A sense of place: Sikh identity in Great Britain and Hong Kong
Although evidence points to Sikhs being present on the day that Hong Kong became a British territory, Sikhs in Hong Kong remain a relatively unexamined group. Based on data gathered as part of a wider study of processes of religious transmission among young British Sikhs and on fieldwork carried out among the Sikh community in Hong Kong, this article follows Dusenbery's (2008) studies of Sikhs around the world to focus on a) how Sikhs understand their place in their social world and b) how they respond to being a minority in every country in which they are resident. Examining the literature on Hong Kong Sikhs in relation to their status and position within wider Hong Kong society, I compare the contexts, issues and challenges faced by Sikhs in Hong Kong with those in Great Britain. The article demonstrates that although many Sikhs have links to the Punjab, local context and local imaginings impact on religious identity and citizenship.
Thai-Sikh diaspora and identity: participation of Sikh students in the extracurricular activities at the university
ABSTRACT This article draws from an ethnographic case study of a group of Thai-Sikh diaspora students in an International college of a Thai Public university. It examines the issues related to the identity of Sikh diaspora students in Thailand and how it affects their participation in extracurricular activities at the university. This study fulfil the deficit of abundant research in the area of Thai-Sikh diaspora studies. Based on Social Identity theory, this qualitative study focuses on the empirical data collected over a period of nine months mainly through semi-structured in-depth interviews as well as ethnographic observation. The major findings of this study are (a) the diaspora students mostly feel comfortable in their own groups because of the cultural and religious differences from Thai students, (b) their schooling in India or International schools have an impact on their socialisation patterns, (c) the unwillingness on the part of the host society to see them as ‘Thai’ limit their participation in extracurricular activities, (d) the fear of not being accepted and viewed differently impacts the lack of participation and (d) there is a lack of proper knowledge and understanding on the part of the Thai society about Sikh religion. This study emphasises the need of a mutual understanding between the Thai-Sikh diaspora students as well as the Thai students to accept the differences and broaden their networks outside of their community.
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India
This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form an exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences - mostly law - in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others". he shows how the very orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.