America's First Sikh Temple Celebrates 100 Years

THE NEW YORK TIMES | OP-ED
By Bhira Backhaus

The Stockton Gurdwara in California — the first Sikh temple in the United States — is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Immigrants from Punjab, India, purchased the lot on Grant Street in early 1912. Once in a while, I bring out a black and white photograph of the gurdwara taken a few decades later. But people still sometimes ask me, why can’t they assimilate more? Dress like us. Talk like us. Perhaps, some seem to believe, that would prevent the sort of tragedy that happened in Wisconsin. I never have an easy answer. But I do know this: to wipe away what has come before, who we have been over the centuries, also means to forget who our own mothers and fathers were. It means that how they conducted their lives — the families they raised, the homes they built — didn’t matter. It denies us that basic human impulse, to remember their stories, the unique timbre of their voices. It would be as if they had never existed at all. [More]

Bhira Backhaus is the author of the novel “Under the Lemon Trees.”