IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE. Sikhs in America captures Sikh social,
family, spiritual, economic, and work life. The documentary looks at a
beautiful Sunday service at a gurdwara, a Sikh wedding, the tying of
a Sikh turban, and a game of Kabbadi. (Photos courtesy of KVIE
Productions)
From The Asian Reporter, V18, #19 (May 6, 2008), page 12.
Sikhs in America examines immigrant experience
Sikhs in America
Directed by Marissa Aroy and Niall McKay
Produced by the KVIE Public Television ViewFinder series
By Ronault L.S. Catalani
Sikhs in America is a program of Sacramento public television
broadcaster KVIE’s ViewFinder series, scheduled for release this month. This
engaging documentary, directed by Filipina-American filmmaker Marissa Aroy
together with Irish-American Niall McKay, is broadcast as part of Asian
Heritage Month. As with all of KVIE’s efforts, this intimate and broad-
shouldered documentary inspires, enriches, and educates viewers.
At the center of Sikhs in America, the same geography as Punjabi
America’s center of gravity, is California’s verdant Central Valley. From
one Sikh family’s kitchen table, from a Sikh fruit farmer’s tractor seat,
from a suburban Sikh driveway basketball hoop, narrator and NPR journalist
Sandip Roy takes us into the personal and wide-angle journeys of this
community from Mother India to contemporary America.
The big picture includes the ancient and elegant details of Sikh culture
— a long list of queries that curious observers like me have always been
itching but too bashful to ask. Questions about Sikh men’s hair and turbans.
Concerns about their ritual swords.
At the intimate end, Ms. Aroy and Mr. McKay slip us into quiet
conversations about this culturally modest community’s resettlement into our
often abbreviated, ordinarily irreverent America.
Says Jaskarn "Jessie" Johal about that first of my many burning
questions: "When I start off in the morning, I wake up and I comb my hair.
And then I tie it up in a bun called the juda."
In fascinating closeup, with startlingly masculine ease, Jessie
continues: "In front of the mirror I adjust it and wrap it around my head,
and at the end I use a pin to tuck in my hair from the back. Like a metal
rod. It’s called a bodge.
"… I continue to have my hair because I feel proud," he says, his eyes
like polished obsidian. "It makes me proud because I know that our gurus …
set guidelines, and I know that I’m following them the best I can. And, I’m
representing my religion."
About our bigger, our perhaps more global anxieties about immigrant
family ethno-cultural erosion in urban America, Yuba physician and Punjabi
American Heritage Society founding board member Jasbir Singh Kang says with
reassuring confidence: "... It’s very important not to give up who you are,
rather add on more values, learn more cultural things in America ... but you
don’t have to give up what you brought with you."
"I think the kids will make their own choices," Dr. Kang goes on
to say. "I am very optimistic. I am not fearful. I know my kids are not
exactly going to be like me. That’s okay with me ... I don’t have a fear of
them losing their heritage." Clearly, a disciplined gentleman cultivated in
a martial society.
"Sure they’re American … they are going to follow some American
traditions," concludes Dr. Kang, "… culture is a dynamic process."
For more, for longer and possibly more reassuring dialogue on Punjabi
dating and marriage, on Sikh spiritual and cultural practices, watch Marissa
Aroy and Niall McKay’s fine documentary, or visit the KVIE website at
<www.kvie.org/programs/kvie/viewfinder/sikhs_in_america>. Sikhs in
America is also available for purchase at <www.kviestore.org>.
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