ILLUSTRATION 

1. Sikh prisoner abused by police

2. Portraits of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh

3. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale

4. Painting of the Golden Temple Complex after operation Blue star

5. Map of Punjab

6. Women weeping after Delhi “riots”

7. Indian security forces at Amritsar

8. “Five Beloved Ones”

9. Dead Sikh Youth

10. The aftermath of a bomb blast

11. An amrithdhari woman

12. Demonstratoin in Washington, D.C

13. Child as solider

PREFACE

This book is the result of a difficult project that could not have been undertaken without the guidance, generosity, tolerance and trust of a great many people. First to be mentioned must be the Khalistani Sikh community, whose members put themselves at risk by welcoming an inquisitive stranger. The hospitality of countless 51kb households and gurudwaras made the interviews on which this research is based possible, and many individuals spent hours and days away from their homes and their work to answer my endless questions. In particular, I appreciate the grace with which militant Sikhs have greeted my disagreements with them and encouraged me to put these divergent opinions in speeches and writings. This generosity of spirit and sense of respect for difference will be, I hope, the enduring cornerstone of the Sikh community.

With regard to the Sikhs, I want to make a few things perfectly clear at the outset, though they will be made clear throughout the book as well. First, the Khalistani militants form a very small subset of the Sikh community as a whole. This book is not about “the Sikhs J It is about the militants. Any attempt to treat what is written here as a generalization about Sikhs in general would be highly misguided, and I would condemn it wholeheartedly. The book is not even about all of those Sikhs who support the idea of an independent homeland; it focuses specifically on those who have taken up arms in order to achieve it and on the communities that support them.

Three years of intermittent fieldwork with expatriate Sikhs in ten North American cities forms the basis for this book, which are both an oral history of the militant movement and a dialogical ethnography of a cultural community. Some of the people with whom I worked are permanent residents or citizens of the United States or Canada, others are here as recent refugees, and still others live outside of North America but met me in various locations for the purpose of recording their narratives. The tapes on which they were recorded have been destroyed, and for the protection of my interlocutors no record of names, places, or other identifying information has been preserved.

The photographs in this book require special comment. Some of them I took myself and publish here with the full consent of the people portrayed. Others however are part of a collection of photos that circulate-around the human rights and Khalistani communities. A few were taken t out of Punjab under difficult conditions and have been reprinted many times, which accounts for their poor quality. The inherent drama of their subject matter, I believe, more than compensates for their technical deficiencies. I chose not to enhance them in anyway.

Though I cross-checked most of what was told to me with other sources, I cannot vouch for the veracity or accuracy of every episode reported to me by Sikh militants. There will obviously be divergent accounts of many of these, particularly from their enemies. The portrait of militancy in this book is therefore not an “objective” or “balanced” description of the Punjab conflict. It is a glimpse into the world of Sikh militants as I have experienced it. I will welcome the broader contextualization of this work by other scholars.

Finally, let me be entirely forthright about my own political stance I here, about which readers may be rightfully curious. I am not a supporter of Khalistan. I think the Sikh militants have some serious grievances with the state of India. I abhor many of the methods militants have chosen to address them. Since I am not a Sikh, nor a Punjabi, nor an Indian, I don’t have

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a “position” on the question of Khalistan, and I feel that the idea of what Khalistan would be is unclear enough at this point to make taking such a position inadvisable in any case. I don’t think the militants are crazy or evil, however; I don’t think India has seen the last of Sikh separatism; and I think that the best way to understand why militants fight is to talk with them about it. I think that the only way to prevent outbreaks of violence such as Punjab has witnessed over the past fifteen years or so is to ensure human rights and freedoms, including attention to the principle of self-determination. These are my political views, in short.

Not all scholars are comfortable with highly sensitive topics such as this one, and some of them are my close colleagues. I therefore thank members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maine for their tolerance of this work, and I particularly value the guidance and support of Henry Munson throughout the project. Steve Bicknell worked on the illustrations, and Kris Sobolik was a constant source of encouragement.

A wide circle of anthropologists who are pioneering the ethnographic study of conflict provided necessary intellectual and moral support. Jeff Sluka, Carolyn Nordstrom, Tony Robben, and Kevin Avruch have been particularly helpful. The courage and insight of Joyce Pettigrew continues to be a major source of inspiration, and her comments and criticisms my work have been indispensable. Mark Juergensmeyer, Peter van der Veer, Al Wolfe, and Paul Wallace also read the manuscript of this book and offered excellent suggestions for revision. Bertrand Masquelier was a source of encouragement and support not only during this project but over the past fifteen years.

Finally, I must comment on Patricia Smith of the University of Pennsylvania Press, who supported this book from the start and persisted through various ups and downs to ensure its realization. I consider her a colleague-an “intellectual comrade”-as well as an editor. Others at the Press contributed substantially to this project, and I thank them for their energy and effort.

