The Sikhs are a “people on the move” and continue to play a significant role in the contemporary phenomenon of global migration. They are historically connected to the Punjab region, a small part of what is today the Indian state of Punjab, which they consider their homeland, real or imaginary. Sikhs are also a “mobile people” with a history and culture marked by the willingness to
travel, adventurousness, and adjustability. At present, the global Sikh population is estimated as between 23 and 25 million people, of which 1.5 million or more are supposedly residing outside of India, scattered around the world. Although Owen W. Cole wrote in the early 1990s that “Europe’s Sikh community outside Britain scarcely exists,” the demographical picture is quite different twenty years later. Currently, the European Sikhs are estimated at approximately half a million people, with the largest and oldest settlements in Britain and growing communities in many countries of continental Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration (Oxford, 2004).
The Punjab region is the land of ive Indus tributaries stretching from the Indus in the west to the Yamuna River in the east and approximates more closely the province of Punjab during the century of rule by Britain (1849–1947) than the sum of the two present-day states of Punjab, one in Pakistan and one in India. It not only refers to the territory of both these states, which are also known respectively as West Punjab and East Punjab, but also embraces the Indian states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, which were created out of the Indian state of Punjab in 1966. See Eleanor Nesbitt, “Punjab,” in Knut A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Volume 1 Regions, Pilgrimage, Deities (Leiden,2009), pp. 153–69.
Hew McLeod, Sikhism (London, 1997), p. 251.
It is dificult to estimate the Sikhs in Europe because the countries are using divergent tools to assess the population, and the oficial statistics seldom include ethnic and religious belonging. This is further complicated by the presence of illegal migrants who are excluded in the statistics. For an overview of how census data was collected on selected measures in some European countries in the beginning of the twenty-irst century and different methods to estimate a religious population, see Mark Brown, “Quantifying the Muslim Population in Europe: Conceptual and Data Issues,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 3/2 (2000): 87–101.
Owen W. Cole, “Sikhs in Europe,” in Sean Gill, Gavin D’Costa and Ursula King (eds), Religion in Europe: Contemporary Perspectives (Kampen, The Netherlands: 1994).Sikhs in Europe 2
century, a signiicant segment of the Sikh population has thus made Europe their new home abroad and they intend to stay as European Sikhs.The purpose of this book is to document and analyze different aspects of the Sikh migration to Europe and the Sikhs’ contemporary presence in various European countries. Until recently, the academic interest and study of the Sikhs in Europe has primarily focused on the British context and resulted in a vast body of literature devoted to their culture, religion, and history in Britain.
However, today the Sikhs reside in almost every country in southern and northern Europe and the research of these settlements is recent and in the process of developing with a new generation of scholars. Much of the research conducted on the Sikhs in countries outside Britain has often been published in European languages other than English and therefore has not been available to a broader readership.
This book can be seen as a irst attempt to bring together a new research ield on the European Sikhs in order to understand their wider presence in new and old countries of migration and settlement. The contributions to this volume are based on ieldwork and present new empirical data on patterns of migration and settlement, transmission of traditions, community building, identity construction, relationships with the surrounding society and the state, and cultural representations of the Sikhs in a total of eleven European countries.The Sikhs have an interesting history in Europe and in relation to Europeans.Apparently, one of the oldest records of connections between Sikhs and Europeans can be traced to a seventeenth-century letter by a Portuguese Jesuit father, Jerome Xavier, who wrote about Guru Arjan’s martyrdom in 1606.
In the following centuries, European soldiers, political reporters, and travelers recounted their experiences of the Sikhs.In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab took French, British, German, and Italian soldiers and oficers into service to train his Khalsa army in the European military discipline.See Eleanor Nesbitt Chapter 10, this volume; and Kristina Myrvold, ‘Bibliography of Studies on Sikhs and Punjabis in Europe’ (2008)Examples of this, as well as references, are found in most of the contributions in Part I and Part II of this volume.
Ganda Singh (ed.), Early European Accounts of the Sikhs (Calcutta, 1962); Darshan Singh (ed.), Western Image of the Sikh Religion: A Source Book (New Delhi, 1999); Darshan Singh, Western Perspectives on the Sikh Religion (New Delhi: Sehgal, 1991); Amandeep Singh Madra and Parmjit Singh, “Sicques, Tigers, or Thieves”: Eyewitness Accounts of the Sikhs (1606–1809) (New York, 2004).Singh (ed.), Western Image of the Sikh Religion; Singh, Western Perspectives on the Sikh Religion; Madra and Singh (eds), “Sicques, Tigers, or Thieves”; Madra and Singh (eds), Eyewitness Accounts of the Golden Temple of Amritsar (London, 2010)
See, for example, Bikrama Jit Hasrat, Life and Times of Ranjit Singh: A Saga of Benevolent Despotism (Hoshiarpur, 1977), pp. 330–33; S.P. Singh and H.C. Sharma,Introduction: Sikhs in Europe 3 As a result of the confrontation between the British and Sikh armies and Britain’s annexation of Punjab in 1849, the Sikhs and the Europeans created a keen interest in each other and eventually established close relations. The recruitment of large numbers of Sikhs to the army and police force opened up possibilities for migration, primarily to serve the British in different parts of the world. As Shinder Thandi writes, “the origins of the Sikh diaspora lie in service to the British empire—as soldiers, civil servants, and skilled laborers; as part of a colonial strategy to divide and conquer.” Contd………….