Author’s Note: This was a free-write essay I did to make my thoughts as legible as possible to my supervisors as I had tried to create a map of my thoughts previously which proved to be difficult since there’s '“too much”. It, of course, was also an exercise for myself to pick out my connections, the themes, motivations, etc. This is by no means a finished or ‘publish-able’ piece in the way we understand it in this paradigm. It isn’t the most nuanced, nor a vigorous theoretical enterprise by any means. It is literally a free-write, a writing exercise that my supervisors had prompted me with, and that I took on in the hopes of refining my research problem.
I had asked people who follow me on Instagram if they would like to read a free-write piece which is the most authentic to my natural way of writing. The poll resulted in a resounding ‘yes’. I’m only just now getting around to copy/pasting it here. It has not been altered since being sent to my supervisors or to the BISA 2023 conference (I unfortunately missed the deadline—that’s ADHD for you, amirite?). I still wrote this under the premise that my supervisors will be reading it, so I am still performing for a specific gaze. But this was the closest that I have been able to come to epistemic disobedience in academia (read: pushing back against normalised academic writing which creates boundaries around what knowledge looks, sounds, and feels like), so far. I hope to explore it more, despite attempting and practicing it since 2016.
Since SquareSpace doesn’t allow for footnotes (as far as I can tell, anyway), you can find the footnotes at the end of the piece.
I hope that, as a free-write, it gives some insight into the way I make connections, think, be, do—and what my project entails. If there is such a thing, I hope you enjoy reading.
What is your research problem?
I believe that my research problem is in the liminal space of what perpetuates systems of oppression that has been borne out of coloniality as we scramble our way ‘back’ to a romanticized historical place or to some future where we ‘arrive’ due to the fear of reckoning with the liminal. If we were once whole people who were dark-skinned, femmes, specialised practitioners, sacred, crippled, and nature itself, with the propensity to need care at all times, then we must ask: At what point were we dismembered in such a way? When we witness those who have endured the disproportionate brutal dismemberment invent ‘intersectionality’ to piece themselves back together and make themselves legible as whole beings? In my current understanding, this is the result of coloniality. It is why there are multiple studies that attempt to understand the human condition under the legacy and weight of ongoing coloniality—duplicating knowledge that has been siloed simply due to different lexicons. This dismemberment includes the relationship to land, to ourselves as the cosmos, to a strict understanding of colonial time, and so on. We must ask ourselves: how do we continue to perpetuate the colonial matrix of power (CMP) even amongst calls of decolonisation? Who are the memory keepers that enunciate the wholeness of ourselves as an extension of the celestial bodies we observe in the night sky where the line on the horizon is blurred in the darkness? How have we inherited the trauma of the colonial encounter, and how do we witness trauma being used as a verb to perpetuate the CMP? How does trauma silence and/or lead to silencing for a moment of respite and survival while we catch our breaths in between whispers underground to scream and be heard outside the trenches? How do we police, and therefore securitise, as an agent of the CMP to perpetuate coloniality? What is the relationship between security/silence/trauma, and how does keeping them as separate actions keep us from envisioning the whole puzzle of coloniality? How do we know where one ends, and another begins? Or do we finally embrace the liminal, the nebulous role of such concepts that has us continue our own dismemberment despite the disavowal of the CMP. To be clear, a single individual cannot match the power of a large structure like coloniality—it takes multiple people to prop the structure up on their backs like Atlas. But what if Atlas shrugged?