None of these individuals, however, bears any responsibility for the final form taken by this book. Mistakes and indiscretions, and certainly all opinions, are entirely my own.

As for my husband Khalid, no one else could have been as steadfast in support of a highly problematic research project, as reliable in keeping confidences, and as acute in political judgment.

My daughter Naintara cheered me up when too much thought of conflict got me down, and with her sunny presence reminded me daily of why we have to figure out a way to live without violence.

OF NIGHTMARES AND CONTACTS

Last Night I was awakened by a nightmare, the same recurring dream I have suffering for the past year or so. I was in Cambodia, a Cambodia I know only through TV images of Vietnam War vintage. It was hot, humid; the air was heavy with tropical smells but vibrating with danger. I was climbing a long stone stairway in a kind of tower, looking down through crumbling windows at a busy marketplace below. People carrying baskets of fruit on their heads; bald-headed monks begging for alms. Suddenly, I heard shots, the rat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire, and men in camouflage suits started running here and there in the crowd. I stood on the steps, frozen in fear and horror. People in the marketplace were screaming and falling down, but I was too far away to see blood. Gathering my wits about me, I ran, breathless, out of the tower and away from the market square. After running for some time, I looked back to see the entire area blow up in a sudden inferno of flame. I fell to the ground and woke up, bolt upright, in a cold sweat.

The story of my research on Sikh militancy is also a story about my personal confrontation with violence. To mask it here as more neutral, more distanced than it is would be to deny the nights of terror, displaced to another, safer, venue, that I experienced off and on since I began this project. And to write about Sikh militants as if I had not become personally, existentially entangled with them and their quest would be an inexcusable hypocrisy. As a scholar, I know what it means to look for all sides of a question, to be critical of sources, to be “objective.” As an anthropologist, I am familiar with the peculiar inside-outside stance of the ethnographer, which allows glimpses into other realities while retaining a quintessentially Western academic outlook. In trying to understand what militant Sikhs are doing, however, I find that the anthropology of another era is also useful, not the anthropology claiming to be science but the one that sees the confrontation of ‘man with man” in all his naked mystery as the heart of the anthropological enterprise Like many anthropologists of my generation, I find myself questioning some of the basic axioms of my field, which, however stimulating intellectually, seem somehow inadequate to the task of understanding real human beings.

Immanuel Kant, a forgotten ancestor of contemporary anthropology, took the traditional ‘What is man?” question to be the heart of what an academic discipline of anthropology should be. But for Kant this question subsumed three subsidiary issues that have been largely ignored: “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” and “What may I hope?” It is this last query in particular that is rather jarringly out of place in the modern academic climate, though Edward Burnett Tylor, too, author of our classic 1871 definition of culture, emphasized not only the “habits” of human beings but their “capabilities” as well.1 Is it not part of the anthropologists enterprise to ask what heights humans are capable of reaching? Our discipline’s insistence on the value of the everyday, so important in countering neglect of the ordinary in other areas of scholarship, also has the effect of somewhat eclipsing the reality of the out-of-the ordinary, the truly heroic, in human endeavor. Taken as a whole, the picture painted of humankind by the collections of ethnographic literature many of us have on our bookshelves is sadly inadequate. True, most human beings live quotidian, habituated, ordinary lives most of the time. But what about when they don’t? What are people capable of when the everyday is disrupted by famine, by war or pestilence, when they are

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called upon to do more than fetch water and grow crops and make love and rear children, to be more than “just human?” Our literature doesn’t contain many portraits of people in extraordinary, rather than ordinary, circumstances.

Sikh militants in the northwestern state of Punjab in India have been engaged in an armed insurgency for the past decade and a half. Their ultimate aim is the formation of a sovereign nation of Khalistan, “land of the pure.” It is not clear what percentage these militants and their supporters form of the total Sikh population; there are many others who would like to see an independent nation emerge but reject violence as a means of achieving it, and still others who are firmly loyal to India and reject the Khalistani ideology outright. Conditions in Punjab have been so disrupted by violence on the part of both the militants and the government forces arrayed against them, and the exchange of ideas has been so severely curtailed by various forms of censorship, that assessing accurately what the people there really want is probably impossible. What is clear is that tens of thousands of people-militants, government troops, and bystanders-have been killed in the past fifteen years or so of the conflict.2 This level of violence is equivalent to that of many of the so-called “low intensity conflicts” that dot the global landscape today (compare for example, the 3,000-odd casualities of the Northern Ireland conflict) and places most members of the Sikh community in what we night well call “extraordinary” circumstances. Certainly the Khalistani militants, now scattered in exile across several continents, live their lives at an emotional pitch far from the everyday reality of most of the people we know and study.

