Woodbridge
THE men sat barefoot and cross-legged on the thick burgundy carpet in the cavernous old supermarket where they worship, singing hymns in Punjabi as they faced the palki, the golden canopy that sheltered the sacred text of the Sikh faith. Most of them wore the turbans they wear everywhere, but some wore the bandanas they wear only here, their choice a measure of the cost of life in a new land.
To wear a turban in America — even in a state that has absorbed as many waves of immigration as New Jersey has — is to subject yourself to judgment by strangers, not all of whom have warm and fuzzy feelings about diversity.
“You get these looks all the time, especially after Sept. 11,” said Rajinder Singh, 57, who holds two doctorates, works as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, has never cut his hair, following the requirement of his faith, and wears a turban. “You could see people — their lips inside their car — that this person is swearing at me.”
Muslims have absorbed much discrimination in the United States in recent years, but also caught in the crossfire have been Sikhs, members of a religious minority from India whose men happen to wear a similar head covering, and who have endured similar suspicions since the terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We have to remind them again and again,” said Hardayal Singh Johal, 68, a mechanical engineer who came to the United States in 1971 and is now chairman of the planning board in neighboring Carteret, home to the largest concentration of Sikhs in the state. “We are more than a thousand times against terrorism and we do anything to stop it. Period.”
Continue reading the main storyNew Jersey is home to an estimated 25,000 Sikhs, and you don’t have to talk to too many of them before you start hearing accounts of epithets, bias and ignorant commentary along the lines of “Osama, go home”; and also of the difficult decision some Sikh men have made to stop wearing their turbans. Those who work at gas stations, an industry with a high concentration of Sikhs, are particularly vulnerable, not just to the familiar insults, but also to the violence endemic to solitary jobs that generate pocketfuls of cash: Over the last two years, at least three Sikh men have been killed in robberies at New Jersey stations.
Sikhs in New Jersey have reported 56 bias incidents since 2001 to the Sikh Coalition, a national advocacy group founded in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, and have quietly absorbed uncounted others. During a fire drill at Hightstown High School last month, a Sikh student’s turban was set on fire. He patted out the flames before he was burned; another student was arraigned on several charges, including bias intimidation. In Hoboken earlier this year, a woman grabbed the turban of a Sikh man in a restaurant and tried to remove it; as part of a plea agreement she must perform 40 hours of community service for the Sikh Coalition, and will soon be collecting accounts of bias from Sikhs.
“If somebody pulled off somebody’s yarmulke, it would be a no-brainer,” said Amardeep Singh, 37, a lawyer from Hoboken who is a co-founder and the executive director of the Sikh Coalition and has been pressing law enforcement officials to bring more bias charges. “Why don’t they get it with the Sikh turban? It seems pretty apparent, especially in a post-9/11 context, that these are not random attacks.”
Four years ago, the old Acme on the border of Carteret — a town whose name sounds to the Sikhs who have been flocking here in recent years propitiously similar to the Indian town of Kartarpur, a sacred place in Sikh history — was reborn as Gurdwara Dashmesh Darbar, the largest of eight Sikh places of worship in New Jersey. Each Sunday as many as 1,200 worshipers pass through: singing hymns; listening to the priest read from the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib; bringing their children for religious classes; partaking of the common meal prepared in the large new kitchen; and wearing their turbans without fear of prompting stares of bewilderment or resentment.
But when they leave, some of the men — especially the younger ones, who were boys here when Sikhs were scarce and the taunts of schoolmates were sharp — uncover their heads to reveal hair that has been barbered.
“You go home and tell your parents you want to cut your hair and your parents get mad,” said Daljeet Singh Mann, 24, who cut his hair and removed his turban when he was in middle school in Carteret. “They don’t understand. They think we’re destroying our religion, but we’re not. It’s just that we want to cut it because everybody teases us so hard.”
Mr. Mann’s cousin, Manpreet Singh, removed his turban and cut his hair when he was just 7, soon after arriving from India. “It didn’t change my belief,” said Mr. Singh, 23, who is studying criminal justice at Middlesex County College and would like to become a state trooper. “With what was around me at the time, it wasn’t worth keeping the turban.”
But the two cousins have more company now, and both are considering growing their hair again, the way they hope their own children will one day, when New Jersey has become progressively more accustomed to the sight of men wearing turbans.
“My school has almost every culture in the world,” said Gagandeep Singh, 13, a seventh-grader in Edison, who also arrived from India at 7, but a crucial decade later, when he was not the only Sikh boy in his school, and who has kept his turban. “They don’t make fun of you that much because they’re used to seeing all different kinds of people.”
Some of the youngest children dashed around the hall as their parents gathered to leave. One boy made straight for the palki, the golden canopy, laughing as he wore on his head something that his schoolmates might hardly notice one day.
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