Legacies of a martial race: Sikh investment and implication in the US police state

Abstract

British colonization in India had devastating social, psychological, and political consequences for Sikhs in nineteenth-century Punjab. Still, much of the diasporic community remains nostalgic for this era of the Sikh “martial race”—a British-crafted racial category through which Sikhs were constructed as biologically and culturally suited for imperial service and consequently received privileged status within the colonial hierarchy. Today, this nostalgia emerges as a commemorative mechanism in US Sikh advocacy projects to incorporate the Sikh turban and unshorn hair into US military and police uniform. Through an analysis of community narratives around publicized Sikh deaths, this article explores the impact of martial race commemoration on Sikh subjectivity formation. Delineating when and how private grief is transformed into public remembrance, I argue such commemorative frameworks in US Sikh advocacy projects inform which Sikh bodies are worthy of collective mourning by suturing Sikh bodies’ value to their service to US imperialism.