New Book on Early 20th Century Sikh Women in California

On 29 Aug, the Bhai Vir Singh Sadan, New Delhi hosted an online discussion on historian Nicole Ranganath’s bookWomen and the Sikh Diaspora in California: Singing the Seven Seas. The panelists were Ranganath, Associate Director and Assistant Professor Middle East/South Asia Studies University of California, Davis; Prof Anshu Malhotra Chair, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Dr Radha Kapuria, Assistant Professor in South Asian History, Durham University. Singing the Seven Seas charts the transoceanic history of South Asian women in California across the 20th century. In an article Ranganath writes, ‘The earliest community of South Asian immigrants in America were Panjabi Sikh laborers and farmers who settled along the west coast of North America at the turn of the 20th century. Nearly 90% of the roughly 6,500 South Asians in the US were Panjabi Sikhs on the eve of World War I.’ The book focuses on the cultural and emotional lives of women who left Panjab for California, starting in the early 20th century, using music as a lens to explore their journeys. Ranganath reimagines the history of the South Asian diaspora through an examination of gender and the dynamic interplay of water and land in the cultural history of Sikhs. It shows how the history and music of transoceanic communities, in this case Sikhs, spilled beyond the boundaries of regions, empires and nation-states. It highlights the diverse South Asian diaspora by revealing women’s distinct migration history and experiences, challenging dominant views that depict men as mobile and women as stationary.