride’s mother pleading with them to stop. The BBC Asian Network reporter met a family who’d had windows smashed as a warning about an upcoming marriage. Most were too afraid to say anything in public.

But not Sim Kaur. One of the very few Sikh women willing to speak about her experience, she says: “Our gurdwaras are run by men and the protesters are all men. All the cancellations I’ve heard about have been of Sikh women marrying non-Sikh men or men not born into the Sikh religion and I doubt that’s a coincidence. I do believe it’s a faith issue, but it’s also about gender and race.”

Her wedding to her partner, Sam, was disrupted earlier this year, even though he had made an effort to learn about Sikhism and adopted Singh in his name, under guidelines laid out by the Sikh Council UK, an organisation set up in 2010 to deal with issues affecting the Sikh community in Britain and Europe. “Isn’t it better,” she asks, “that we teach our partners and their friends and family about this ceremony and invite them in, rather than creating a divide?” 

Sikh radicalism is rarely debated in the media. British Sikhs — numbering 400,000 — are largely seen as a model minority who aren’t embroiled in controversies or plagued by extremists as Muslims are. But scratch the surface and there are signs of a growing divide between the liberal and more conservative Sikhs, and the controversy around interfaith marriages goes to the heart of the problem.

Until I posted several videos of wedding disruptions on my Facebook page last month, there seemed to be barely any debate about why these were happening. Immediately, I was subjected to a torrent of abuse and threats, but also heard from dozens of Sikhs (mostly women) who had faced a similar kind of intimidation. 

One might conclude that this issue was about race and the diaspora, but the experience of North America, where nearly a million Sikhs live, says differently. Amardeep Singh, associate professor at Lehigh University in Philadelphia, attributes the more relaxed approach largely because there aren’t such concentrations of Sikhs as in London and Birmingham. “Sikh communities in the US are suburban and spatially dispersed. Most of us commute some distance just to reach the nearest gurdwara.”

In the UK, then, we seem to be dealing with people who believe they have a sufficient density of numbers to preserve some kind of cultural purity. 

However, those who support the disruptions say they are not opposed to interfaith marriages per se, but are only trying to enforce religious guidelines. Shamsher Singh, of the National Sikh Youth Federation, says it objects to this ceremony being appropriated by non-Sikhs. “They can have prayers, they can have part of the function inside a gurdwara, just not the religious ceremony. That’s reserved for those of the Sikh faith.”

Others say this attitude ignores Sikh history. Amandeep Madra, co-founder of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, says that until recently “Sikh traditions were highly pluralistic, with a willingness to learn and coexist with concordant traditions. This is one of the most culturally appealing aspects of Sikhism in a modern, multicultural world. However, there has always been a more fearful voice that is threatened by the danger of being assimilated and indistinguishable from others.”

So the rise of Sikh fundamentalism in the UK isn’t just an attempt to enforce rules; it is also the expression of a worry among young males that Sikhs are becoming too integrated. To them, it is profoundly disturbing that a recent poll by City Sikhs, representing professional Sikhs, should show an overwhelming majority in favour of gurdwaras allowing interfaith marriages.  The events of 1984 in India have also led to a defensive mentality, exacerbated by worries that the religion is being diluted as new converts join the fold.

So, while many Sikhs are integrating into British culture, others gravitate towards religion as their main primary identity. Shamsher Singh is one. “We’re dealing with complex issues of identity,” he says. “The intersection of our sense of self with coloniality has created this hybrid, stateless individual who struggles at every juncture with validation and having to constantly justify beliefs and the practice of religion to a westernised audience. I’m living in an age where individuals on the periphery, with tenuous links to the community, are telling those of us who have committed to the Sikh way how we must interpret and practice Sikhi.” 

Many worry that such attitudes will eventually shrink the community, not strengthen it. Pippa Virdee, a senior lecturer of South Asian History at De Montfort University, says: “There has generally been a greater assertion of what it is to be Sikh in the last 10 to 15 years. That identity has become exclusive and serves to exclude people who see themselves as Sikhs but may not be practising. Increasingly, I feel we are told — often by men and so-called leaders of the faith — who is a good Sikh. This will serve only to alienate people.”

As I can attest. After I posted videos of wedding disruptions, I was threatened. And my experience wasn’t rare. 

Many Sikhs also see the bid to stop inter-religious marriages as an attempt by men to control Sikh women and stop them from marrying “out”. “If they so love Sikhi, why not question the high rate of female foeticide within the Sikh community as a hindrance?” asks writer and journalist Herpreet Kaur Grewal.

Meanwhile, this controversy isn’t going to go away soon. The 2011 British Census found that 1.8 per cent of Sikhs (7,600 people) identified as white, while 1.2 per cent (5,000) identified as mixed-race, and it’s likely a large proportion of them do so through marriage to Sikhs, rather than conversion. If those numbers grow, and as some grow more liberal, the differences with more radical Sikhs will grow starker. 

Jonathan Evans, who calls himself Jonny Singh, emailed me about his experience of moving closer to Sikhism after his marriage to a British Sikh. “If my wife and I were forced to abandon our Anand Karaj, would I have felt the same about the vision of Sikhism?” he asks. “As humans, we are shaped by our experiences. I would never have become a Sikh if I was not married in the gurdwara.”

The Independent