War of Narratives: Christianity, Iconoclasm, and Decoloniality of Race and Religion

Abstract

This paper examines Christian icons in Panjab, in northern India, and their relationship to the larger discourse on race, iconoclasm, and decentering Whiteness in the United States. I analyze the appropriation of Panjabi idioms woven into Christian icons to interrogate the alleged case of forced conversions of lower caste, Mazhabi Sikhs, and the atmospheres of violence. Focusing on the beheading of Christ and Mary’s pieta statue in a church in Tarn Taran, Panjab in 2022, I investigate the iconic materiality and vexed histories of the religious symbol through a visual studies lens. How do Christian images signal liminal material presences that oscillate between their identity of sacred icons and of hegemonic monuments of white supremacy? Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic and decolonial framework, I argue that entangled in the politics of memory, Christian icons are an impregnated space of intersecting colonial histories of oppression and conversion entrenched in hierarchies of race, class, and caste. This study contributes to understanding the growing impact of Christianity in northern India, the war of narratives being enacted upon its icons, and its relationship to anti-colonial and anti-racial expressions of transnational iconoclasm to posit a bigger question: Is there a way to navigate through the dense matrix of colonialism, race, religion, caste, and violence to reclaim agency through Mignolo’s call for a “praxis of decolonial healing”?

1. Introduction

Although my name is Gurwinder Singh, which means ‘a part of the Guru,’ but this society has kept us [lower caste Sikhs] ‘broken.’ We still face caste discrimination.

-

Gurwinder Singh, son of intergenerational bonded laborers, Bauran Kalan village, Patiala district, Panjab

You see, 80% of the world is Christian and the rest 20% will also be….

-

Father John, Parish Priest of Infant Jesus Catholic Church, Thakarpura village, Patti, Tarn Taran, Panjab (Interview with the author, July 2023)1

In the 2023 documentary, “The Broken: ‘Dalit’ Sikhs Fight Back in Punjab” Gurwinder Singh, a lower caste Sikh, or a Mazhabi Dalit Sikh becomes the emblematic figure of caste oppression in the state of Panjab in northern India. The word “Dalit” comes from the Sanskrit root “dal,” which means to split-open or grind, translated as “broken” or “crushed” in Marathi, referring to those that are oppressed and separated from the society (Abraham and Misrahi-Barak 2018, p. 18).2 For generations, Dalit Sikh families have been “broken”—cut-off, torn apart, and systemically ostracized from mainstream Sikh society, primarily by the peasant Jat Sikh caste who are the most powerful in Panjab.3 Gurwinder’s family has been working as siri (bonded laborers) for the upper caste Jat Sikh landowning farmers.4 His 65-year-old father continues to do the “polluted” work of a “dung-rubbish picker,” a job predominantly reserved for the “outcasts” who face hundreds of years of exploitation, humiliation, and violence (Surabhi Singh 2023).5

Gurwinder Singh belongs to Sikhism, a relatively new religion in India that emerged in Panjab in the sixteenth century based on an egalitarian ideology, espousing equality for all. However, the exploitation of lower caste has been deeply entrenched in the Sikh society (Jodhka 2004, Ram 2007, 2017a; Puri 2009). Dalit Sikhs, such as Chamar (leather workers) and Mazhabi (sanitation workers, derisively called Chuhra), are the outcaste groups in the Sikh community, the latter being the most deprived (Mondal 2025; Ram 2007). Primarily associated with the Hindu religion, caste is not an indigenous term and there is no exact equivalent of the word “caste” in Indian languages (Guha 2013, p. 19). The term caste is derived from the Portuguese word casta, denoting “purity of blood” or race; a concept that was “the earliest instance of biological racism in the Christian West” (Vaid 2014; Currie 2024; Guha 2013, p. 21). Since the Portuguese inter-bred with the local darker colonized population, the term caste alluded to a Western perception of “biologically distinctive (and ranked) social groups generated by Western expansion in Americas and Asia” with different proportions of “racial purity” (Guha 2013, p. 22; Elder 1996, p. 20). The Portuguese “applied the term ‘casta’ (inappropriately) to the inter-marrying groups they found in India” and the “British changed the word to ‘caste’ and incorporated it into their legal documents, where it continues to be used by the post-independence government of India” (Elder 1996, p. 20).

As the British established their colony in India, they began to operate caste on the Hindu idea of division of society into four varnas of Brahmins (the priests), Kshatriyas (the warriors), Vaishyas (the merchants), and the Shudras (the workmen). Those who inhabit the fifth category have been excluded from this social order, the avarna—literally, “out of caste” or outside of society, later called “untouchables,” Harijans, Bahujan, or the self-defining term, Dalit (although placement of untouchables in the fifth category remains controversial) (Beteille 1996; Srinivas 2003; Gupta 2022; Charsley 1996; Elder 1996; Vaid 2014).6 Post-independence in 1950, the Indian government criminalized caste discrimination and untouchability was abolished. Article 25 of the constitution of India recognizes Indic religions, such as Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism, as religions in which castes exist and provides for reservation for the lower caste. Indian Christians are excluded from caste-based benefits as Christianity is not recognized as a caste-based religious community. To uplift the lower castes, reservation quotas in government jobs and educational institutions have been introduced across India. Under this, Mazhabi Sikhs are recognized as an eligible subcategory in Scheduled Caste (SC) or the lower caste category that are entitled to benefits.

Despite these reforms, caste-based oppression persists through social and economic exclusion, enforced endogamy, residential segregation, erosion of dignity, restricted access to governmental lands by the local sarpanch (village head), and relegation of menial jobs to Dalits, especially in rural areas. Ironically, discrimination is so deeply entrenched that it continues to function even within different subcastes of the lower castes, referred to as a “caste within caste” as there is a stark failure “to break the caste-barrier among dalits” (Ram 2025; Omvedt 1993, p. 57).7

Trapped within casteist stereotypes, Dalit Sikhs in Panjab have been trying to find refuge and solace in alternate religious spaces such as deras (religious sects),8 dargahs of sufi pirs (shrines of Muslim saints), and Christian churches in their quest for dignity, better education, and an enhanced social status (Ram 2007, 2008, 2017a, 2025; A. Kumar 2014; Singh and Singh 2017; Snehi 2019).9 These alternate religious modalities that have historically been part of Panjab’s landscape are now growing exponentially. Specifically, Christian missionaries and self-styled pastors have taken center stage in Panjab’s changing demographics with a cluster of cities colloquially referred to as the “Church Belt” due to their growing Christian presence (which includes the main city of Amritsar, considered as a center of Sikhism). Six major denominations: Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventist, Church of North India, and Methodist Church are spreading across Panjab, building new churches and promoting large scale conversions (Chaba 2023). According to media estimates, 65,000 pastors are currently active in Panjab to spread Christianity (Mahajan and Menon 2022; S. Sharma 2023). In the process, the spatial, political, and socio-religious configuration of the state is changing.