Anybody who has thought about whether the Nicaraguan contras were “freedom fighters” or “counter-revolutionaries” or whether the PLO is “terrorist” or “nationalist” organization will recognize the element of relativism that comes into any serious discussion of political conflicts like die one in Punjab. Unfortunately, the rather obvious fact that things look different from the inside of one of these groups than from the outside has been lost on many people involved in policymaking and negotiation, who tend to underestimate the radical differences in world view that obtain between the U.S. State Department, for example, and militant Islamists intent on blowing up the World Trade Center. The fact is, we don’t know enough about how the latter think to effectively talk with them. We can’t easily imagine what the world looks like from extraordinary viewpoints. And ethnographies of village life in Egypt, however important in themselves, don’t enlighten us much about World Trade Center bombers.

There is a growing feeling among younger anthropologists that our discipline has suffered a not entirely unwarranted marginalization over be past few decades. Even as the methods and language of ethnography are being taken up by colleagues in fields as diverse as political science and English literature, and even as “cultural studies” usurps anthropology’s primary concept of culture, the discipline itself cannot be said to he a central voice on the current intellectual scene. It is particularly worrisome that anthropologists are called on as infrequently as they are in the policy arena, which depends on accurate information about and assessment of actors whose worldviews may be wildly different from our own. In a culturally plural world, those whose calling is translation across cultural divides have a critical role to play.

Anthropologists, professionally oriented to recognize the kind of radical otherness represented by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his band, are in an especially good position to explore the nature of the extraordinary cultures that emerge in conditions of conflict. We are habituated to the situation of listening to people with judgment suspended, whether they be Philippine headhunters (Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Head-hunting) or impoverished mothers

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in Brazil (Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping). That anthropological “translation” occasionally comes across as exoneration is a Particular problem when we are dea1ing with political violence, a subject far nearer to most readers than the traditionally exotic subject matter of classic ethnography. A scholar who chooses to study the culture of a street gang or a guerilla army will certainly find herself a more difficult ethical and methodological predicament than scholar who studies kinship patterns in highland New But, convinced that Street gangs and guerilla armies are at least in sonic sense “cultures” amenable to the same kind of ethnographic exploration anthropologists have pursued in the jungles of Africa or the outback of Australia, more and more scholars have turned to the study I localities of violence as One important way in which anthropology can make a constitution to the public discourse of our times.

MEETING SIKHS

My interaction with Khalistani Sikhs began at a South Asian restaurant in Berkeley in November 1992. A friend somewhat involved in the Kashmir issue knew that I had written about the problems that various communities in India faced and asked whether I would like to meet some Khalistani activists from the Bay Area. I agreed, albeit hesitantly, and mulled over and Over again in my mind whether I really wanted to meet people associated with a major guerilla insurgency in a foreign country. I had just returned from India the previous spring, whet-c I had become embroiled in a debate about the fate of tribal peoples in Bihar, entangled in that state’s notoriously contorted politics (which includes academic politics), and at the end, physically assaulted by a street gang in Patna. As it was, I wondered whether I had any future research career in India. To study Khalistani Sikhs, known to be among the most violent of the many groups today challenging Indian state authority, would mean perhaps relinquishing further hopes of extended visits to India. Scholars I worked with in Patna virtually forbade me to pursue ‘the Punjab problem” further. The topic is extremely volatile, and despite a strong commitment to academic freedom in India, a fair amount of self-censorship goes on all the time, particularly in peripheral locations.

Nevertheless, I went to the Berkeley dinner, inspired in part by Carolyn Nordstrom’s session on “Dangerous Anthropologies” at the American Anthropological Association meetings then being held in San Francisco. I was not the only anthropologist to find that the study of culture leads, in today’s world, to the study of politics, and, in many cases, to the study of violent conflict, With both trepidation and overwhelming curiosity, I met three Sikhs at the office of our common friend and we went on to a local South Asian restaurant.

Over vegetarian curries we talked about India, Sikhism, and conflict they were noncommittal; I was curious. Of the three Sikhs present, one had short hair and a trimmed beard, and the other two sported classic flowing beards and saffron turbans. One of the turbaned Sikhs was obviously the spokesperson, while the other -as silent. The silent one had dark, clear eyes that never left my face. I was very conscious of his gaze as I talked with the

others.

Rightly suspicious, these three Sikhs, whose position in “the movement” I didn’t know at the time, asked more questions than they answered. But what they did say struck me as remarkably open; they were not a bit furtive or evasive in talking about Khalistan and seemed to speak from heartfelt feelings rather than from ideology. They asked me about my family background; I told them about my father, who was a labor activist and a pacifist. They asked about my research on Buddhism; I told them about the ancient Buddhists and how I believed their movement to have been social and political as well as religious, putting them in a

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dangerous position vis-a-vis the powerholders at the time. I told them about my recent trip to India in which I became convinced that the rights of tribal peoples, now involved in their own insurgencies, were being severely abused-sometimes with the complicity of academics. The Sikhs listened intently. When we were through with our meal, they all shook my hand warmly, and the solemn one grasped my hand in both of his.

