Description
This paper offers a personal reflection on how I understand the commitment of abolition as socio-spiritual, related to Gurmat (the teachings and praxis of being Sikh). Specifically, I focus on the praxis of Degh Tegh Fateh (the cauldron, the sword, the victory) to show how, contrary to Sikhi’s hegemonic co-option by and assimilation into secular colonial modernity, Sikhi is rooted in abolishing hierarchies of oppression and the structures which sustain them.
Degh is embodied in the act of Langar, a praxis rooted in the physical and spiritual nourishment of all regardless of caste, wealth, and other hierarchies. Although Langar is hegemonically co-opted, secularised, and reduced to “free food” and “charity” in modernity, the foundational logic of miri-piri (the inseparability of the socio-temporal and the spiritual) in Sikhi roots Langar in a deeper socio-spiritual commitment to abolishing the structures which construct hierarchies and sustain oppression. How is this abolition achieved?
Tegh embodies, to me, a Fanonian understanding of violence. Namely, colonial structural violence means self-defence cannot be ruled out for revolutionary praxis from the below for resisting, and ultimately abolishing, global structures of oppression which discipline through violence from above i.e., carcerality, policing, and exploitation. This focus on abolishing structures of violence from the below to achieve Fateh – a world otherwise – complicates reductive, homogenising notions of violence which obfuscate the role of power structures.
Therefore, Sikhi commits to abolition as political-spiritual praxis. One needn’t look further than the Kisaan Morcha’s (Farmers’ Protests) praxis, resisting colonial modernity through Degh Tegh Fateh.