Though Christianity opens its doors to people of all castes, economic backgrounds, and religions, the above quote of Father John encapsulates the primary objective of missionaries: proselytization. In the past two decades, many Dalits in Panjab, both Balmiki Hindus and Dalit Sikhs (especially Mazhabi Sikhs), have converted to Christianity in large numbers.10 Jat Sikh-dominated organizations such as the Akal Takht, the highest Sikh temporal authority, and its chief, Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh, have accused Christian priests and pastors of ‘illegal’ and ‘forced conversions’, appealing for an “anti-conversion law” (Sandhu 2022). Akal Takht released a press note that read, “Issues of fake pastors continuously challenged Sikh doctrines in Punjab through false superstition, conversion of religion, desecration of Gurbani, false propaganda about Guru Sahibs and Sikh doctrines, and physical abuse of naive people” (Brar 2022a). Alleging that missionaries are spreading Christianity through fraudulent means (luring vulnerable Panjabis into their fold by offering cash, foreign visas, or engaging in dubious healing practices), Giani Harpreet Singh affirmed that to counter such practices Sikhs “should open modern weapon training centres. There should be no hesitation in doing so. Other people are training their people in this regard secretly; we will do it openly” (S. Sharma 2023; Khanna and Singh 2024; Sehgal 2022; Brar 2022c; Surjit Singh 2022b). Several Christian leaders such as Hamid Masih, President of Punjab Christian Movement, rejected these allegations, calling them baseless (Sehgal 2022). Dismissing Giani Harpreet Singh’s remarks as inflammatory, Pradeep Kumar Samantaroy, bishop of the Diocese of Amritsar and the apostolic administrator of the Jalandhar Diocese, Agnelo Rufino Gracias, responded “We are Catholics. We don’t convert people. … There is no conversion going on. Only dormant Christians have become active,” adding that people have the right to preach any religion in India and Singh’s comments could lead to disharmony in the state (Surjit Singh 2022b).

This verbal sparring and incidents of sporadic violence have led to a tug of war between Jat Sikh-dominated religious organizations and Christian missionaries, as the former also see their hegemonic grip loosening over the lower caste in Panjab, and instead being replaced by the rising dominance of Christian priests and pastors.11 The “religious appropriation” of Panjabi idioms that are openly incorporated in Christian sermons has further irked the Sikh community (Bucar 2022). Even after conversion, Christian Sikhs do not relinquish their Dalit status to retain their lower caste to avail reservation benefits from the government, which are not available to converted Christians. While attending church services, Dalit Sikhs are allowed to keep their visual markers and emblems of Sikh identity including pagadi (turban), kara (bracelet), flowing beard, and covering of the head by women, along with their Sikh names. Sometimes referred to as “Pagadi-wale Christians” (Christians with [Sikh] turbans), they frequent church gatherings. As 46-year-old Monty Singh, who holds his lower caste SC certificate and a Sikh visage declares, “Even though I am Sikh on paper, I feel Christian at heart” (R. Kumar 2022). This blurs the distinction between Christian Sikhs and other Sikhs, which the latter see as a covert way of diluting their cultural and religious identity, while unscrupulously replacing it with a Christian one. Emerging from this conflicted terrain is the figure of the Crypto-Christian Sikh that straddles between two identities: A Dalit Sikh on paper and in visual form, but Christian in religion and practice; a liminal figure caught between the antagonism of Jat Sikhs and Christian missionaries that adds yet another layer of complexity to this unfolding war of narratives.12

Amidst growing religious polarization between the Akal Takht and Christian missionaries, an undercurrent of unease hangs in the air. This has taken shape in the form of attacks on Christian congregations, icons, and churches in Panjab.13 In 2022, on August 31 at 12:30 a.m., four masked men entered the Infant Jesus Catholic Church in Thakarpura village of the Patti Assembly constituency in Panjab’s Tarn Taran district (Figure 1). They held the guard, Jagtar Singh, at gunpoint and beheaded the pieta (meaning pity, compassion) statue of Jesus and Mary with an axe, shouting, “We are Khalistanis” (Khalistani are members of the “formerly violent political” separatist movement in India, primarily associated with Jat Sikhs (Rampal 2022; Juergensmeyer 2022, p. 38). The assailants also accused Christians of “‘creating a mess’ in Punjab” (Rampal 2022).14 Before departing, they set the car of the Catholic priest, Father Thomas Poochalil, ablaze and took the decapitated heads of Mary and Jesus with them (Figure 2).15 A special investigation team was formed to probe the matter. The incident sparked protests from the Christian community that threatened to call for a state-wide bandh (closure) if the preparators were not arrested for breaking their sacred icon (Rana 2022).

In this paper, I centralize multiple narratives that are being constructed around Christian icons in Panjab.16 Taking the example of Tarn Taran’s pieta, I interrogate the alleged case of forced conversions of lower caste Sikhs and the subsequent “atmospheres of violence” in Panjab.17 The decapitated pieta becomes a loaded space, a battleground of conflicting narratives, and a new site for a quest for religious and political assertion. I analyze the iconic materiality and vexed histories of the religious symbol through the following questions: Do Christian icons reside in the collective subconscious as political monuments of oppression that commemorate colonial power? Seen through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the one hand are ‘White icons’ and their churches viewed as vestiges of racial superiority, embedded in cultural imperialism that re-domesticate the Other? On the other hand, how is pieta’s mutilated body delicately counterpoised between the conflicted space of an upper caste Jat Sikh and Dalit Sikh’s identity? As a paradoxical figure invoking both reverence and revulsion perched at the cross-roads of Sikhi (Sikh principles of faith), how does pieta make visible the fissures in a deeply segregated caste-ridden society of Panjab, destabilized by what Spivak calls the “epistemic violence” of the newly formed identity of the Crypto-Christian Sikh, looming over this conflicted terrain? In what ways does the contested image of the Tarn Taran pieta become a stage to enact visual histories of iconicity, ‘idolatry,’ and eventually of what I term as “inverted iconoclasm”? In other words, how do Christian images signal liminal material presences that oscillate between their identity of sacred icons and hegemonic monuments of white supremacy? I argue that entangled in the politics of memory, Christian icons are an impregnated space of intersecting colonial histories of oppression and conversion entrenched in hierarchies of race, class, and caste.18

This study contributes to understanding the growing impact of Christianity in northern India, the war of narratives being enacted upon its icons, and its relationship to transnational iconoclasm to posit a bigger question: Is there a way to navigate through the dense matrix of colonialism, race, religion, caste, and violence to reclaim agency through Mignolo’s call for a “praxis of decolonial healing”?

To interrogate these questions, the paper is divided into three sections. In the first part, citing the work of other scholars, I trace a brief history of Mazhabi Sikhs and the specter of caste in Panjab in context of its changing dynamics within the backdrop of Christianity. With a clash of identities and power struggles, atmospheres of violence have emerged, triggering a complex interplay between colonial memory and contestation of physical, mental, religious, social, and political space.

In the second part, which forms the main body of the paper, I examine a conceptual (as opposed to historical) trajectory of Tarn Taran’s pieta and its symbolism by analyzing Christian icons in the West and their framing within imperial aspirations. Beginning from the Byzantine era, an unresolved tension between icons, ‘idolatry’, and iconoclasm emerged, becoming even more complicated when combined with the project of colonialism.19 Applying a visual studies lens, out of a plethora of paintings documenting iconoclasm, I examine works of two artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Tommaso Laureti and Peter Paul Rubens, that visually celebrate the narrative of destruction of ‘false’ pagan gods, their ‘idols’ (a pejorative term), and “monstrous” Hindu deities (Mitter 1992). Commissioned by the local pope and missionaries, in these works, the violence embedded in the act of iconoclasm is sanitized and serves as an impetus for “Christian Imperialism” of the world (Conroy-Krutz 2017).20 Christian missionaries worked in tandem with colonizers to relieve the “burden of the white man” by erasing native religions, and by bringing a “civilized culture” with its “White icons” to convert “savage” native populations (Kipling and Wise 1899).

