Following 9/11 fearful Americans felt even more uncomfortable around Middle Easterners, and traditionally dressed men wearing turbans received even more suspicious looks or worse. The Phoenix area notoriously made international news with the first post 9/11 hate crime when Frank Roque murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi in front of his service station, but at least 290 other Sikhs reported severe incidents in the months that followed. Since Sikh men wear beards and turbans, ignorant Americans equated them with Osama bin Laden and Al Quaeda with predictable prejudicial actions.
As the Chinese assert, out of crisis come opportunity; thus, the previously obscure Sikh religion was forced to assert its identity and make itself better known to the American public. One of the fruits of this campaign is Vivanti Sarkar's 56 minute made for television documentary, Mistaken Identity: Sikhs in America. With stated goals of educating and informing mainstream Americans about the true nature of Sikhism and its contributions to American society, the film effectively educates with enough visual variety to maintain interest.
Broken into sections with intertitles, the film explains the historical origins of Sikhism, its basic tenets, cultural customs, and sketches of Sikh entrepreneurs. The most effective sequence is an extended examination of a cross cultural marriage between a young Sikh woman and a Christian man, who is open minded enough to ride a horse to the wedding and go through traditional Sikh rituals. Likewise, his parents dress like other Sikhs (including headbands) and only insist on the American custom of exchanging rings as part of the ceremony. Interviews with the girl's parents reveal how reluctant they initially were for their daughter to marry a non-Sikh and how they continue to have cultural concerns, but the wedding pictures reveal a portrait of true multi-culturalism.
The narrative largely follows 22 year old Amada Gesine, as she tracks down a variety of Sikhs for interviews, to visit their religious gatherings, and take in informal social gatherings. A Georgetown university student who had selected Sikhs as her India project, Gesine serves well as non-judgmental hostess through the Sikh lifestyle, helping the audience to relate more to this little known group.
If any positives have come out of the horrific events of 9/11, greater awareness and appreciation of Sikhs has resulted, all due from necessity. One brief scene shows a group of bearded turban wearing men meeting with President Bush shortly after 9/11, and the President declares that innocent Sikhs have needless suffered since the attack on the World Trade Center and that the government would do everything possible to protect them. I'm not sure whether the government really has a whole lot of power in that area, but this documentary does.
It has the power to introduce the Sikh religion and its beautiful people to a much larger audience than was ever possible before, and it should spark much more positive interest in the Sikhs. Although it doesn't have enough entertainment value to play theatrically outside special interest groups, it can appropriately be showcased on PBS and other educationally minded television networks or in classrooms studying Indian religions and culture. Given the historical context, Mistaken Identity makes a significant contribution towards tolerance and the importance of increasing our cultural knowledge, strongly reminding us that America's underlying strength lies in its cultural diversity. |
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