My- second contact with Khalistani Sikhs took place about eight months after that Berkeley dinner. Letter and phone conversations with Dr. Amarjit Singh, the vocal one at the restaurant, resulted in my flying out to the West Coast again. Amarjit and another gentleman took me to the San Pedro detention facility in Los Angeles harbor, where several dozen Sikhs were imprisoned for immigration offenses. That was the first of a series of encounters with Sikhs, varying in content and form but always quite intense, that forms the basis of this book. Over the course of the next three years, I interviewed dozens of militants at length, stayed in the homes of militant families, spoke in Sikh gurudwaras (temples) and attended Sikh conventions. That first trip to San Pedro nonetheless remains crystal clear in my mind, for it was then that I really committed to the idea of writing a book about Sikh militancy.

As the gates of the jail clanged behind us, I realized that I had never actually been in a prison before, although I had seen so many in movies that the scene felt not at all strange. After the two Sikhs with me deposited that daggers at the entryway (all orthodox Sikhs carry swords of some form with them at all times), we proceeded upstairs to a large room that had been set aside for Sikh religious services. Amarjit and the other gentleman with us had agreed to conduct prayers for the inmates, providing a neat excuse for our access to the prison. Slowly the Sikh prisoners filed into the room, their regulation orange uniforms incongruously matching the scraps of saffron cloth, sacred to Sikhism, pinned or tied in their hair. They were barefooted, and left tracks on the dusty linoleum. As each passed us, he gave the traditional gesture of respect and greeting, palms together in front of the chest, or bowed down quickly to try to touch the fee of Amarjit. Lie seemed embarrassed by this gesture, and discouraged it. I later learned why the men were showing him this honor, however: Amarjit, among the first Sikhs I met, was spokesperson for a committee that plays a leading role in the Khalistani insurgency. Though his own role is purely political, it quickly became clear to me that he was respected by many Sikhs involved in both militant and non-militant sides of the struggle.3

The men, some quite young, boys, really, gathered in one corner of the room and sat cross-legged on the floor, Before I knew what was happening, I was in front of them, standing by as the other Sikh led them in the recitation of verses from the Sikh scriptures. When they stopped, Amarjit started explaining who I was.

“Why don’t you say a few words?” he suggested.

Totally unprepared for this, I was, not surprisingly, hesitant. The men with dark hair, dark beards, dark eyes, and all those orange uniforms, sat expectantly-respectful but wary. One or two looked quite dazed. I glanced out the window and saw an exercise yard and barbed-wire fencing beyond. Again, the ridiculous memory of TV movies crossed my mind. Television encourages a kind of game-playing mentality, I believe, especially in the realm of violence that many of us suburbanites have never really experienced in any other form. But this was not a game. I remembered my own minimal experience with violence-the assault in Bihar, a rape in New Orleans-and this brought me back to the grim reality of the people before me. There was nothing exciting about their situation. There was no music, as one Vietnam vet commented about buildings blowing up in the non-cinematic real world.

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I caught the eye of one young fellow at the back, and his mouth crinkled very faintly at the corners in a wisp of a smile. Taking that as encouragement, I thought of what I could say. I knew that many Sikhs have suffered in the counterinsurgency that has swept Punjab in the past twelve years, and I decided to try to establish a link with these prisoners through the natural sympathy one feels for victims of repression. Some of them might well have also been on the trigger end of acts of terrible violence, but I knew that if I highlighted that possibility in my mind a wall between me and them would rise up quickly to block out our human bond.

I knew that I couldn’t be afraid of them, or I would never manage to understand what they were doing. So I decided to insinuate myself into their world gently, getting to know them first as sufferers, only later as fighters. I now find that though I disagree with and condemn many of their actions, I ant never paralyzed by the amorphous sense of fear that-rulers most of our discussions about “terrorism.” If only militant Sikhs were monsters, psychopaths, criminals, or “evil men” (Khushwant Singh’s term4), it would be easy. But they’re not, and my hope is that bringing out the world of Sikh militancy in human terms here will make clear the real problem of conflict resolution: that both sides are populated by human beings, in most cases behaving as decently as they know how in immensely difficult circumstances.

“I know that many of you have been through great ordeals,” I started, slowly. I didn’t know what to say, and the enormous chasm between signing Amnesty International letters and facing the victims of human rights abuses eye to eye suddenly yawned before me. I knew

J was inadequate to the task of saying anything meaningful to people who had probably been tortured, maybe raped, certainly humiliated and harassed before they fled India.