Following this nexus between conversions and hegemonic White supremacy, I move my conceptual compass to follow the contemporary trajectory of iconoclasm upon Christian icons. After 2020, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children at former church-run residential schools, described as centers of “cultural genocide” of Native Americans due to forced conversions, my argument anchors to the global discourse of anti-racial and anti-colonial iconoclasm.21 These acts of iconoclasm have both been applauded and critiqued/condemned depending on the socio-religious and political moorings from which they are viewed from. Various incidents of desecration of the Christian icons of Virgin Mary and Jesus have been reported across US and Canada in churches in Toronto, Florida, Boston, Tennessee, California, and Missouri, among others. In California, protestors gathered and publicly removed icons of Saint Junipero Serra, a controversial priest who brutally tortured and enslaved Native Americans to Christianize them (Hurd et al. 2020). Similarly, protestors across the nation toppled Confederate statues, performatively endorsing their anti-slavery and anti-race stand. Scholars have noted that such controversies advocating for equality in a public space and fighting against “religious racism” are not a recent phenomenon but rather a reaction to “a reemergence of previous ideologies and patterns of racially motivated persecution that began during slavery and continued until the middle of the twentieth century” (Cerqueira and Boaz 2024; Boaz 2021, p. 2).22 How do these instances of iconoclasm rupture the façade of normalcy, bringing to the forefront simmering issues of race and slavery that resulted from the lethal combination of conversions and colonialization, long thought to be buried under a capitalist modernity and principles of ‘equality’ of a ‘democratic’ West?23

I read such global ruptures of racial and colonial iconoclasm to situate the decapitation of the Tarn Taran’s pieta as a counter-narrative, which I term as an inverted iconoclasm. Locating iconoclasm within the twin Panjabi concepts of beadbi (disrespect/sacrilege) and sodhi (discipline), I illustrate how Tarn Taran’s pieta narrates opposing and multivalent conceptualizations, both contradictory and overlapping in Christian, Dalit Sikh, and Jat Sikh voices: all these narratives converge on pieta and also radiate from it. To sieve through these multimodal genealogies constructed on Christian icons, I propose to see the Tarn Taran pieta as a polysemic image: a neocolonial figure of oppression and trauma packaged as a religious icon, a sacred image promising salvation, and a visual metaphor that lays bare volatile race and caste conflicts. These multiple trajectories reveal how the decapitated Tarn Taran’s pieta further demarcates and deepens the boundary between Self/Other, Colonial/Neocolonial, Christian/Sikh, Jat Sikh/Dalit Sikh, Center/Periphery, White/non-White, and so on.

In the third part, I turn to Walter Mignolo’s praxis of decoloniality as a way to steer away from above dichotomies and their theoretical paradigms. Instead, following a “pluriverse,” I explore a new discursive arena, an utopian order embedded in the concept of the 16th century Dalit Sikh Guru Ravidas’s idea of Begumpura (land without sorrows) (Mignolo 2017, 2021; Reiter 2018).

2. Mazhabi Sikhs and Christianity in Panjab

2.1. The Ambit of Caste

The modern word caste is based on the term casta that originated in the Iberian Peninsula (Pitt-Rivers 1971, p. 234). In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the “Doctrine of Discovery” that authorized Spain and Portugal to take over non-Christian lands, “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans” take their possessions and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery … and to convert them to his … use and profit” (R. J. Miller 2019, p. 36). However, “by dividing the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Pope also divided the application of the word casta,” which was until then a “normal way at that period to designate animal species” (Pitt-Rivers 1971, p. 234). Casta was applied “to the human realm to lineages or clans” to control newly acquired colonies after their conquest of Latin America (p. 234). A hierarchical casta system was devised in which peninsular White Spaniards (people from the Iberian Peninsula) were at the top, and at the bottom were positioned the dark-skinned enslaved Africans. As Spanish and Portuguese developed colonial empires, the casta system was used to denote notions of ‘purity of blood’, which “became a way of conceptualizing race as well as religion, class, and nation” (Tinsley 2022; Wiesner-Hanks 2004, p. 59). In her celebrated work, Purchasing Whiteness, Ann Twinam concurs that the racial undertones of the casta system ensured European superiority and control of Latin America, through gracias al sacar (“permission to take”) in which the Spanish state sold “certificates of white blood” to people “as a potential to acquire Whiteness as a provocative marker of the historic differences between Anglo and Latin American treatments of race” (Twinam 2015, p. 3). This doctrine of purity of blood, which was visually documented through “casta paintings” (Katzew 2005; Currie 2024)24 had its roots in the Christian notion of hereditary sin (Chenault 2022; Pitt-Rivers 1971, p. 252). Despite gaining independence the social hierarchy and the ingrained racial casta prejudice remained in place leaving those of indigenous and African descent needing documentation to prove their Whiteness and move ahead in the exploitative social order devised by the Spanish.

In context to India, the idea of casta was brought by the Portuguese. In Beyond Caste, Guha emphasizes how the concept of “purity of blood” was added to the “chaotic mix of social categories in southern Asia in the 16th century” (Pitt-Rivers 1971, p. 234; Guha 2013, p. 25). It fused the “European notions of ‘racial’ purity with Hindu notions of religious purity” creating “categories such as ‘half-caste’ which were meaningless within the Indian jāti-varṇa system” (Guha 2013, p. 20).

2.2. Varna, Jāti, and Social Discrimination

Mapped onto hierarchal Indian social order, the casta or caste system was devised to operate upon two indigenous and intricate concepts of varna and jāti (Beteille 1996; Marriott 2004; Vaid 2014). Both varna and jāti are “polysemic terms” and therefore there is an overlap between their meanings (Beteille 1996, p. 20). According to ancient text Rigveda, varna is derived from the Sanskrit word that means “color”, “choose”, or “classify” and is based on division of society on the basis of one’s qualities, considered by some as hierarchical, while for others it is a flexible system of classification based on one’s actions and bhakti (devotion) (Elder 1996; Vaid 2014; Gupta 2022, p. 624).25 Caste was projected on the Hindu social order that functioned on the division of society into four varnas and later became hierarchical with the Brahmins (priestly class) on the top and the Shudras (laborers) at the bottom. In addition, the traditional concept of varna is not confined to human society but pervades the entire universe as a system of social classification established by Hindu cosmology in which plants, animals, and “even lands or temples are classified into Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on” (Marriott 2004; Beteille after Bose 1996, p. 20).

