u/Curious_Map6367

Recently, a political candidate in Taiwan, Lee Hung-yi of Kaohsiung, put up a campaign billboard with a prohibition sign over a turbaned figure. He told reporters he wanted to ban Indian migrant workers from coming to Taiwan. The figure on the billboard was not a generic Indian. It was a Sikh, dastar wrapped, beard rendered, kurta colored. Of every visual he could have reached for to symbolize "Indian," he picked the most visually distinct religious minority in the country he was claiming to oppose.

This is not the first time. In 2023 the Bureau of Public Order, an arm of China's Ministry of Public Security, shared a brownface video to its 32 million Weibo followers as a road safety message. The video, originally posted on Douyin and liked more than 1.2 million times, featured Chinese men in dark makeup and Sikh turbans riding a motorbike, lip-syncing the Punjabi song Tunak Tunak Tun. Comments inside China were mainly positive. The post was only deleted after international criticism.

For context, Sikhs are not Hindus, not Muslims, and not generic Indians. The turban and beard are religious articles that observant Sikh men are required to keep, which is why Sikhs cannot blend in the way other South Asian immigrants sometimes can. There are barely 25 to 30 million Sikhs in the whole world, and Taiwan probably does not even have a hundred Sikhs with turbans and beards.

In the West, I should not have to explain to anyone in this subreddit how stereotypes propagate. Most readers here have been on the receiving end of exactly the mechanism the Chinese ministry video and the Taiwan billboard are deploying. The mechanism does not change when the operators change race. A flattened visual marker stands in for a whole population, ignorance gets dressed up as humor or politics, and the targeted community is asked to explain itself yet again to people who could have learned the difference at any point and chose not to.

The basic question I want to put to this sub, and especially to readers from Chinese-language backgrounds, is this. Did your education actually teach who Sikhs are? Did it teach the difference between Punjab and the rest of India? Did it teach anything about Sikh history, religion, or community structure? The depth and consistency of the ignorance across two different Chinese-language polities suggests this is not individual prejudice but a structural gap in what gets taught.

Japan does not deploy Sikh imagery this way. Why? My hpotheis is that the reason may sit in the fact that Japanese Zen's metaphysical substrate, the Yogacara school, was founded in the fourth century by Vasubandhu and Asanga, two brothers from greater Punjab.

This is the part that should embarrass any society that takes pride in its world education.

When diaspora Asians ask Western audiences to learn the difference between Chinese and Japanese, between Korean and Vietnamese, between Cantonese and Mandarin, the argument has always been that Asia is internally various and that the distinctions matter. The same standard applied westward also has to apply intra-Asian.

The Taiwan billboard and the Chinese ministry video are not isolated incidents. They are surface symptoms of a structural gap that has been visible to its targets for a long time. The question is whether anyone from inside that education system can confirm where the gap is, where it came from, and whether anyone is moving to close it.

Source #1: Why is anti-India racism on the rise in Taiwan? Political candidate promises to ban Indian workers – Asia News Network

Source #2: Chinese ministry deletes brownface video post after criticism

I am looking for a deeper understanding and nuanced explanation. Please go beyond the surface-level expectation that because one time when Bhagat Singh Sandhu was young, he wrote an essay called “Why I Am an Atheist,” this somehow justifies the erasure of his tribal identity as it somehow overcomes caste. Anyone familiar with how Indian society works understands this is simply not true, especially in Panjab where villages themselves are named after specific caste groups. Dosanjh Kalan is the village of Diljit Dosanjh. Badal is the ancestral village of Sukhbir Singh Badal, who is otherwise Dhillon.

The atheism essay gets deployed as retroactive justification for stripping away his gotra, but that’s intellectually dishonest. His Marxist atheism was a critique of religion as a tool of oppression, not a renunciation of Sikh identity. He kept his kesh except when fugitive operations demanded otherwise, his family remained deeply Sikh, and the Jallianwala Bagh response and Akali movement were both active in his world.

We don’t apply this same logic to Ambedkar, whose Mahar caste identity persists in the historical record even after his formal renunciation of Hinduism and conversion to Buddhism, because that identity serves the Ambedkarite narrative.

Udham Singh could also used as an example. He was Kambojh.

https://www.exploreyourdna.com/sample/china/c1654

Princess Sophia was born in Belgravia in 1876, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and goddaughter to Queen Victoria. By her twenties she had a grace-and-favour apartment at Faraday House on the Hampton Court estate, and she lived the part: Parisian couture, championship dogs, society parties, the right address.

A 1907 trip to Punjab shattered that life. She saw colonial rule at ground level, encountered Indian nationalist circles, and returned fundamentally changed. Within two years she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In November 1910 she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst on Black Friday, when police met around 300 women with six hours of beatings and assaults outside Parliament. She joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League under the slogan No Vote, No Tax. When bailiffs came for her diamond ring, she let them take it.