“Nobody knows what is happening to the people of Punjab,” I continued. “I know just a little bit about it, enough to know that your stories ire worth hearing and worth retelling. I want to hear them from you, if you will allow me to. I want to write a book about Punjab and tell them to other people as well.”

I went on in this vein. I no longer remember just what it was that I was saying, but I do remember with acute clarity the expressions on the faces of my audience. As a teacher, I am used to paying attention to how my audience is reacting, hut I think I never scanned the faces of the crowd more earnestly than during those initial moments at San Pedro, Many of hem remained totally blank throughout my talk. When I was through some of the men stayed where they were but others came up to greet me.

“1 didn’t know what to say,” I confided apologetically to Amarjit.

“It’s all right,” he said, “They were listening not to your words but to your heart. They can hear that you are sincere.”

Sincere. This was a word I was to hear many times over the next few years, for sincerity, authenticity, being who one says one is, is a trait especially valued by Sikhs. Conversely, insincerity, duplicity, or failure to live up to what one should be is the greatest sin. “He’s not sincere,” can be a scathing insult; “He is sincere,” a compliment applied even to enemies.

Amarjit and I sat down at a long table and one of the prisoners, an older man with gray in his beard, sat down across from us. He was thin; bones stood out everywhere.

“I used to be a farmer,” he said. “My family was farming for many generations. We are simple people without much education, but we work hard.” He glanced at lie to see I imagined, whether not being educated might affect my estimation of him.

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“My family was simple too,” I said. “They left Germany when they-couldn’t practice their religion the way they wanted to, and came to Pennsylvania to farm. I was the first member of my family to go to college.”

At this gesture of empathy, he seemed to relax. He then told a story that I came to see as typical: the Indian army’s attack on the holiest shrine of the Sikhs in 1984 prompting a renewed identification with the faith: a relative who got involved in the militant resistance; repeated harassments and finally arrest at the hands of Punjab police. I didn’t know how to ask about torture but I had read enough human rights reports to he aware of how frequent it was in that part of the world.

“Would it be all right if I ask him about torture?” I asked Amarjit. He nodded. But I hesitated, looking for words, and Amarjit finally jumped in for me.

“Were you abused while in police custody?” he asked. “The Doctor [an honorary reference to me] would like to hear about those experiences so she can put them in her hook.”

I got ready to write down what he said in my notebook, but at the same time recognized an certain inhumanity in the mere gesture of picking up my pen. I put it down again and shoved my notebook to one side.

“First I was stripped naked,” the man recounted. “The police officers started shouting questions at me, in very insulting ways,” he said. “They were quite drunk.”

“Were they Hindu or Sikh?” I inquired.

“Sikh,” he responded, bringing out one of the features of the Punjab problem too easily skimmed over by media centered on “communal” (interrelations) conflict.

“One of them started hitting me, and he hit me again and again. He started beating me with a lathi [night stick]. After a while when I didn’t say anything they hung me up by the arms, like this.” He demonstrated a position I would later know as “the airplane,” arms pulled up behind to put the strain on the shoulder girdle. In some cases the feet were weighted to pull on the joints even further.

“I got electric shocks on my head and on my private parts. I told them I didn’t have any information, I didn’t know anything, but they kept on shocking me and abusing me with that stick.”

Amarjit said quietly by my side, “Sometimes they are abused anally too, but they won’t talk about it.” Amarjit had a medical background, and found it easier than other Sikhs to talk about anatomy. I nodded in response to his comment, banishing the image conjured up by it, and listened as our interlocutor continued.

“After that they took me down from there and threw me in a cell. There were two other guys there, but no toilet or any thing. Just a bucket the corner and it was overflowing. One of the guys was badly bruised and he was moaning and groaning, lying on the wet floor. We kept trying to tub his legs. He was in a lot of pain.

‘That night we three prayed for hours. We didn’t sleep. We just prayed and prayed.” “Did you think that you might not survive?” I asked.

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“No one knows whether they will live or die when they are picked up 1w police. I put my trust in Waheguru [God].

He cleared his throat. “Next day, I was taken out again and more of the same was done. More the next day. Then they made me sit on the floor and put the roller on me.”

I later learned what “the roller” was. A heavy wooden cylinder is rolled across the thighs of a prisoner, weighted by people standing on both ends, to crush and tear the muscles of the upper leg. Months after this interview, I was able to see the results of “the roller” on the legs of one Sikh unembarrassed enough to show me. That one also had burns from a hot iron staggered up and down his back and chest.

“What were you thinking as you were being tortured? Can you tell me what was going through your mind?” I asked, indelicately.

“Nothing. My mind was empty. When I thought of something I only thought to say the name of my God, Waheguru.”