The term jāti that originated from the Sanskrit root, “to be born,” encompasses another dimension of social order that is inherently heterogenous with numerous organic divisions and subdivisions, which unlike varna are “self-generated and self-reproducing” (Beteille 1996, p. 22). As diverse and malleable social units, jātis defy any cogent categorization and fixed system of hierarchy (Srinivas 2003; Samarendra 2022; Marriott 2004). Historically, these complex networks of social units, each containing numerous jātis, had fluid boundaries; however, caste became rigid with the arrival of the British who used it as a divisive tool of imperial control through a “cultural and intellectual colonization” to govern the newly colonized Indian population (Cohn 1996; Charsley 1996; Dirks 2001; Bayly 1999; Jodhka and Shah 2010; Jodhka 2012; Chakravorty 2019; Mooney 2013, p. 279). The British developed census in India and in 1901 Sir Herbert Risley led a classification of castes, but when the data showed perplexing flexibility, in order to organize the findings, he applied a racial theory to caste, thus obliterating the mobility patterns in the varna system (Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001; Charsley 1996; Samarendra 2022). Suppressing diversity and homogenizing multiple collectivities in order to impose some kind of order into the data, Risley inaugurated a singular category of the “untouchables” (Charsley 1996, p. 12). As compared to precolonial categories of varna and jāti in which the society was constituted based on Dharmastashtras (ancient Hindu texts), with sacred texts such as Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavad Purana emphasizing fluidity between different varnas (Gupta 2022); however, under the British nomenclature of the ‘caste system’ these divisions became codified, metamorphosing into highly stratified social categories (Novetzke 2007; Dirks 2001; Charsley 1996; Chakravorty 2019). Citing the works of Dirks and other scholars, Marriott concludes the following:

The ‘rigid caste system’ made up of a collection of such entities is not likely ever to have existed, although, as Ronald Inden (1990) and Nicholas Dirks (2001) point out, its prevalence has been asserted rhetorically by most of India’s published critics—Christian missionaries (Forrester 1980), colonial officials like James Mill (1817), and Indian reformers such as Jawaharlal Nehru (1946)—and elaborated in armchair theorizing by Max Weber (1958), Louis Dumont (1970), and others. The supposition of such a caste system guided the gathering of official information and influenced social policy debates throughout the final century of colonial rule. It continues to preoccupy many recent descriptions of Hindu society.

(Marriott 2004, p. 358)

Other scholars oppose this view, stating pre-modern scholarship documents “caste as both material oppression and varna ideology,” prevalent prior to the arrival of the British (Chakravarti 2019). They state that Jainism and Buddhism both rejected Brahminical claims to supremacy, and later the bhakti movement in the medieval period “grew from within the Hindu fold and was characterized by a strong anti-hierarchical and anti-ritualistic stand” (Srinivas 2003, p. 458). Bhakti saints endeavored to create an egalitarian society devoid of discrimination, which served as a precursor to modern “anti-caste consciousness” in India (Omvedt 2008; Novetzke 2007; Ram 2008; Chakravarti 2019; Sarkar 2019; Gopani 2023).26 The strong presence of such reformist movements signals the existence of transformative spaces in ancient and precolonial India through which novel articulations of self-critique, reflection, and alternate socio-religious ideologies could emerge. Post-independence after caste was abolished, the lower castes, now divided into Backward Class (BC), Scheduled Caste (SC), and so on, are given reservation quotas in higher educational institutions and government jobs but, as noted before, caste-based oppression continues in contemporary Indian society. It exists among Hindus, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims (Elder 1996, p. 22).

Within a popular perception and even in mainstream academia, caste is seen as a phenomenon attached only to the Indian and South Asian community, specifically within the Hindu society. Jodhka and Shah remind us that caste-based hierarchies and untouchability are part of a wider global phenomenon that runs across different societies in the world (Africa, Japan, Latin America, among others, including the diaspora) so “for region-specific understanding of caste, we need to disentangle it from Hinduism and look at caste from an historical perspective … In order to do that one needs to begin by separating the idea of ‘caste’ from Hinduism… This would also require that we look at caste not merely as a religious or ideological phenomenon, but also give equal importance to the historically evolved structures of social relations and the political economy of a given region that sustain and reproduce caste in everyday life” (Jodhka and Shah 2010; Judge 2015; Jayasooriya 2017; Singha 2022; Gazdar 2007; Tamari 1991; Gordon 2017; Amos 2019; Jodhka 2004, pp. 165, 67).27 In Panjab, the caste system operates on a different hierarchical social order between the landless and the landowning communities (Ram 2007; Puri 2009; R. Kaur 2022).28 As a deeply enmeshed system in Sikh society, to unfold its complex layers, let us look at a brief history of caste in Panjab.

2.3. Umbra of Caste in Sikh Society

Scholars have documented caste conflict between Jats and Dalits in Panjab. Recent media reports have exposed what Ronki Ram calls rupturing the “myth of casteless Sikh society,” bringing into focus the state of Panjab as a major battle ground of caste oppression and struggle (Ram 2007, p. 4066; 2008; Jodhka 2004; Judge 2015). Panjab is a Sikh-dominated state with the highest number of Dalit population at 31.94% making Panjab’s villages predominantly both Sikh and Dalit, where more than 80 percent of the land being owned by Jat Sikhs that constitute 20% of the population (Ram 2017b; Puri 2009, p. 31). However, Dalits in Panjab are not a homogenous category and are further subdivided into 39 castes, perpetuating a similarly graded caste hierarchy model in which, as Ram reminds us, “almost everyone locates herself/himself above someone else” (Ram 2017b, p. 55). Paradoxically, Panjab is also the only state in India where despite being home to the largest number of Dalits, they own only 0.72% of the cultivated land, which compels them to work as farm laborers for Jat Sikhs (Sehgal 2022). In other words, despite the fact of their numerological dominance the share of Dalits in agricultural land, trade, industry, financial sector, health, and religious establishments in the state is also almost negligible (N. Sharma 2012). The rising caste discrimination within the Sikh society has disillusioned Dalit Sikhs, who at one point of time had embraced Sikhism in the hope of escaping social exclusion imposed on them by the Hindu varna system.

Unlike the Hindu social order, the caste system in Sikh society works on different parameters as stated above. Principles of caste hierarchy persist in Panjab more in terms of landownership, social status, martial strength, and dominance in mainstream Sikh religion and state politics rather than on Brahminical ideology. In fact, the highest caste in Hindu varna system, the Brahmins, are marginalized and underprivileged in Panjab. Like the members of “menial castes,” they “are treated rather derogatorily and denounced derisively as a mangkhani jat (a community/caste simply living on alms)” (Jodhka 2004, p. 174; Ram 2017a, p. 57). Brahmins in Panjab wield no power in mainstream politics that is dominated by Jat Sikhs that were formerly a Shudra (lower/menial) caste in Panjab (Judge 2015, p. 63; Puri 2009, p. 36; Ram 2017a, p. 57). The power invested in the identity of Jat Sikhs can be traced back to the “British-engineered grandeur of Jat caste credentials” represented as a superior, ‘martial race’ (a racialized and gendered conception) and ‘noble peasants’, duly valorized by the colonizer in tandem with their ‘divide and rule’ policy, constructing social hierarchies and divisiveness in Panjab to maintain British control (Judge 2015; Mooney 2013, p. 282) Wrought with such complexities, caste in Sikh society dwells on “different sources of power (social, ethnological, economic, political, religious, and numerical)” and “the only caste in which all these multiple identities coalesce is that of jats in Punjab” (Ram 2007, p. 4069).

