In India today, whenever you say 12 o’clock (midday) and Sikh in a public place, you’re likely to get a few smirks, sniggers and so on, and it seems to most Indians that the reason for these jokes is lost in time. Jokes about sardars in India going mad at 12 o’clock are common in Indian society, like Irish jokes in England were for so very long.
Earlier a close friend told me a couple of sardar jokes and failing to laugh I rolled my eyes. Those harmless jokes fired up a furnace of hot feeling inside of me relating to our origins, social status, ancestors, history, culture, their inter-relationship and the role it played in bringing us here today.
When he replayed these jokes he’d picked up at a recent family wedding I felt an erruption from within (didn’t burp though) and did well to stand back and button my lips. I quite bluntly put it to him that “I dont like sardar jokes,” so rightly and fairly he explained to me that the intention was to simply poke fun and that nothing deeper was meant. He went on to say that because most modern Sikhs are farmers from Punjab (the “breadbasket of India”) that they are the butt of jokes as in any other nation that has farmers. It was a slightly defensive explanation as he could see that I looked upset.
I enquired “Do you know why people take the piss of out of Sikh’s about it being 12 o’ clock?” If you’re a regular reader of this blog and are Indian, then I pose that same question to you. He didn’t know.
Centuries ago the Islamic empire had stretched all of the way from the Iberian peninsula to the north of India and was still spreading east. Despite the reconquista of Spain far to the West, looting expeditions into India, under the guise of spreading the faith by people in the mould of Babur and the like gained their foothold and dominance until the British arrived and unintentionally saved India from complete and total Islamic domination.
Around the time of Indias takeover by the Mughals, the Sikh religion emerged as a kind of compromise between the Hindus and Muslims. The Sikhs back then were living a much more nomadic lifestyle based around horses than their modern-day descendants who are today’s stereotypical farmers. The raids by Afghan hordes continued as they rampaged, raped and pillaged throughout the whole of the Punjab region.
In the Koran, it is written (see here, search the web for “slaves women koran surah” or buy yourself a translation if you don’t read Arabic and see for yourself) that non-Muslim women can quite legally be taken as slaves, and in euphemistic terms, be ‘made wives’ as at the point of capture, their existing marriages are said to be have been annulled.
The invaders, being nasty people, didn’t think twice about taking their own fellow-Muslims as slaves, never mind the unworthy infidels, and so families and communities were torn-apart and decimated over time. In that time, when a community, town or village was raided, many would accept such things as fact-of-life, because of bad Karma, because the Muslims allowed them to continue to practice their religion in exchange for tax revenue, because they were cowards, afraid to fight, and a million other reasons.
However fed up with this state of affairs and inspired by Guru Gobind Singh the Sikhs started to become militant, arm themselves and fight for their freedom, to practice their relgion, for their fellow Punjabis who had their own faiths. (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain…) and for their women.
They suffered many losses, some of whom became martyrs and made many sacrifices on behalf of their fellow Punjabis which obviously rippled on a wider-scale across the whole of India. The Sikhs developed a fierce fighting style, were strong, tough, formidable soldiers of the Khalsa, just like the other brave minorities in history who made a difference, such as the freedom-fighting slaves in Brazil with their self-developed martial art capoiera, the neighbouring Gurkhas etc.
The proud Sikhs were quite heroic in their defense of Punjab from the inflowing menace. People in villages all over Punjab saw the use of having an army of brave Sikhs, and that’s how Sikhism grew in popularity and swelled in numbers. It soon became a custom in Punjab that the first-born son in a family of any religious denomination would be raised a Sikh and encouraged to become part of the Khalsa, even those who were Muslim. In swelling their numbers, fine-tuning their skills in combat and so-forth the Sikhs quite rightly aquired and cemented their status as being the defenders of Punjab.
Indeed it took a couple of Sikh Wars and an effective kidnapping for the British to wrest control of the region. (See also Sikhism in Suffolk)
Almost like routine, when the nasty invaders would come in, attacking infidels in the name of Islam and kidnapping women as slaves, the communities through Punjab looked to their Sikhs to rescue the women and their honour. The Sikhs duly obliged and would attack the Muslim encampments at the darkest hour, the dead of midnight, 12 o’clock, and in their raids which often involved ferocious fighting, and often out-numbered they would rescue as many of the women as possible and return them to their villages, untouched and unharmed by them, whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or any other religion.
