Why I Wear the Turban

“The Turban” exposes a paradox. I can’t think about ever surrendering my turban. It’s develop into soldered to my identification, serving as each the final word in-group badge and a flexible stylistic accent: eye-catching, a bit unique, a chance so as to add shade and aptitude. However I haven’t forgotten how onerous it may be to hold. Like an enormous zit or a malformed nostril, it turns into a lightning rod for insecurities, the factor to be blamed after slights and uncomfortable experiences. I’ve been fortunate to flee bullying, however in keeping with one examine practically eighty per cent of Sikh boys with head coverings in america report having the alternative expertise. That is why it’s jarring to see the turban featured on catwalks and pink carpets and in Renaissance courts. How can one thing that after threatened to destroy my mother and father’ marriage, one thing that sparks emotions of hysteria and apartness, be worn so casually by others? Why are symbols typically probably the most burdensome for the individuals who maintain them most dearly?My great-grandfather died searching lions, or so I used to be instructed rising up. The incident occurred within the scrublands of western India, within the remaining years of British rule. He was out together with his oldest son, my maternal grandfather, who was then round twenty. My great-grandfather was dealing with his rifle, presumably cleansing it, when the mechanism misfired and shot him within the arm. My grandfather ran to his father, pulled off his turban, and tied it across the wound. He lifted him onto his horse and rode to a hospital, his unshorn hair uncovered to the world. However the bleeding didn’t cease, and his father died.I’ve all the time had a sophisticated relationship with this story. I perceive that the occasion was traumatic, that it haunted my grandfather for the remainder of his life, leaving him not solely fatherless however, because the oldest youngster, a surrogate dad or mum to 6 siblings, together with a sister who was nonetheless within the womb. Though I by no means met him—he died 5 years earlier than I used to be born—my mother instructed me that he’d saved {a photograph} of his father in the home, bowing to it typically, even after on a regular basis milestones, like shopping for new garments.However that recognition of loss coexists with delight. As a younger child, I fixated on the lions. I used to be small, bookish, and obsessive about Asian and African mammals—and I beloved envisioning my ancestors on horseback, fearless and regal, stalking probably the most royal of beasts. “My grandfather died searching lions,” I might say, mixing up which forebear it was and both forgetting or intentionally excluding the opposite particulars. As I received older, the second of the unwrapped turban grew extra outstanding in my creativeness. Few objects are extra sacred to a Sikh man than his turban; utilizing it as a bandage exemplified devotion and compassion, but in addition power. I wore a turban, too, and the story imbued the merchandise with a dignified masculinity, positioning me in a stately, nearly majestic lineage.Such grandeur was the purpose, initially. Trendy portraits of the founding father of Sikhism, Nanak Dev, present him beturbanned, however historians comparable to Jvala Singh, at Berkeley, insist that it is a historic misrepresentation. The primary 5 gurus, a succession of prophet-leaders, doubtless donned the seli topi, a woven cap worn by Hindus and Muslims and related to humility and non secular residing. The turban, Singh argues, wasn’t broadly adopted till the time of the sixth guru, Hargobind. Responding to persecution by India’s Mughal rulers—and the torture and execution of his father—Hargobind militarized Sikhism. He carried two swords, solicited choices of arms and horses, and swapped the saintly topi for the kingly turban. Roughly a century later, in 1699, the tenth guru prohibited baptized Sikhs from reducing their hair, and the turban grew to become enshrined as a martial and non secular requirement for males.Valor and the Aristocracy had been recurring themes in my childhood. At Sunday college, we realized how Mughal élites monopolized the turban, and the way Sikhs usurped it and bestowed it on themselves. At any time when I scraped my knee and cried, my father would remind me that I’m a Singh, a lion. My mother and father—with levels in civil engineering and English literature—aren’t precisely warlike, but watch that video from my third birthday lengthy sufficient and also you’ll discover a protect with a pair of crossed swords hanging like a trophy on our living-room wall.Which means hardly ever travels intact, nevertheless. Strangers and new classmates didn’t consider badass lion hunters or Mughal-era warriors once they first noticed my patka or, later, the total turban. Quite, they tended to deduce piety and cultural parochialism, figuring that anybody dressed like me should be critical about God and sure to custom. To be truthful, fellow-Sikhs additionally infer devotion and self-discipline, though these are neither the one readings nor the commonest. Everyone knows mone, or males with lower hair, who learn scripture day by day, in addition to full-bearded sardars who drink whiskey, spend Saturday nights flirting at hookah lounges, and haven’t seen the within of a temple since their sister’s marriage ceremony. All of us perceive that the choice to keep up Sikhism’s exterior markers displays numerous concerns, together with religion, delight, household stress, the inertia of identification, and the consolation of prompt belonging—most of which may stay frustratingly invisible to the Western mainstream.A simple response to carrying one thing so burdensome is to drop it. I’ve seen many younger Sikhs go this route. After I began school, a child I had grown up with who spoke significantly better Punjabi than I, and whose traditionalist