Most of the current Sikh castes, such as Mazhabis, Chamar, and the Jats as mentioned before are lower castes Hindus that “fall in the shudra (artisans) and the ati-shudra (untouchables) categories of the Hindu social order” (Ram 2007, p. 4068).29 However, after embracing the Sikh religion, landowning Jats assumed the status of upper caste and continue to follow discriminatory practices such as segregation and caste endogamy. The main target of their oppression, Mazhabi Sikhs, have been pushed to the margins and are forced to work on the land of Jat Sikhs for their livelihood, bound by a master–slave relationship (Ram 2007, 2017b). Due to their work as sanitation workers and siri, the everyday lives of Mazhabi Sikhs (such as that of Gurwinder Singh mentioned in the beginning of this paper) are marked by poverty, lack of education, landlessness, exploitation, and prejudice. They continue to face discrimination in Sikh gurdwaras as they are forced to sit separately near the entrance, stay at the end of the queue in langars (community kitchens), and are refused copies of the Sikh sacred book, Guru Granth Sahib [considered as the living body of the Guru] from gurdwaras (Sikh temples) to perform rites at home (Sehgal 2022; Bochkovskaya 2016, p. 79; Puri 2009, p. 55).30 Shunned by the society, they have separate gurudwaras from that of upper caste Jat Sikhs, their marriage venues and even their cremation grounds are segregated along caste lines (Puri 2009, p. 55). In addition, caste-based killings of Dalit Sikhs are regularly reported in the media, leaving the lower caste Sikhs to explore alternate religiosities.

2.4. Christianity in Panjab

Christianity entered Panjab in the nineteenth century and the first missionary that came to Panjab was the American Presbyterian Missionary, John Lowrie, who arrived in 1834 (Webster 2009). Gradually more missionaries joined including Catholics and Pentecostals that expanded their evangelistic mission and set up schools and hospitals leading to a mass conversion movement of the lower caste in colonial India (Webster 2009; Pervaiz and Mahmood 2018). Although mass conversion was not a new phenomenon in India, from 1880s to 1930s among the overall converts in Panjab’s Sialkot, ninety-five percent came from a lower Chuhra caste that sparked fear among missionaries that “allowing them in would sully the church’s reputation” (Pervaiz and Mahmood 2018; Jodhka after Juergensmeyer 2004, p. 177).31 This transformed the community into a larger but far more homogenous and backward community in Panjab. Panjabi Christians have been overwhelmingly Protestant, but since 1973 Catholic missionaries from Kerala and a growing Pentecostalism have made Panjabi Christianity more diverse (Webster 2009, p. 35). The last two decades have seen an upsurge in Christian missionaries with widespread and increasing en masse conversions (Sehgal 2022). According to the 2011 census, the Christian community had a population of 1.26 percent in Punjab but currently, Christian leaders claim their population to be nearly 15 percent, as converted Christians remain Dalits on paper to avail reservation benefits and do not officially reveal their Christian identity (Sehgal 2022; Kissu 2025). Several churches have mushroomed in the state in the past two decades, even on rooftops of homes in rural Panjab. With Catholic churches came their sacred images, the Christian icons. In the next section, I will analyze the origin of icons as sacred imagery in Christianity to unpeel some of its complex layers and to interrogate the meaning of icons within the Western world.

3. Icons, Iconoclasm, and “Inverted Iconoclasm”

3.1. Of ‘Idols’ and Icons in Christianity: A Dialectical Paradox

Within the Christian context, the meanings of icon (eikon), and ‘idol’ are convoluted and remain a contentious issue that began with the Byzantine era, resurfacing during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, and continues to be debated in religion, popular culture, and academia (within the paradigms of post-structuralism, phenomenology, semiotics, among others (Denny 2009; Leone 2016)). Although early Christian art did not shun figurative representation of the divine, most Christian authors condemned images of pagan deities by using a pejorative term, ‘idol’ to frame them as ‘false’ gods (Jensen 2022, p. 20). Notably, “as early as the second century CE, the apocryphal Acts of John reports that a portrait (eikon) of the apostle is worshiped in private with garlands and candles” (Elsner 2012, p. 371).Though pagan polytheists were ridiculed for worshiping ‘idols’ considered as lifeless objects crafted by human hands, Christian critics of ‘cult’ images clearly understood that most polytheists neither worshiped human-made artifacts nor confused them with divine beings but instead employed them as vessels for a visual encounter with the divine (Jensen 2022, pp. xviii, 27). While they continued to accuse polytheists of irrationally denigrating their version of divinity and such allegations became the basis of most early Christian critique of ‘idolatry’, the sacrality of Christian pictorial art was celebrated (Jensen 2022, p. 27). However, a dramatic shift toward material forms around the fourth century onwards, resulted in an upsurge of sacred Christian figural images called icons (Jensen 2022, p. xviii).

The word icon comes from the Greek word εἰκών, eikon, and can be translated as an image, picture, portrait, painting, or representation in three-dimensional objects such as statues (Denny 2009; Kenna 1985). In Byzantine art, icons took on the role of being the real presence of saints, “icons had eyes into which the petitioner could gaze, and a face that the petitioner could kiss in veneration and honour” (Chapman 2018; Brubaker 2013, p. 17). Images of Mary, Jesus, saints, holy objects, and illustrations of religious events came to be understood as icons (Bogdanović 2021).32 However, “the need to establish a clear distinction between the legitimate representation of the divine (the eikon/icon) and the illegitimate one (the eidolon/’idol’) became a crucial aspect in the relationship between art and religion in Byzantine culture” (Gasbarri 2023, p. 1).33 So, the line between Christianity’s disdain for ‘idols’ and the so-called pagan ‘idolatry’ on one side, and their veneration for icons as objects of worship (perceived as ‘idol’ worship by Protestants), obfuscates the distinction between icon and ‘idol.’

This ambiguous relationship created a dialectical paradox of juxtaposition and collision between ‘idols’ and icons in Christian thought. Iconoclastic attacks were justified as long as they helped in the triumph of ‘true’ Christian icons ameliorating figurative representations of the divine by alternate religions. The inherent violence of the Byzantine iconoclastic process came to be seen as the rightful means that cast a universal gaze of Christian vision and their articulation of sacred images, with icons as the only legitimate form of representation of the divine. Sanitized through staged performances of Christian narratives in paintings, icons thus contributed to the construction of “notions of identity, otherness, and ethnicity” (Gasbarri 2023, p. 1). “The Triumph of Christian Religion,” a fresco painting on the ceiling of the Hall of Constantine, housed in the Vatican Museums in Rome, illustrates this point. Executed by the Sicilian artist Tommaso Laureti who undertook the work (1582–85) under Pope Sixtus V, the painting is emblematic of Christianity’s intolerance for pagan religions and its gods. It depicts an interior of a church with a crucified icon of the Christ in the center and a dismembered ‘idol’ of a pagan god sprawled on the foreground (Figure 3). As its decapitated head rolls to one side, the painting visually chronicles the acute violence of the aftermath of the climactic moment of an iconoclastic assault, which continues to be celebrated in the title of the painting housed in the Vatican City, the pivotal center of power in Christianity. The Vatican Museums website elaborates: “In the central panel Laureti illustrated the Triumph of Christian religion that refers to the destruction of the pagan idols and their replacement with the image of Christ, ordered by Constantine throughout the empire.” Paradoxically, as scholars have argued, the fear and condemnation of pagan images goes hand in hand with the spiritual potency that Christians ascribe to them, and this “visual tale of iconoclasm not only bestows an agency to idols but also provides them with an iconic embodiment,” resurrecting them (R. Miller 2018; Jensen 2022; Leone 2016, pp. 31, 53). The act of destroying them, empowers them.