Real world issues and gaps in the theoretical literature
For Sikhi, for us as Sikhs, for me—we have inherited our stories through the eyes of the colonial gaze, and through the bodies who have endured and bear the mark of colonial trauma. Every day, I see the discourse shift ever so close to the edges of the liminal, and in each moment I watch with bated breath as the CMP that walks, talks, sounds like me use the lexicon and the understanding of such lexicon to call those who are reaching for the unseen and unknown back into the centre through the trifecta of security/silence/trauma that encircles and protects the CMP from being dismantled to pine for the seen, known, and romanticised—but only as it was told to us. In a lot of ways, Sikhi has started from the foundation of reaching for the unknown, and pushing against the forces that requires us to remain still; to assimilate and disappear into a sea of dismembered and disfigured faces that render us as unrecognizable. To be clear, Sikhi is not a notion or tradition of individualising the human and separating it from the cosmos. Neither is it to reorganise the human and render it as a collapsible being that can be as powerful as the collective vastness of the universe. Yet, through centuries of enduring the CMP, we remain in the liminal space where we can make nonsensical statements divorced from the profound irony that betray the intangible power of the CMP like stating “we are all an integral part of the same Divine and no one is superior or inferior to anyone else” in response to a feminised person attempting to be heard about the harm in the practices of policing their bodies simply because it is being gendered through the colonial lens that we have inherited. It can be seen in the ways we resist the Indian State—where we simultaneously throw rocks at the border that has dismembered and severed our connection to the land and the various integrated lifeways and waterways imbedded in it, while having those rocks create a neat little line to demarcate a “separate Sikh State” to ‘ensure our safety’ due to our profound insecurity as a result of ongoing colonial trauma that continues to be mapped onto our bodies. The centralised State is reflected back to us when we look in the mirror and do not see the nebulous cosmos filling the confines of our physical bodies. Similarly, I struggle against the confines of an ivory institution that wishes to make the nebulous—with each individual star and gaseous formation coming together to create a mesmerising vast image that cannot be comprehended while simultaneously taking shape of an image that we can name—into a singular point that can be made legible into the confines of word limits, disciplines, academic lexicon, or worse, dismembered into smaller chunks that span across a lifetime in the hopes that others will see the forest for the trees. Even my words are limited as I try to translate the electrical fields of my mind into the English trade language that allows room for bartering on ideas to exist in the first instance.
Why is it significant?
While I already had these thoughts swirling in my mind and seeing the sparks of connection as my dismembered body has been crawling its way back together in the dark picking up all sorts of debris on its way back to me, while I align my praxis to the teaching of the cosmos, I have been so lucky (or maybe the planets have heard my prayers) in having articles find their way to me, and me to them. In Sharma (2021, p.25), the author illuminates “the issue of ‘epistemic imperialism’ and utilizes indigenous knowledge systems as an analytical framework with emancipatory potential representing one of the possible means of decolonizing knowledge and advancing the case for epistemological plurality within the discipline of IR”. Sharma (2021, p.25) does this by “offering a methodological contribution to the larger debate on ‘coloniality of power’ by critiquing the disembodied monoculture associated with modern scientific rationality”. As the calls for decolonisation of the international relations (IR) discipline increase, I question if we (those who call for and those who receive the call of decolonisation) have a shared meaning of decolonisation. Time and again, I see the call for decolonisation leave structures intact to allow the CMP endure. We see this in the ways that diversity and inclusion has been co-opted to allow for celebrations of people like Rishi Sunak to be considered the first person of color as Prime Minister when many others would consider him to be the same as his white, rich counterparts. Of course, there is some nuance in that he is not white—and that doesn’t absolve him of his effort in attempting to access the very structure that has been left intact: whiteness/white supremacy/CMP. As an antidote to this, Sharma (2021, p. 31) asserts that moving towards an “ecology of knowledges disrupts the hierarchized power and knowledge relations and unravels alternative epistemic sites, thus supplementing the current decolonial critique in IR. It helps in reframing coloniality as a methodological problem in IR that has shaped hierarchies and erasures”.