The State was stuck. Arresting her risked a diplomatic incident. Lord Crewe warned that evicting Queen Victoria’s goddaughter from Hampton Court would be optically intolerable for George V. So she carried on. She gave the WSPU’s largest single donation in 1914, nursed wounded Indian soldiers at Brighton Pavilion during the war, and on Pankhurst’s death in 1928 took over the Suffragette Fellowship as president.

Asked by Who’s Who to list her interests, she wrote one phrase: the advancement of women.

She died on 22 August 1948. By her own instruction she was cremated according to Sikh rites and her ashes returned to India

Princess Sophia was born in Belgravia in 1876, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and goddaughter to Queen Victoria. By her twenties she had a grace-and-favour apartment at Faraday House on the Hampton Court estate, and she lived the part: Parisian couture, championship dogs, society parties, the right address.

A 1907 trip to Punjab shattered that life. She saw colonial rule at ground level, encountered Indian nationalist circles, and returned fundamentally changed. Within two years she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In November 1910 she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst on Black Friday, when police met around 300 women with six hours of beatings and assaults outside Parliament. She joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League under the slogan No Vote, No Tax. When bailiffs came for her diamond ring, she let them take it.

The State was stuck. Arresting her risked a diplomatic incident. Lord Crewe warned that evicting Queen Victoria’s goddaughter from Hampton Court would be optically intolerable for George V. So she carried on. She gave the WSPU’s largest single donation in 1914, nursed wounded Indian soldiers at Brighton Pavilion during the war, and on Pankhurst’s death in 1928 took over the Suffragette Fellowship as president.

Asked by Who’s Who to list her interests, she wrote one phrase: the advancement of women.

She died on 22 August 1948. By her own instruction she was cremated according to Sikh rites and her ashes returned to India

Princess Sophia was born in Belgravia in 1876, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and goddaughter to Queen Victoria. By her twenties she had a grace-and-favour apartment at Faraday House on the Hampton Court estate, and she lived the part: Parisian couture, championship dogs, society parties, the right address.

A 1907 trip to Punjab shattered that life. She saw colonial rule at ground level, encountered Indian nationalist circles, and returned fundamentally changed. Within two years she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In November 1910 she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst on Black Friday, when police met around 300 women with six hours of beatings and assaults outside Parliament. She joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League under the slogan No Vote, No Tax. When bailiffs came for her diamond ring, she let them take it.

The State was stuck. Arresting her risked a diplomatic incident. Lord Crewe warned that evicting Queen Victoria’s goddaughter from Hampton Court would be optically intolerable for George V. So she carried on. She gave the WSPU’s largest single donation in 1914, nursed wounded Indian soldiers at Brighton Pavilion during the war, and on Pankhurst’s death in 1928 took over the Suffragette Fellowship as president.

Asked by Who’s Who to list her interests, she wrote one phrase: the advancement of women.

She died on 22 August 1948. By her own instruction she was cremated according to Sikh rites and her ashes returned to India.

Princess Sophia was born in Belgravia in 1876, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and goddaughter to Queen Victoria. By her twenties she had a grace-and-favour apartment at Faraday House on the Hampton Court estate, and she lived the part: Parisian couture, championship dogs, society parties, the right address.

A 1907 trip to Punjab shattered that life. She saw colonial rule at ground level, encountered Indian nationalist circles, and returned fundamentally changed. Within two years she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In November 1910 she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst on Black Friday, when police met around 300 women with six hours of beatings and assaults outside Parliament. She joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League under the slogan No Vote, No Tax. When bailiffs came for her diamond ring, she let them take it.

The State was stuck. Arresting her risked a diplomatic incident. Lord Crewe warned that evicting Queen Victoria’s goddaughter from Hampton Court would be optically intolerable for George V. So she carried on. She gave the WSPU’s largest single donation in 1914, nursed wounded Indian soldiers at Brighton Pavilion during the war, and on Pankhurst’s death in 1928 took over the Suffragette Fellowship as president.

Asked by Who’s Who to list her interests, she wrote one phrase: the advancement of women.

She died on 22 August 1948. By her own instruction she was cremated according to Sikh rites and her ashes returned to India.

Princess Sophia was born in Belgravia in 1876, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and goddaughter to Queen Victoria. By her twenties she had a grace-and-favour apartment at Faraday House on the Hampton Court estate, and she lived the part: Parisian couture, championship dogs, society parties, the right address.

A 1907 trip to Punjab shattered that life. She saw colonial rule at ground level, encountered Indian nationalist circles, and returned fundamentally changed. Within two years she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In November 1910 she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst on Black Friday, when police met around 300 women with six hours of beatings and assaults outside Parliament. She joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League under the slogan No Vote, No Tax. When bailiffs came for her diamond ring, she let them take it.