Under the dazzling veneer of color and form, these frescoes remain etched on the ceiling as thousands of visitors and worshippers flock to the Vatican Museums to admire the aesthetic beauty and pray to Christian icons. Sanctified through representations, they also narrate the history of stigmatization and erasure of other religions that do not conform to the monotheism of Christian ideals. Jan Assmann argues that religious violence is rooted in monotheism and “monolatry” (“a monotheism of cult, worship, and commitment”) as it “brought a new form of hatred into the world: hatred for pagans, heretics, idolaters and their temples, rites, and gods” (Assmann 2009, p. 16).34 As an ‘inferior and illegitimate’ ‘idol’ is replaced by a ‘superior and legitimate’ one, monolatry replaces ‘idolatry.’35 Leone explains that countless Christian controversies over images stem from this “semiotic paradox,” and thus “evoking, defining, and narrating idolatry is therefore a central task for all monolatries wishing to define themselves in relation to alternative” forms of the sacred (Leone 2016, p. 32).

After the diffusion of paganism, documenting the journey of Christian icons to colonial lands through violent attacks on ‘monstrous gods’ became a normative feature of Christian art and missionary objectives. Elucidating the origins of ‘idolatrous’ practices, “missionaries such as Jose de Acosta (1539–1600) and Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) documented their encounters with idol worship in New Spain and India,” demonizing their deities and worship practices (R. Miller 2018). Intriguingly, in the case of Nobili who went to Tamil Nadu in southern India for his evangelistic endeavors when the locals rejected his European missionary teachings, he devised a conversion strategy based on accommodatio, an ‘accommodation approach’ in Christian missions, that allows them to adopt local religious and cultural practices for proselytization by “translating Catholicism” (Ogilvie 1915; A. Henn 2014, 2015; A. E. Henn 2022; Županov 2015; Nardini 2017, pp. 225–26). Nobili put on a Hindu saffron robe, became a vegetarian, and translated his name as Tattuva Pōtakar (‘The Teacher of Reality’) claiming to be a “Roman Brahmin” under the guise of a “sannyāsa (a Brahmin ascetic or renouncer)”, as the latter were respected by all varna and jāti of the society and the “forgery held its place for one hundred and fifty years!” (Nardini 2017, p. 228; Ogilvie 1915, pp. 173–74). This strategy of a “Brahmin sannyāsa model” devised by Nobili aimed at the conversion of Brahmin elite and through them of the entire society (Nardini 2017, p. 228; Johnson 1987). He spoke in their local language and celebrated ‘heathens’’ “religious festivals and even adopted the social discrimination that the British called the caste-system in order to convert Brahmins to Roman Catholicism.”36 Nobili clearly stated his objective, “that they be converted from the worship of the devil to the service of the true God” (Johnson 1987, p. 17; emphasis mine). Let us look at another example of European art that illustrates this endeavor of Christian missionaries.

The painting, “The Miracle of St Xavier” (1617–18) by Baroque artist, Peter Paul Rubens depicts Xavier, who, along with Ignatius of Loyola, was a Jesuit that founded a new militant missionary order, the “Society of Jesus,” which was established in 1534 to combat Reformation (Freer 1922, p. 82). Jesuits harbored imperialist ambitions and declared their goal of ruling the world through conversions and setting up Roman Catholic churches while leveraging on art to showcase the production of miracles and public exorcism “as a means of propaganda” (Levy 2004; R. Miller 2023; De Waardt 2009, pp. 344–47). They commissioned artists to manufacture art that reinforced their worldview (Miller 2023; Freer 1922).37 The main objective of these paintings was the exaltation of Jesuits and Christian icons, while simultaneously denigrating and othering alternate religiosities, destroying their images of worship, and packaging their violent erasure as part of divine will.

In the Jesuit Church of Antwerp, Rubens drew a series of paintings highlighting iconoclasm of non-Christian images set within the backdrop of ancient Rome and the Byzantine. These fresco paintings functioned as an “effective rebuttal of Protestant criticisms of Catholic image veneration” and also as “important promotional tools in the saints’ canonization campaigns” that helped in consolidating the colonial project (R. Miller 2018, pp. 127, 133). They became a visual medium to spread the Jesuit ideology, to motivate others to join the fold, and to emulate Xavier, who, as a representative of the Portuguese empire, augmented Spanish colonial expansionist policies in the East (R. Miller 2018, 2023). Rubens’ iconoclastic series culminates in the altarpiece “The Miracle of St Xavier”, where ‘idolatrous practices have been relocated from pagan gods to sixteenth-century India” (R. Miller 2023; 2018, p. 128) (Figure 4).38 In the painting, Xavier is the dominant figure around whom multiple miracles are staged. As his fingers point upward to the heaven, floating amidst clouds angels holding the cross send beams of light toward the ‘idol’, destroying it, while the natives, shown as meek and helpless run helter-skelter under the wrath of Christianity (Figure 5). Through the painting, Rubens demonstrates “that followers of the True Faith had always been opposed to the incorrect use of sacred images and would continue to eradicate idols in the contemporary world … No longer is pagan idolatry a thing of the past; instead, it is a practice that must be combatted in the contemporary world, in the places where the Roman Catholic Church was actively converting new believers in its quest to become a universal global religion” (R. Miller 2018, pp. 128, 33; emphasis mine). As Levy postulates in the following:

The reception of Jesuit images as art is not just a modern art historical question. Around it the Jesuits (and others) drew the line between the European and non-European, good and bad, morally pure and impure, civilized and uncivilized.

(Levy 2014, p. 87)

Within this colonial worldview, by extension, non-Christian gods are also ‘morally impure and corrupt,’ rather ‘demonic’ and hence deserve to be represented (if at all) only as broken and decapitated. However, in Rubens’ vision the rendition of Hindu ‘idols’ is perplexingly animated. Similar to the earlier painting by Laureti, “The Triumph of Christian Religion” in which the pagan god’s ruthless dismemberment points to the power ascribed to ‘idols’ that ought to be annihilated; the iconoclasm of Hindu ‘idols’ by Xavier, a Christian missionary in Rubens’ painting also heightens the ‘idols’’ energy by imbuing them with a pulsating quality (Figure 3 and Figure 4). Undermining the lifelessness and inertia attributed to ‘idols,’ in Rubens’ version they express an array of emotions—dismay, distress, grief, and fear, grimacing and writhing in pain like animated entities framed with Christian ideas that stereotyped Indian gods as Satanic creatures fused with elements of Greek satyrs (R. Miller 2018).39

Miller elucidates that in the hagiography of Xavier, there are several instances of ‘idol’ destruction, and the above event is based on an episode that took place in the kingdom of Travancore in southern India (R. Miller 2018). Xavier went to India (Goa) for conducting mass conversions that helped strengthen the grip of the Portugal empire (R. Miller 2024). He has been attributed for destroying Hindu images, while nurturing a deep hatred for the ‘idolaters’ as expressed in his letters: “Following the baptisms, the new Christians return to their homes and come back with their wives and families to be in turn also prepared for baptism. After all have been baptized, I order that everywhere the temples of the false gods be pulled down and idols broken. I know not how to describe in words the joy I feel before the spectacle of pulling down and destroying the idols by the very people who formerly worshiped them” (Xavier 1543). Xavier continues to document his views about Hindu worship images: “Whenever I hear of any act of idolatrous worship, I go to the place with a large band of these [converted] children, who very soon load the devil with a greater amount of insult and abuse …[they] run at the idols, upset them, dash them down, break them to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about, and, in short, heap on them every possible outrage” (Xavier 1543).