Knowing this and seeing this reflected back to me, and knowing that ‘the Sikh community’ asserts its indigeneity to the land, I was overjoyed to see the algorithm pair me with Sian & Dhamoon’s (2020) article titled, Decolonizing Sikh Studies: A Feminist Manifesto. In it, Sian & Dhamoon (2020) assert that
“By dwelling at feminist intersections of postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and decolonization studies, we are inspired to share the radical possibilities of Sikh Studies, and we also urge Sikh Studies and Sikh people to inhabit an explicit political orientation of insurrection and subversion…In particular, we foreground eight points of action: gendering Sikh Studies; de-policing intimate desire and the diversity of relationships; disrupting Eurocentric knowledge production; de-territorializing diasporas; challenging caste politics; disrupting Islamophobia; undoing our roles in contemporary colonialism; and fostering care and responsibility for the nonhuman world” (p. 43).
Considering that doing/action has been aligned with masculinity and therefore seen, and thinking/patience with femininity and therefore unseen—what better way to understand and delink our contemporary period than to observe, watch, process, and fully contend with the liminal space we find ourselves in that is held together by the trifecta of security/silence/trauma? In fact, Sian & Dhamoon (2020, p. 48) state that “conventionally in Sikh discourse, Sikh women have been located on the margins, represented through the Sikh male gaze; as Jackobsh argues, ‘the overwhelming impression one receives from Sikh historiography is that Sikh women do not have a history. From the silences surrounding women, their experiences and lives can only be perceived as inconsequential.’” As a feminised person myself, I was frequently subjected to the policing of all the dismembered parts of my body and my disconnection to land. If I cut my kes[1], then somehow I have severed my connection to the cosmos and therefore I am no longer a Sikh—or ‘less than’ a Sikh due to some litmus test that must have been invented prior to my birth that has not been made visible to me since visiting this earthly plane. Yet, if kes is a part of our bodies, and is our connection to the divine—shouldn’t my communityTM be interested in why I chose to sever that connection? Or cleanse myself of that portion of the connection to start anew? If they were truly interested in relationality, they would have learned that a boy chose to pull my kes while we were playing a friendly game of baskeball and threw me to the floor with my kes still in their hand as I was about to make a winning shot. They would have known that it was my first time learning, quite emphatically, that men would always feel they have access to my body; to my connection with the Universe; and will enact violence onto my body just to win a child’s game—what more are they willing to enact violence on under the guise of ‘winning’, I wonder.
Actually, I can hear the responses to my disconnection now—someone else touching my kes isn’t a good enough reason to cut it. That somehow this shouldn’t have traumatised me in such a way. That “a true Sikh” would have persevered and maintained their kes despite this. Typical. These assumptions on my part are from 32 years of navigating my communityTM while trying to maintain some connection to it. It wasn’t until I started analysing their assumptions—that cutting one’s kes somehow means the connection to the Divine is so severed that there are no other ways to connect; or that there isn’t still kes that remains that keeps us connected in the first instance as we shed portions of our connection that no longer serve us (because even the Divine can see the importance of autonomy over our own bodies); or that we cannot simultaneously say that kes is a part of us and that other’s touching our kes without our consent isn’t trauma in and of itself; or that the policing of our reactions and the need to embrace autonomy after such a violent act onto our bodies as a form of healing is an extension of the same practices of the State that securitises on the basis of subversion to the hegemony. Our experiences, then, are rendered silent, inconsequential, while we scream against the soundproof glass walls, beating away at it in the hopes that one day it might crack.
To my mind, if scholars truly wish to decolonise and allow space for those at the margins, then they wouldn’t be too worried about diluting the hegemony. In fact, on some level, maybe they’d welcome it. Maybe when the liminal space is flooded with so much water that it dilutes the air, people would join those who are reaching for the unseen and unknown. Maybe, because they’ll see the water rushing from the romanticized, they’ll see that the only way out is to a space we have never been. Without fully contending the role of the trifecta of security/silence/trauma, scholars cannot understand the barbed wires that keep us in the centre of the CMP, we cannot empancipate ourselves. Contending with this trifecta would mean understanding the ways in which the trifecta is consumed to be made one with our DNA. It would mean looking in the mirror and seeing cracks in the CMP, and the cosmos glittering through behind it waiting to be experienced.
How will you go about executing it?