Again, I later learned how common it was for people under torture to lose all sense of their surroundings, and literally, their wits. Elaine Scarry, who wrote an intriguing book about torture and war called The Body in Pain, pointed out that this fact of radical narrowing of one’s world while in extreme pain calls into question the alleged aim of torture, namely, to get information. Even when people do have information to give, they typically lose track of it utterly in the torture situation. The goal of torture therefore must b understood in terms other than the mere acquisition of knowledge, despite the common claim of torturers the world over that that is why they torture.5

“After several days of this treatment some people of my village managed to gather up some money and they demanded my release. I got out and then decided to leave India. But I came to the United States without proper papers and now I am in jail.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Four months:”

“Are you being treated all right?” I queried.

‘Yes, but…”Suddenly this gaunt survivor was looking away from me, his face contorted with emotion. I hardly dared to ask, but I did.

“What is it?”

“My wife . . . I was. . . since I have been here I got a letter, she . . was taken into custody..”

He couldn’t go on. I saw water filling his eyes, and he turned away.

‘Your wife was dishonored? asked Amarjit. It’s a euphemism for rape. He nodded, and I watched a tear drop onto his beard. I didn’t know whether it was appropriate or not, but I reached across the table and put my hand on his ann. He didn’t move it away.

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Later I would sit through many sessions like this, see many eyes full of tears. Amarjit, however hardened to the realities of what he sees as a guerilla war, became watery quite often. He has a peculiar gesture of swiping at the corners of his eyes with one finger, which he does surreptitiously, as if no one notices. But I do, and seeing that raw emotionalism in a man at the forefront of a major separatist movement always prompts me to recognize anew the complexity of trying to write effectively about people involved in conflict.

I heard tale after tale of atrocities suffered by Sikhs during the course of my research, some of which I share in these pages. Reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are also replete with them.6 The texts alone, however, in their understated neutrality, do not show one very critical aspect of the Sikh experience of abuse: that is that physical insults, no matter how horrific, are not as agonizing as attacks on one’s dignity. The really hurtful things involve the humiliation of women, the indignity of anal and genital torture, the slurs on the Sikh faith represented by tearing off turbans and cutting hair (kept long by Sikhs as a’ crucial religious symbol). At one point I was sitting with some Sikhs looking through an album of photos that had been smuggled out of Punjab at great cost. One page was worse than the next for sheer blood and gore. The picture that really caught my attention, however, showed a Sikh man with turban removed, hair flying, crouching in abject fear as an Indian police officer, with an expression of supreme disdain, prepared to slap him. I kept returning to this photo. Sikhs around me who noticed my response said that I must have been a Sikh in a previous life to recognize this particular scene as a particularly and uniquely horrifying one.

Eventually, I did make contact with people who had not only suffered but fought back. Although some individuals declined to talk with me or talked only in highly guarded terms, others were, after a time, willing to tell me their stories. I was actually surprised at the cooperation I received from people involved in the guerilla struggle. Why should they take the risk? Why trust me? What did they have to go on, other than my “sincerity?”

Sincerity, however, may be enough, or at least as good as any other criterion one might apply in a situation like this one. Jeff Sluka, who studies the IRA and other paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, says frankly that friendships are among the most important factors in conducting research in arenas of conflict. (Sluka’s articles on “Participant Observation in Violent Social Contexts” and “Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork’ are the clearest guidance available for those interested in this kind of study.7) Sluka also suggests that one start at the top of any organizatio1 of interest, since access guaranteed by leaders will typically he respected all the way down. Though I had not consciously chosen this strategy, serendipity put Amarjit, a very highly placed individual, in my path. Now my circle of acquaintances among Sikhs has widened, but it is clear that the reason people talked to me at first was solely Amarjit’s presumed approval. After the initial entree, however, I was on my own. There was a snowball effect: one militant would introduce me to another, that one to a third, and so on.

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Once I realized that I would indeed be talking with people involved on both receiving and initiating ends of acts of violence, I thought carefully about how best to protect both them and me from legal repercussions. (Anthropological fieldnotes can be subpoenaed, a fact some have learned to the detriment of their “informants.”) I first developed an informed consent statement, which I read or told to people at the outset of interviews, which stated that I had no legal privilege and that information told to me could be requested by a court of law. Because of this, I asked Sikhs with whom I talked to change names, places, and details as necessary to disguise their stories. I knew I needed to remain in ignorance of certain things despite the problems it might cause my research, because otherwise I might become inescapably compromised (for example, finding out who committed an unsolved crime).

Most of the conversations I had with militants were conducted in English, spoken fluently by many Sikhs. Some of the narratives, however, were recorded in Punjabi and translated with the help of other Khalistani’s present, usually highly placed ones. The situations in which a translator was required were occasionally particularly interesting, as a telling phrase or two would be purposely left out or modified, apparently not by mistake but in the interests of security. I never pressed at these points; I didn’t want to know whatever it was that highly placed Khalistanis felt I shouldn’t know. The translation process served as a kind of screening for the most sensitive subjects, and I believe I had to allow that screening to take place if I hoped to retain access to the militants.