Jesuits and colonial officials used icons and narratives of Xavier for “propagandizing a global vision of the Church” built on an “imaginary” Catholic global community such that two hundred years after his death, these paintings continue to sustain and build “cohesion by devotion to the saint and his visual representations” (R. Miller 2018, 2023).

3.2. Anti-Race and Anti-Slavery Iconoclasm in the United States

This globalizing mission of proselytization in Christianity reached magnanimous proportions when combined with colonization. In context of North America, native American tribes were converted en masse, many of them forcefully by missionaries. One such missionary enterprise was led by the Spanish priest, Junípero Serra of the Franciscan Catholic order, who arrived in California in 1769. “Serra was a colonizer” who furthered the expansionist policies of Spain and came to build frontier outposts of empire and church (Hackel 2013, p. xiii). He set up Catholic missions that resembled slavery and contributed to the abuse and death of countless indigenous tribes leading to a massive decline in their population (Hackel 2013; Gumbel 2015; Holson 2015; Oakes 2022).40 In spite of these atrocities, Serra is seen as a visionary for spreading the Christian faith. North California’s powerful and controversial Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco explains in the following:41 “He gave his life to defending the native people of our land—the actual historical record is beside the point” (K. J. Jones 2023; emphasis mine). Serra was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis, amidst strong protests by Native Americans. Serra’s depictions have been vandalized, especially after his elevation to sainthood that “reopened old wounds” (“Archbishop performs exorcism” 2020).

Five years after being bestowed with sainthood, in the wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and Native American anti-slavery protests, statues of Serra across California were toppled, with people in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles calling them as monuments to White supremacy (Figure 5). On 12 October 2020, on Columbus Day, known as Indigenous People’s Day, Serra’s icon in St. Raphael Catholic Church in the Bay Area was publicly painted red and toppled as a form of protest, “focusing on the rights and historical struggle of Black and Indigenous people led activists” (“Archbishop performs exorcism” 2020).

In Brand Park in Mission Hills in Los Angeles, Serra’s statue that depicted him with his arm around a Native American child became a powerful image of trauma for the indigenous people, reminding them of how their ancestors were forcibly taken to missions (Castro 2020; Mitchell 2019). Serra’s icons have been described as a continued reminder of the traumatic impact of colonization of the indigenous people that refer to his images as “monuments to racism and genocide” (Escobar 2020). According to the National Catholic Reporter, natives want to unfold “all sides” of the story: “not just for us, but for future generations.”42 After Serra’s canonization in 2015, the Brand Park Serra icon was defaced with the word “murderer” in red paint inscribed upon it by unknown preparators. In 2020, Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, the first people who inhabited the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, decided to protest by performing a different ritual of iconoclasm. Wanting to conduct a peaceful protest and not to forcibly remove the Christian icon, they “burned sage, sang songs, and gave speeches about the ‘genocide of native people perpetrated by the Catholic Church’,” chanting “Fuera, fuera, Junipero Serra” (“Get out—leave, Junipero Serra”) led by Aztec dancers (Castro 2020) (Figure 6).43 Interestingly, after the event, the protesters themselves removed the coverings they placed over the statue. “We were respectful to them even though they weren’t to us, and we gave them their privacy and space to pray,” said Caroline Ward-Holland, an elder member of the community (2020). The ritual of iconoclasm and its conscious ‘erasure’ becomes a powerful medium of protest. Without transgressing legal boundaries and physically destroying or permanently altering Serra’s physical form this ‘silent iconoclasm’ inscribes him in a native voice, reclaiming excruciating cries of their ancestors now writ large upon the Christian icon. In this case, the Serra statue in Brand Park becomes a palimpsest,44 marking an opening of space in Christian icons that can be coded, inscribed, and rewritten by multiple and opposing narratives in Catholic, Protestant, Native American, anti-slavery, and anti-race voices. In response to incidents of iconoclasm on Serra’s images, San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone called them “sacrilege” and “horrendous acts of blasphemy,”45 and decided to perform exorcism rituals. Some scholars argue that Catholic priests have used “exorcism and other sacramental rites as a means of showing that they possessed better contacts with Heaven than their opponents” (De Waardt 2009, p. 346; a similar reference was visually articulated in Rubens painting) (Figure 4). They conduct such ceremonies openly in public to obtain the best propagandist effect (De Waardt 2009). Cordileone performed an exorcism in Latin46 and sprinkled holy water on the bushes and concrete area where the statue had stood “to drive out evil and defend the image of Serra,” commanding “Be gone, Satan, inventor and master of all fallacy, enemy of the salvation of men. Place yourself before Jesus Christ” (emphasis mine).47 The belief that the Christian icon needed to be free from the ‘devil’ that had possessed it, and by acknowledging an embodied ‘presence’ (of the ‘devil’s evil’ spirit versus Serra’s image) further convolutes the definition of ‘idols’ and icons. For the Roman Catholic Church, the belief in the existence of Satan is an essential theological prerequisite for the implementation of expulsion practices (Bauer and Doole 2022). Unlike the ‘Satanic spirits’ that resided in the pagan idol and were decapitated in Laureti’s painting (Figure 3) and in the smashing of the Hindu ‘idol’ in Rubens’ version (Figure 4), in this case, the ‘demonic spirit’ had possessed the body of their own saint, pulsating in the icon of Serra itself. Here, statues of Serra do not function only as worship aids and icons of Christian faith, but also ones that have agency, becoming fertile grounds for evil spirits to attack and reside inside the icon, needing help from Christian priests to be released from them. Hence, one can conclude that within Catholic thought, Christian icons can function as sites in which narratives of “spiritual warfare” can be staged (Bauer and Doole 2022, pp. 7–8).48

If the Christian icon possesses agency reflective of the saint himself (framed as a sacred icon whose desecration is considered sacrilegious by Catholics), then how is it different from the worship of ‘idols’ by alternate religions that see the sacred image as a dwelling space in which divine energy can manifest?49 Within Christianity, Protestants, critics of figural representation of Christian icons, have over the centuries raised this point of blurring lines between icons and ‘idols’, made visible through their acts of iconoclasm. In our contemporary moment, with the BLM movement and anti-racial iconoclasm, attacks on icons of Mary and Jesus increased. In 2020, the statue of Virgin Mary was decapitated outside a Catholic church in Toronto while another one of Jesus Christ was beheaded at a church in Miami, Florida. In Boston, an image of Mary was set on fire and in Brooklyn it was sprayed in black paint with the word “IDOL,”50 while a 5-foot statue of Virgin Mary was decapitated at a parish in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Christian icons erected in the United States and around the world are invested with power inscribed by the Catholic Church onto their sacred images and likewise their critics, such as BLM anti-slavery, anti-racial advocates, and Native Americans, use iconoclasm to send a similar message to the Catholic Church, challenging their globalizing mission and universalizing power by attacking icons that they revere and hold sacred.