And that dear reader is why people make jokes about Sikh’s going mad at 12 o’clock. They helped establish some peace and stability, became an important part of both British India’s and the modern forces. They began to settle down more, many became farmers – and eventually the butt of jokes all over India and its diaspora.
Jokes about Sikhs I put in the same category as jokes about untouchable low-castes. They are all symptoms of the Indian racist psyche, but thanks to reform, legal rights and so forth, the previously public common jokes about the low-castes, “untouchables” tend to be made behind closed doors nowadays. Jokes about Sikh farmers, well they’re farmers aren’t they?! However it’s funny to me (no pun intended) that jokes about the so-called higher castes, like the warriors and Brahmins are not told. To most good Indians it’s mandatory to respect Brahmins and making jokes about them would be unthinkable.
My ancestors were enforced by Hindu society to be born, live and die as untouchables. That’s a major reason why Islam caught on so much in India, it wasn’t all by the sword, but people were escaping their low status in Hindu-dominated society by swapping the religion they were born into to the religion of Indias new Arab immigrants on the west coast of India, and the religion of the new ruling elite in the north. By the way it is also untrue to say that only the low-caste people converted to Islam. For many Hindus of high-caste, it was a way to escape taxes (for not being Muslim) and to become part of the elite again and escape the continuously cruel treatment by their Muslim overlords.
My friends family were high-caste, a part of the Hindu privileged elite by fact of their birth alone. That Hindu religious elite was free to control the society and keep the poor, downtrodden low-caste people in their place, and it’s sad that over time, the Sikh culture, like Islam in the subcontinent of India, has absorbed elements of the caste-system.
I’m proud of being a Punjabi. I’m glad the religion of my family, as followers of the Guru Ravidass (a leather worker) was preserved, grew, survived and through common belief adopted many aspects of the Sikh religion and tradition. I’m glad my family weren’t forced to change their religion, despite being downtrodden too by the ruling Muslim minority.
Indians are racist. To eachother. There’s no two ways about it. When they are lucky to move on up through education and work, many people from the untouchable majority still hide their origins from their friends and colleagues. And this still happening in 21st Century India and beyond the sea where it should not even fucking matter anymore. It’s for fear of being made to feel inferior. It’s stupid and senseless. Indians are racist over perceived differences in religious status, even though they mostly look the same. My friends jokes made it clear that such views about people who are not part of that religious and social elite are still in place. It may not consciously come to the surface when people socialise, but it’s always there. It is something many British-born Indians, especially those who like me who aren’t part of that Hindu high-caste background can attest to in their intra-community social encounters.
I’ve fallen out with some of my closest Sikh friends in the past, over issues relating to caste, and them making “chamarr” (leather worker – ‘untouchable’) jokes. They apologised and never made those kind of jokes again, at least not when I was around. Maybe they still do, but at least they have a bit of fucking tact now.
Deep down I believe that you should have the right to able to say what you want, what you feel, to your friends both honestly and openly. We should have the tolerance to tolerate shit from each other without fisticuffs. To tolerate doesn’t imply or mean that one has to agree or to like what someone else is saying.
But if you say something and upset someone because you don’t know how they feel about something, it’s not your fault. Just as it’s not my fault for my internal reaction. How you react and feel inside can’t be helped.
My friend was just telling me a joke in good humour, after all.
A family friend once said to me that because of our unfortunate ancestry and history, no matter what we do in this life, no matter how successful, to the other Indians who benefited from centuries of privileged status (just like the formerly slave-owning whites minorities in former colonial countries see black people) “in the back of their minds you will always be an untouchable person.” I denied it, I tried not to believe it, I thought in the UK we’d left those kind of attitudes behind. Was I mistaken? Whenever I hear a joke about sardars, it’s a reminder of everything that’s wrong with Indian society.
Tags: caste, hindu, history, india, muslim, religion, sardar, sikh