And I read the plaques that had long lists of those incarcerated there: and they were disproportionately Sikhs and Bengalis. They broke our patriots there, in a Panopticon, as visualised by the famous British liberal Jeremy Bentham.
In 2019, I went to Kala Pani, the infamous penitentiary in Port Blair, Andaman Islands. I wrote about Jallianwallah Bagh and the sacrifice of the Sikhs, quoting Vijayan (my translation from the Malayalam): Vijayan wrote of the betrayal ordinary Sikhs felt when the Indian Army attacked the Golden Temple. Later, I read OV Vijayan’s masterpiece The Path of the Prophet, and he spoke of “the lament of the innocent first-borns”, and I learned from a colleague named Inderjeet Gujral how he literally was the first-born of a Hindu family who had become a Sikh. They were the ones who tried, as economic migrants, to move to Canada and the US, and were forced to return, and massacred on arrival. And then there is the Komagata Maru incident once again Sikhs were prominent. I wrote of Kartar Singh Sarabha, the 19-year-old from the University of California, Berkeley, who was hanged by the British for sedition in 1915. Later when I lived in California, I remember visiting the Gadar Memorial Hall, and as I wrote then, seeing the photographs of ‘glowering young men’, long-dead patriots, mostly Sikhs. Perhaps I am naïve, but growing up in the South, I had a healthy respect for Sikhs, whom I viewed as men of honour and of principle.
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