Trouble in the Temple

It seems almost too predictable to be called ironic: a play about violence and repression in an ethnic community sparks violence and repression by members of that same community. This is the short version of what happened to Behzti (Dishonour), by the British Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, which opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the UK on Dec. 9. I know all about this thanks to surfing British news web sites -- originally for a perspective on events in the US, but in turn getting a window into what's happening in the UK. In the case of Behzti, I've been hypnotized by another nation's conflicts over free speech and religious values. Maybe it's just the relief from focusing on America's problems. Or maybe it's just schadenfreude, like watching a train wreck from a distance. In any event, the crashing clearly hasn't finished yet.

The story of Behzti involves a gruesome incident of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or gurdwara, accompanied by the airing of other community dirty linen. The Sikh community's objections started before the play opened. The deepest anger seems to have been less about the portrayal of events themselves than the setting where they take place. Exposing sacred religious symbols in this way, as a Sikh website states, was the equivalent of "burning a cross onstage". A proposed compromise of moving the offending scenes to a "community centre" was rejected by the play's producers. Days of protest after the play opened climaxed in a full scale riot on December 18, when a crowd of 400 protestors stormed the theater, calling out scores of police and requiring the evacuation of 800 theatergoers. The play closed to avoid further confrontations, and the author is reportedly in hiding as a result of death threats.

The fallout from these events -- reported both in the British press and on Sikh websites -- has also been rather predictable. Comparisons have been made to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Accusations of extremism and demagoguery have flown from both sides, along with an orgy of defensiveness and institutional soul-searching by artists, politicians and religious leaders. In a peculiarly British twist, the government agencies charged with arts and minority relations plan to broker discussions among the warring parties. For now the excitement has quieted down, in the news at least, in part no doubt because of the holiday season in Britain, in part because horrific natural events have overwhelmed any other concerns in this South Asian community. But the controversy and publicity the play has provoked, and a widening interest in reviving the production, almost guarantee more ethnic, religious and political drama waiting in the wings for 2005.

My first reaction to this story was a sense of shock and disgust at the behavior of the Sikh rioters. But I've grown less interested in conflicts of artistic vs. religious values than in the religious as well as ethnic side of the equation. With all the analysis in the British press, you can still sense puzzlement as to why people were so ready to get so angry in the first place. It's worth noting, for example, how little the British Sikh community fits ready-made stereotypes of a disadvantaged minority group yielding to religious fundamentalism, to express social frustrations or reinforce its sense of identity. Though a relatively small and (thanks to the male dress) conspicuous part of Britain's South Asian population, Sikh's have gained a notable degree of economic success and political empowerment. In some ways, their situation seems similar to that of ultra-orthodox Jews in the United States and Britain as well. Unlike the extremes of Orthodox Judaism, however, Sikh social and religious values appear tolerant and even liberal, with an equal role (in principle at least) granted to women as spiritual and community leaders. And although both Bezhti and Bhatti's earlier play, Behsharam (Shameless) -- a black comedy about a dysfunctional Anglo-Asian family -- testify to serious social strains between first and second-generation Sikh/Punjabi Brits, internal community strife doesn't seem a likely source of the anger on display in the English midlands before Christmas. Neither is a sense of grievance, however painfully justified, born of attacks on turbaned Sikhs by anti-Muslim bigots.

My quite irrelevant personal theory -- triggered by an offhand side trip to a Sikh website -- is that it's the experience of Sikhs in India not in the UK that explains the anger and violence that erupted in their transplanted homeland, at even the symbolic "desecration" of a gurdwara. The last 20 years and more of Sikh history in India has been a complex, evolving nightmare of nationalist aspirations, terrorism, brutal repression, broken agreements, inter-ethnic violence, and ongoing human rights violations. At the center of this history -- and the symbolic narrative on which much of modern Sikh identity is founded -- is the Indian Army's attack in 1984 on the Golden Temple or Darbar Sahib, the holiest shrine of Sikhism, in Amritsar, Punjab. Aimed at dislodging members of an militant sectarian group that had terrorized the Punjab, the army's assault killed hundred of Sikhs, including many ordinary worshippers, and caused heavy damage to temple buildings. The revenge killing of Indira Gandhi 1984 by members of her own Sikh bodyguard was followed by riots in Delhi and elsewhere where thousands of Sikhs were killed by furious Hindu mobs. Territorial accommodations and political changes over more than a decade, including the election of India's first Sikh president in 2002, seem to have dampened the extremes of feeling to a degree. But India's Sikhs still wait for a full judicial accounting for hundreds of prisoners "disappeared" in police custody as well as constitutional action on the promise of a sovereign Punjabi state. And the violation of the Golden Temple still stirs deep, painful and sometimes violent emotions -- if one can believe the evidence of Sikh-oriented websites, and not just of the nationalist variety.

It's obviously a leap, of faith so to speak, to directly link this fraught history with an isolated moment in the life of the Sikh diaspora in Britain. Yet if the modern experience of other diasporas (Jewish, Irish, Armenian, Palestinian) proves anything, it's that the burdens of memory can get heavier the further they travel, in time and space. I'm not sure what diasporic undercurrents of my own are at work here, but I'm fascinated by the pathos of one act of destruction inspiring -- almost unconsciously, and at such a real and symbolic distance -- another, aimed at revenging and redeeming the original act. I wonder how you say "Never again!" in Punjabi.

This suggests a lot, frankly, about how history lives and gets transformed, for good or ill, in all of us. The whole idea deserves a play in its own right.