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I learned that one of the really important skills in talking with people involved in conflict is having a strong sense of this information threshold, of knowing when to stop probing, when to simply let a topic drop and pursue something else. Paradoxical though it may seem, I believe that a certain gentleness of style here is critical in interviewing people who are involved in armed conflict. Being accustomed to responding to violence with violence, they open up best in a nonconfrontationad setting. Observing the way that journalists tend to interview people on television and radio, often “putting them on the spot,” I find it unsurprising that what they are able to elicit from people engaged in violence is some-tines less than useful. In my experience, putting people on the spot is probably the last thing an effective interviewer in an arena of conflict would want to do.

Having made a plea for gentility, however, I would hasten to add that honest) in expressing one’s differences with interlocutors and firmness in standing by them are also crucial to winning the respect of people in conflict. Perhaps particularly for Sikhs, any hint of fearfulness on the part of an interviewer would be disastrous. Throughout this research, I had the sense that if I started being afraid around Khalistani Sikhs I night as well drop the project entirely. Sometimes, after an absence from the community for a month or two, reading other accounts of their acuities that made them seem frightening indeed, I would start to grow uneasy, feel my heart beat more rapidly at the thought of what I was getting into. But a dose of real Khalistanis would always restore my sense of balance. When I got scared, I knew it was time to touch base with reality-that is, touch base with human beings, not their near-monstrous images-again.

I also told Sikh militants individually and in groups what my book would be like and made sure they understood that they could refuse to participate or end the conversation at any time. When I could, I showed them parts of the finished manuscript to solicit their comments and suggestions. Sometimes I revised the text based on what they said, other times I did not.

This kind of research arrangement is obviously highly problematic. Usually guarantees of confidentiality and anomymity are given, but the researcher herself knows the masked information. Purposely keeping oneself in the dark means most critically that one is unable to verify a lot of information. I don’t see any way around this dilemma. If you don’t want to become a partisan (i.e., are not ready to perjure yourself on behalf of the group or suffer the consequences of sharing sensitive information), you have to keep yourself innocent of many concrete details.

I believe, however, that for the purposes of anthropology (as opposed to, for example, the purposes of intelligence gathering), it is in some sense not the concrete details in which we are interested. Was it in Gurdaspur or Ludhiana that the bomb went off? Was it in this jail or that that the “roller” was used? These are not the kind of things I wanted to learn from militant Sikhs. What I did want to learn about was how it felt to be somebody whose legs have been permanently crippled by torture, or alternatively, somebody who set off a bomb. (Often, not surprisingly, the two are related.) And the trust the Sikhs extended to me was reciprocated by an important trust I had to extend to them: to protect me from becoming compromised by unwanted information. I did not want to become a Khalistani I wanted to remain an anthropologist and I had to have help from my interlocutors to retain this fragile inside-outside position.

The wrist bands worn by Sikhs (kara) represent many things. I got one at a gurudwara near Chicago at one point, and I sometimes wear it and other times take it off. I find myself taking it off when I am feeling too much in danger of “going native” through my close

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association with the people I study-too much the participant, too little the observer. But I always wear it when I write, and for me that clink of steel around my wrist: serves as a constant reminder of two values. First is the commitment to write the truth as I, in my best effort, understand it; “Truth is pure steel,” says the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak. But in another way the kara reminds me of my indissoluable link to real people in the real world; more generally, the impact of what I do as a scholar on the world outside the academy. We are too easily oblivious to the practical consequences of: our work, claiming arrogantly that truth is truth, we will write it as we see it and let the chips fall where they may. I am too much of a pragmatist to ever be that kind of scholar. I know that what I do affects real people, and I have to try to think through the possible repercussions. Another aphorism of the Sikhs comes to mind: “Truth is the highest good,” they say, “but higher still is truthful living.”

How to reconcile adherence to truth with commitment to human beings is, of course, one of the big challenges facing concerned scholars today. It is also one with which Sikhism as a philosophical tradition has grappled extensively. Maybe we can learn something from them, and they from us.

CONFRONTING VIOLENCE

In this spirit, I began interviewing men and women involved in the armed side of the Khalistan conflict, renegotiating my stance as independent- scholar-yet-constrained-bypolitics at every step. There were missteps, too. But in bumbling my way into the lives of people in conflict, I found myself personally engaged in a way that I had not foreseen, not on a political level but on a deeply philosophical one-what Nordstrom and Robben call existential, rather than cultural, shock.8 I had never really sat down and talked with people who openly accepted the necessity of dying, and killing, for a cause-and who were ready to do either at the drop of a hat. Being around people like this makes you think, and not only about the viability of the state of India. For what am I willing to die? To kill? And aside from this nearly automatic reflexive impulse, what does it mean to live in a community circumscribed by violence, to witness lives in which violence, and the threat of violence, and the memory of violence weave a sinuous path through daily activities and define a world in which survival alone seems a substantial accomplishment?