The State was stuck. Arresting her risked a diplomatic incident. Lord Crewe warned that evicting Queen Victoria’s goddaughter from Hampton Court would be optically intolerable for George V. So she carried on. She gave the WSPU’s largest single donation in 1914, nursed wounded Indian soldiers at Brighton Pavilion during the war, and on Pankhurst’s death in 1928 took over the Suffragette Fellowship as president.

Asked by Who’s Who to list her interests, she wrote one phrase: the advancement of women.

She died on 22 August 1948. By her own instruction she was cremated according to Sikh rites and her ashes returned to India.

(Credits to Ho Ee Kid that posted this picture and writeup on the Nostalgic Singapore Facebook group that allows us to learn more about Singapore’s unique history)

“ During my treks in Brown Hill, I noticed that quite a number of Sikh Guards were standing watch on the tombs of many a notable personnel including the late Ong Sam Leong. The story of why Sikhs are preferred dates back to the good old days of Singapore.

Many of the early Sikhs from Punjab, India, came to Malaya in hope of finding work as soldiers or policemen in the British service. However, not all of them were successful. Hence to pay off the large debt incurred to come to Malaya, many of them sought alternative employment as watchmen & security guards. These traditional watchmen were known as ‘jaga’, which is Malay for a watchman or caretaker. These Sikh jagas used to stand vigil outside banks, godowns, retail shops and factories, usually after office hours and during the night, to prevent theft and damage to property. Over time., this job came to be closely associated with the Sikh community.

Due to their imposing appearances and martial reputations established from their experiences with the British military and policing, Sikhs were highly sought after by businesses and the wealthy for private security services. Over time, these Sikh watchmen became status symbols of the rich, as wealthy Chinese businessmen would hire them as personal bodyguards as well as to protect their homes and businesses. These jaga were known for their loyalty, dependability and friendliness which made them ideal guards and door-keepers at banks and hotels. So valued were their services that the Chinese were known to burn effigies of Sikh jaga as offerings to the dead. Statues of Sikh guards adorned the tombs of some rich Chinese merchants in the belief that they would continue their protective roles in the afterlife.”

(Credits to Ho Ee Kid that posted this picture and writeup on the Nostalgic Singapore Facebook group that allows us to learn more about Singapore’s unique history)

“ During my treks in Brown Hill, I noticed that quite a number of Sikh Guards were standing watch on the tombs of many a notable personnel including the late Ong Sam Leong. The story of why Sikhs are preferred dates back to the good old days of Singapore.

Many of the early Sikhs from Punjab, India, came to Malaya in hope of finding work as soldiers or policemen in the British service. However, not all of them were successful. Hence to pay off the large debt incurred to come to Malaya, many of them sought alternative employment as watchmen & security guards. These traditional watchmen were known as ‘jaga’, which is Malay for a watchman or caretaker. These Sikh jagas used to stand vigil outside banks, godowns, retail shops and factories, usually after office hours and during the night, to prevent theft and damage to property. Over time., this job came to be closely associated with the Sikh community.

Due to their imposing appearances and martial reputations established from their experiences with the British military and policing, Sikhs were highly sought after by businesses and the wealthy for private security services. Over time, these Sikh watchmen became status symbols of the rich, as wealthy Chinese businessmen would hire them as personal bodyguards as well as to protect their homes and businesses. These jaga were known for their loyalty, dependability and friendliness which made them ideal guards and door-keepers at banks and hotels. So valued were their services that the Chinese were known to burn effigies of Sikh jaga as offerings to the dead. Statues of Sikh guards adorned the tombs of some rich Chinese merchants in the belief that they would continue their protective roles in the afterlife.”

In 1849, after the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the British East India Company gathered itself around a ten-year-old boy named Prince Duleep Singh, the youngest son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab. They had separated him from his mother Maharani Jind Kaur, imprisoned her, and brought to him a document the historians now call the Treaty of Lahore. The boy signed. By the terms of that signing the Sikh Empire ended, the throne passed into Company hands, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which had ridden on Ranjit Singh’s armlet through the last great Punjabi sovereignty, was carried to London.

It now sits on the Crown of the Queen Mother.

This week, Mayor Mamdani told reporters that if he got a private moment with King Charles, he would ask for the Koh-i-Noor returned.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/nyregion/kohinoor-diamond-india-history-mamdani-king-charles.html?unlocked_article_code=1.fFA.m62H.H01S6G68-OcB&smid=url-share

The caption at the bottom reads “FROM THE PEPPÉ STŪPA AT PIPRĀHWA,” referring to the stupa excavated at Piprahwa in present-day Siddharthnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, near the Nepal border. In 1898, W. C. Peppé excavated the mound and uncovered a stone coffer containing reliquary vessels, bone and ash fragments, and a large deposit of precious offerings.