father taught us Sikh historical past, appeared in Fb photographs with cropped hair and a popped collar, as I bear in mind it. My cousin’s finest pal, who was featured on academic posters informing the general public about Sikh headwear, experimented with a person bun in highschool, then lower his hair. I get why they did it. Once you’re misinterpret earlier than you communicate, scrapping the visible script can appear to be the one method to reclaim company. “My confidence is dying as a result of I really feel so trapped in turban that it limits my potential,” one school pupil wrote, in a Reddit put up titled “I’m on the verge of reducing hair.” A seventeen-year-old Sikh born and raised within the U.S., after getting a crewcut with pale sides, defined, “It’s been a constant supply of distress for me, sure clearly due to social isolation.”An alternative choice is to counterbalance the turban’s weight, to decorate oneself in a constellation of symbolic imagery so expressive and emphatic that the that means of the turban is altered or overwhelmed. Such compensatory identification signalling is widespread. A younger Black man may whistle Vivaldi to place passersby comfortable. An Asian American excessive schooler may break-dance to defy stereotypes of nerdiness. The marginalized and diasporic study the gestures that finest reroute notion. Like garam masala thrown right into a curry, these selections don’t erase the bottom elements a lot as increase and redefine them.For a lot of turbanned Sikhs, this has typically meant seeking to hip-hop and Black tradition. Students like Conner Singh VanderBeek, an ethnomusicologist at Davidson School, and Aranveer Singh Litt, a Ph.D. pupil in communication arts on the College of Wisconsin-Madison, have studied why diasporic Punjabi Sikhs gravitate towards hip-hop, citing its warrior ethos, politics of resistance, and reflections on racial profiling and systemic injustice. However there’s additionally the need to be cool, to be seen as greater than only a brown dude with spiritual head garb. I bear in mind when children my age—together with the son of one among our temple’s musicians—began exhibiting up in gold chains, dishevelled denims, and basketball jerseys, talking a tough mix of village Punjabi and slang borrowed from “106 & Park.”After I switched colleges in eighth grade, I, too, moved on this path, quoting OutKast, then Tupac, then the Soulquarians’ discography, all of the whereas rocking Timberlands and dishevelled, zip-up hoodies. I beloved the music, but—and I admit this with some guilt—I additionally favored the model of myself that it projected: the little chocolate boy whose automotive bumped Talib Kweli as his dad dropped him off every morning. The match was all the time awkward, although, to not point out offensive, one thing I realized when a Black classmate requested me why I felt comfy constructing my identification round a tradition that wasn’t mine.In school, I developed a special aesthetic assemblage. I had, by this time, progressed from the patka to the dastar, the total turban, carrying a method much like my father’s however greater on the top and extra voluminous. This was the start of the Obama period. Ironic hipsterdom was ascendant, though it was countered by a subcultural pattern that revelled in celebrationist pleasure, psychedelic absurdity, and eccentric transcendence—the cult of Dan Deacon, Devendra Banhart, and Animal Collective. The whole lot was handmade, loop-pedalled, a bit messy, a bit lo-fi. I discovered myself in a social scene that valued creativity, self-expression, iconoclastic sincerity, and the cultivation of interesting-ness. It was typically exhausting—a carried out individuality—but I morphed to accommodate it. My mom tie-dyed a turban purple for my nineteenth birthday; months later, my pal Arlando screen-printed zigzags onto one other one. Although my vogue grew to become bolder—purple corduroys, tiny floral-patterned shorts, an outsized sweatshirt with my face printed on the left breast like a brand, the whole lot patched and re-sewn to oblivion—I additionally grew to become conscious of the materiality of my headwear, the way it could possibly be reimagined and absorbed into this newer, extra florid self. I stamped a turban with hippos’ faces, screen-printed one other with hand-drawn paisleys, and commenced a apply of turban-dyeing and turban-painting that has continued to today.The consequence was a semiotic pivot. Like a chameleon dropped right into a pile of Technicolor tapestries, my headwear introduced a reimagined self—much less pious conservatism, extra ecstatic singularity. It was round this time that I watched the video of my third birthday. My mother requested me why I used to be crying, and I lied, saying one thing about being dissatisfied that I had tried to take the cricket bat from my pal. The reality was that I didn’t have the phrases to specific what I used to be feeling. The sight of me with lower hair had been unusual and jarring, like recognizing a doppelgänger of your self doing one thing out of character and obscene. My hair and turban had been so foundational to my story—gravitational facilities round which I had constructed myself—that the child on the display screen, so clearly me, additionally appeared clearly not me.I as soon as thought that symbols like my turban felt heavy due to different individuals. They stereotype; they assume; they stare. However none of these responses would happen with out the turban mattering to me. I’ve chosen to hold it regardless of being gawked at, misinterpret, feminized, and forged as unreasonably religious. Strangers might not know why I put on it, however they sense that it isn’t arbitrary. That is what makes my turban totally different from Lord Byron’s or Sarah Jessica Parker’s, what occurs with any image that’s essential to the particular person carrying it. It’s burdensome not regardless of its that means however due to it. ♦