To contend with this, I do not believe that I can just focus on theory as those who have not yet read the project I’ve yet to write may feel it is too abstract to conceptualise tangibly. While simultaneously focusing on tangle ways obfuscates the connective tissues that lead back to coloniality, the way security is already institutionalised, felt, lived, and the ways we continue to institutionalise it. Even my imagination on how to showcase what is unseen to make it legible and be seen is shaped through the colonial lens as I desperately pick at the wound of the colonial trauma—like picking away at a scab that refuses to heal. I am simultaneously a part from and assimilated into the institution that securitises. I will never have the same amount of power as the State does, nor the monopoly on violence. But, I can either breathe into the fire of insurrection, supply the coal or logs; or, I can get the pail and put the fire out, get a pat on the back by daddy State and be rewarded by seeing tomorrow despite my malnourished (physically/spiritually) deteriorating slowly. Do I risk my own comfort to delink the electrified fence of the trifecta and urge people to make their way through the small gap into the dark night, or do I reach for the cattle prod and usher people back into the centre out of protection and fear of the trifecta despite never being as powerful as the trifecta itself? Shouldn’t the trifecta’s power be made visible so I can finally look down at the cattle prod in my hand and contend with how I’ve attempted to become the electrified fence? And shouldn’t the trifecta be linked back to coloniality—where we have huddled in the centre?
“It is said that the rest of the Guru Granth Sahib is an elaboration of the mool mantar[2] and that this Mantar itself is an explanation and amplification of the single phrase – Ek Oankaar, which is the first entry in the holy Granth” (Mool Mantar - SikhiWiki, Free Sikh Encyclopedia., n.d.). Therefore, while it seems inevitable that my body of work will span a lifetime, I need to remember that I’m not aware of how long this particular lifetime is for me. But, I know deep in my body that this is what has been written in stone for me in this iteration. So, I need to translate the essence of my purpose in this paradigm upon which I can elaborate. Since my focus is on my community—the one I define for myself, the one that is at the margin of the liminal reaching for the unseen, in the dark, and across time and space—it is important to me to centre the Sikhs who are perpetually subjected to the trifecta of security/silence/trauma because they dare to be their whole selves instead of dismembered parts.
I must imagine ways to marry the theoretical to the empirical to showcase the ways the trifecta is the gatekeeper, the enforcer of the CMP that continues to keep coloniality in the shadows of its enunciations. It is my hope that I can do this by simultaneously territorialising Sikhs to Punjab as the land that birthed us, and deterritorialise us as we have both propagated ourselves and been propagated into what is now called the diaspora. How does the State—the UK and India—rely on the trifecta to maintain its existence as the enunciation of coloniality? How do the Sikhs both internalise this and resist against it? How do we see this mapped onto our bodies through the monopoly of violence we witness by the State and normalised practices we have inherited and pass down? This requires looking at policy and practices of the State(s) of UK and India and how it securitises Sikh existence, as well as how we police each other to either be assimilated into the hegemony of the State(s) or the hegemony of the racialised Sikh that has not reckoned with its occupation of the liminal, and how both of these instances allow coloniality to hide in the shadows of its enunciations.
References
Katy P. Sian, & Rita Kaur Dhamoon. (2020). Decolonizing Sikh Studies: A Feminist Manifesto. Journal of World Philosophies, 5(2), 43–60. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/171336/
Mool Mantar - SikhiWiki, free Sikh encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved November 4, 2022, from https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Mool_Mantar
Sharma, A. (2021). Decolonizing International Relations: Confronting Erasures through Indigenous Knowledge Systems. International Studies, 58(1), 25–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020881720981209
[1] Kes is the practice of allowing hair to grow naturally as a connection to the cosmos. It is said that Guru Gobind Singh ordered Sikhs to keep the 5 k’s as a symbol of one’s Sikhi. It has since been racialised as a marker to be a Sikh.
[2] The mool mantar begins the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, our living guru who resides in the pages that we have come to call ‘scripture’ after the colonial encounter, and is the basis of the whole of Sikhi.