These are relic offerings placed with the deposit: faceted beads, coral or carnelian-like rods, flower and star-shaped cut pieces, pearls, rock crystal elements, and other small worked ornaments. Museum descriptions identify the broader Piprahwa group as gold, semiprecious stones, rock crystal, pearls, and shell, dated roughly to ca. 240 to 200 BCE. The Met described one exhibited set as about 320 tiny objects arranged in framed ensembles.

Visually, the frame shows:

1. the outer border dominated by small faceted crystal or stone pieces,
2. upper rows with red cylindrical beads or cut segments,
3. middle rows with floral rosettes, discs, and larger clear crystal pieces,
4. lower rows with pearls and darker red beads,
5. all mounted on black velvet to maximize contrast.

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-Y35105/globetrekker

Musical guest Diljit Dosanjh performs "Morni" for The Tonight Show

A discussion on the history of the interactions between horses and humans in South Asia through three millennia and an introduction to the forthcoming book by Pratyay Nath and Ranabir Chakravarti (eds), The Coveted Mount: The Horse in South Asian History (Cambridge University Press).

The word Khanda has its origins in the Sanskrit khaḍga (खड्ग) or khaṅga, from a root khaṇḍ meaning "to break, divide, cut, destroy".

The older word for a bladed weapon, asi, is used in the Rigveda in reference to either an early form of the sword or to a sacrificial knife or dagger to be used in war.

The story that “Hindus made their eldest son Sikh” out of devotion or interfaith harmony is the polished version. The unvarnished one is colonial accounting. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, in Dowry Murder, documents that the British after 1857 organised their army by religiously segregated regiments drawn from designated “martial races,” which shut Hindu Khatris out of military service even though Khatris had served in Ranjit Singh’s forces a generation earlier. The squeeze tightened in 1900 when the Punjab Land Alienation Act classified Khatris as a “non-agricultural” tribe and forbade them from acquiring further land. A community that had been landholders, scribes, traders, and soldiers was now legally cut out of two of those vocations at once.

The escape route was confessional. W.H. McLeod, in Who is a Sikh, notes that for the British, “martial Sikhs” meant Khalsa Sikhs specifically, and any man inducted into the Indian Army as a Sikh was required to maintain the external insignia of the Khalsa. So the colonial state had inadvertently created a regulatory arbitrage. A turban and unshorn hair on one son in the household unlocked land-holding rights, military pensions, and access to the regimental economy that Hindu Khatri identity foreclosed. The Khalsa was the loophole. What gets retold today as evidence of seamless Hindu-Sikh kinship was, for many families, a cold-eyed adaptation to British caste-engineering rules.

Even Khatri sources concede this when they are being honest. The eSamskriti account of the practice preserves the family memory directly, recording that a forefather “wanted to avail of the economic benefits offered by the British to the followers of Khalsa and had decided to become a Sikh.” That is not the language of dharmic syncretism. It is the language of a household ledger. Reading the practice as devotion when it was substantially arbitrage is what lets the Khatri-Sikh boundary continue to be narrated as porous and accommodating, when in fact the porosity was engineered by colonial land law and the British military pension book.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Sources cited:

1.	Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford University Press, 2002) — on post-1857 martial-races regimental policy and the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 reclassifying Khatris as a “non-agricultural” tribe.

2.	W.H. McLeod, Who is a Sikh? The Problem of Sikh Identity (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989) — on the British equation of “martial Sikh” with Khalsa Sikh, and the army induction requirement to maintain Khalsa external insignia.

3.	Sanjeev Nayyar, “Why was the first son made a Sikh,” eSamskriti (July 2004, edited April 2017) — family-memory account preserving the explicit motive of availing economic benefits offered by the British to Khalsa followers. URL: [esamskriti.com/e/History/Indian-History/Why-was-the-first-son-made-a-Sikh-1.aspx​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​](http://esamskriti.com/e/History/Indian-History/Why-was-the-first-son-made-a-Sikh-1.aspx​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​)

Yogācāra is one of the two great philosophical streams of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the other being Madhyamaka. Its central claim is that the world as we experience it is mind-constructed, and that consciousness itself, in its many layers, is the ground from which any serious investigation of suffering must begin. Most practitioners here have encountered the school in some form, whether through Tibetan teachings on the eight consciousnesses, through East Asian schools descended from later Yogācāra-Madhyamaka synthesis, or through any commentary that takes the ālayavijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, as its working concept.

The school’s classical form was built by two brothers born in Panjab. Asaṅga and Vasubandhu were born in Punjab and educated in Kashmir. The earliest detailed source for their lives is Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese pilgrim who travelled through the region himself and recorded Vasubandhu’s birthplace as Gandhāra. The philosophical literature the brothers produced over the following decades still anchors Mahāyāna Buddhism across Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.