Daniel Gold, professor of South Asian religions at Cornell University and expert on modern Indian religious movements, is available to discuss the Sikh religion in wake of the recent shooting in Wisconsin.
He says:
“In India, people can often immediately recognize whether someone is a Hindu, Muslim or Sikh because traditional members of each of India’s diverse religious communities have distinctive styles of dress. These subtleties of style, however, are usually lost on Americans. “The characteristic mark of Sikh identity is a turban tied in a particular way that covers a topknot. Guru Govind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru and founder of the Sikh Khalsa ¬– to which most contemporary Sikhs belong – saw the hair as integral to the human body and instructed his followers not to cut it. Khalsa Sikh men customarily tie their uncut hair on top of their heads and protect it with a turban, which the devout may also see as a sort of glorious spiritual crown. Although Sikh boys sometimes just secure their topknots with a simple black covering, adult men almost always appear in public wearing a turban. Called a “dastaar,” the Sikh turban is readily distinguishable from those sometimes tied by members of other Indian religious and ethnic communities, both Hindu and Muslim. “Perhaps if Americans understood these distinctions as well as the residents of India, yesterday’s tragedy at Milwaukee’s Sikh temple would not have happened.”
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