At the tail end of a generation whose attitudes were largely shaped by he Vietnam War, looming over our consciousness even decades later, I was always generally opposed to military action. Gulf War, no, Somalia or Bosnia, better give it deep thought, and so on. Unlike my father, I was never a pacifist-couldn’t be a pacifist in a world in which the strong so clearly dominated the weak and so clearly would not give up that power by moral pressure alone. One thing was clear, however-violence was a last resort, at best an unfortunate strategic necessity in a world in which power was distributed unequally. One might have to grit one’s teeth, go against one’s better instincts, and make short-term sacrifices in the interests of long-term justice. The idea that violent actions could be meaningful in themselves was a troubling one all too glibly avoided in mainstream Western circles.

At the same time (the sixties and seventies) there was a new academic literature that tried to define aggression as an inherent part of human nature. Books like Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative, and Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups had great popular am peal because they seemed to live up to widespread ideals of peace, while also neatly justifying capitalism, patriarchy, and other aspects of modern western society. Most anthropologists hated this kind of literature and devoted much teaching time to demonstrating that humans were not genetically wired for violence; there were various

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“harmless peoples” to he found around the globe-look at those Semai, for example, who had such an abhorrence of violence they would not tolerate even a parent reprimanding a child. Yet oddly enough Robert Dentan, one of the key ethnographers of the Semai, noted that when Semai were recruited into the Malaysian army they became fantastic soldiers, experiencing a “blood drunkenness” in battle that horrified onlookers. The Kalahari San turned out to occasionally murder each other, fought with valor in the South African Defense Force, and later joined the guerilla organization SWAYO in some numbers when they realized where their interests lay. Conversely initial reports of “fierce people” like the Yanamamo were supplemented by more balanced portrayals that showed that even they were also capable of gentle and loving actions and sustained peace for substantial periods between their famous bouts of warfare.9 The picture turned out to be complex: every society seemed to exhibit both peaceful and violent behavior, however various the interpretations placed upon them. “W al-c all capable of violence” is one of those truisms that seems to be, in fact, true, at least as far as societies as wholes are concerned.

Outside the halls of academia, the most important forums where matters of human violence are discussed are the military headquarters of the world. Pragmatists all, military writers are rarely inclined to speculate about whether we are “instinctually” aggressive or simply culturally inclined or disinclined to violence. They are interested in one question only: given war, how can we (whoever the “we” is) win it? Yet despite-their pragmatic stance much of the work by military theorists is oddly abstract, talking in coldly rationalistic terms that seem eerily to exclude breathing human beings. Classical military theory is therefore as inadequate to the task of understanding actual violence as the sociobiological literature that reduces it to genetics and the “cultural” literature that makes it epiphenomenal to social circumstance.

Working with Sikh militants has made clear to me that abstract explanations of group violence that neglect the highly individualized quality of participation in violent activities, whether on the part of victims or perpetrators are insufficient. Wars are fought between groups, but pain, death, and risk are deeply personal. Treating people’s actual experiences of violence as central gives a wholly different perspective from that of military theory, and it brings to life Corbin’s insight that human violence is mostly conceptual, not instinctual, emotional, customary, or blind.’0 Sikhs, drawing on an elaborate theology of violence, are particularly articulate about the conceptual order behind their armed resistance, an order fully ensconced in individual, conscious, decision-making human beings. Anyone who attempted to understand Sikh militancy or predict militant actions based on the hyper-rationalized military theory of ROTC textbooks would find themselves wholly out of their element, as in another arena the U.S. military establishment also discovered with regard to the Viet Cong.

Though many academics would like to see ROTC programs out of the universities and have little respect for military writers, it is important to look carefully at military theories about violence because they are spawned by and in turn shape general attitudes toward political violence in our culture. In particular, the legitimation of murder carried out by states and the criminalization of murder carried out by non-state groups or by individuals is a legacy of the Western military tradition that haunts us today, distorting, for example, analyses of the World Trade Center bombing. “How can you sit around talking with people who are responsible for murder?” I was asked by one student with regard to interviews with Sikh militants. I presume that “sitting around talking” to war veterans would not provoke the same sense of outrage. To be sure, there are important differences between state and nonstate political violence, and glossing over these differences can be both intellectually irresponsible

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and pragmatically dangerous. Nevertheless, the very strong sense of disjunction between the two spawned by traditional military theory continues to inhibit the effective resolution of conflict.