To add to this conundrum of iconoclastic controversy, in 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL), a research academy of the Vatican, sparked outrage after it posted a digitally manipulated image of Michelangelo’s iconic pietà on social media. It portrays a Black Jesus, lying in the arms of a White Mother Mary, “ostensibly in support of the ‘Marxist Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement’” with the caption posted on social media: “‘An image that is worth a speech’” (Duke 2020) (Figure 7). Describing it as disturbing, blasphemous, and a ‘woke-led’ attack on Christian icons that “profanes the Pieta,” it was seen to “divide Catholics on race and politics” by some Roman Catholics (“Black Jesus version” 2020).51 Conservative author, Janice Fiamengo, accused PAL of achieving the very opposite of what it had intended by calling this version of pieta “an act of exterminationist othering” by “presenting Mary as a white woman holding her black son, PAL could well be seen as perpetuating white supremacist norms showing that white came before black, that black is not possible without white, and that white remains the great Mother of us all” (emphasis mine, Duke 2020). Instead of decentering Whiteness, the PAL recenters it in a new form of pieta that gives the impression of inclusivity but is actually celebrating Whiteness, while erasing/subjugating alternate racial identities and religions. The ethos of “white remains the great Mother of us all” resonates with Du Bois’s characterization of what he called “the new religion of whiteness”—a concept based on the belief that Whiteness is a marker of superiority sanctioned by God (Myers 2022, p. 85). In The Gratifications of Whiteness, Ella Myers points out that for Du Bois, Whiteness does not just inscribe non-Whites as inferior, but it is a vantage point weaponized by colonizing White nations “that regards nonwhite persons, their lands, and their resources as properly belonging to whites, available for use and disposal” implying that their imperialist projects are part of divine will, authorized by God (Myers 2022, p. 98; emphasis original). Borrowing from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the “white gaze” that reverberates over the colonial landscape is cast as a universal web echoing Du Bois’s assertion, “whiteness is ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen!” (Myers 2022, p. 97).52 This gaze is amplified when Whiteness originates in specific, identifiable set of sacred material practices encoded in Christian icons that creates and transmits a visual field that penetrates and permeates the colonial land and its natives.

3.3. Tarn Taran Pieta: Inverted Iconoclasm and the Return of the Real

Whiteness thus is a tangible part of iconography of Christian icons that are transported to ‘racially inferior’ Brown and Black colonial landscapes (Figure 1 and Figure 8, Figure 9 and Figure 10). During colonial rule, natives were politically and economically controlled by the West, but by praying to a ‘White Jesus’ and his ‘White mother,’ the colonized become emotionally and spiritually invested, perpetuating the model of colonizer’s religion for generations, even after the colonizer has lost a direct political hegemonic hold over their land and resources. The construction of a White Jesus, who as many scholars now agree was historically a ‘brown-skinned’ “Middle Eastern Jewish or Arab man,” and not White (Blake 2024). Depicted as a blonde-haired and blue-eyed figure in popular images and its global perpetuation through Christian icons according to Anthea Butler, Professor of Religious and Africana Studies at University of Pennsylvania, is highly problematic: “Every time you see white Jesus, you see white supremacy” (E. Miller 2020). She further contends, “If Jesus is white and God is white, then authority is white” (E. Miller 2020). In White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity author Robert Jones, a Christian who was raised Southern Baptist argues how White Christians perpetuate racism (R. P. Jones 2020). He “exposes the cancer of white American Christianity” concluding that “Christianity is the originator, architect, and sustainer of white supremacy in America” (O’Reggio 2022, p. 151).53 Likewise, Betty Clermont, a Catholic and former employee of the Archdiocese of Atlanta brings attention to “neo-Catholics” and how the powerful hierarchal Church is implicated in the concept of a White Christian Nationalism in mainstream American politics (Clermont 2009). This idea gains traction as the highest seat of Christian power for centuries that remains in the West, in the Vatican is controlled by the Pope. Out of the 267 popes that have been appointed till date (barring the possibility of three Black African popes around 2–5th C.E.,) all have been White males (Moore 2023), including the current Pope Leo XIV. As neocolonialists have argued, the end of colonial structures does not signify the end of colonial attitudes since the “matrix of whiteness” remains intact (Rieger 2021, p. 538; Hogue 2022, p. 83). Thus, with colonization and through rapid “church planting” (Rieger 2021, p. 537), churches may become sites that produce Whiteness as the insidious marker of religious and racial hierarchies, mirroring it in the enduring efficacy of Christian icons.54

The innate Whiteness of Jesus and Mary also radiates in the Tarn Taran pieta. Extending to both the figure of Mary and Christ, the underlying supremacy of Whiteness is accentuated in the grandiose looking church they inhabit (Figure 1). As more and more people in Panjab convert and pray to Christian icons, the pieta in its sparkling Whiteness, atop the staircase in the church of Tarn Taran, the tallest building in dusty lanes of Thakarpura village, is seen to mock the postcolonial subject with the advent of neocolonial framings; it stokes the collective subconscious resurrecting latent fears of colonial expansionism and erasure of indigenous political and religious identities (Figure 9 and Figure 10). The Virgin Mary holding her dead son, Jesus who according to Christians gave his life for sins of people across the globe, is powerful in producing and normalizing “’White affects’ as universal, concrete and true,” reinforcing the project of colonial hegemony and the ‘burden of the white man,’ through “emotionalities of whiteness” that sustain and reproduce “racialization and the racist status quo in society” (Zembylas 2025).55 Within this context, the breaking of the icon can be read as a violent inscription of a counter-narrative, propelled by the memory of colonial oppression and an underlying anti-White sentiment, and as an inverted iconoclasm, recuperating in the Lacanian return of the real. To unpack this caveat, we need to revisit the most violent incident in Panjab during the colonial rule.

Amritsar in Panjab became the epicenter of one of the worst massacres by the British—the Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy. On 13 April 1919, without warning, the British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened indiscriminate firing, killing hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered at a park for a peaceful protest and to celebrate the spring festival of Baisakhi. It was reported that 1650 rounds of ammunition were fired within ten minutes, in which four hundred to possibly fifteen hundred people were killed and 1200 injured in the stampede that followed, converting it into a burial site (Rana 2021). As bodies began falling on top of each other, people scrambled to flee from the only narrow entrance to the park. Some jumped in a nearby well to escape the bloodbath, while a barrage of bullets that missed them pierced the surrounding walls, permanently marking them with their terrifying screams. The incident shook the collective conscience of India and the world (Mani 2018, p. 133). While different reasons have been proposed that led to the shooting of innocent people, primary among them was the passing of the Rowlatt Act (Condos 2017, p. 8). This act allowed for a draconian expansion of state laws further legalizing colonial violence to maintain British control, resulting in retaliatory protests in Panjab that lead to attacks on White residents including on a Christian missionary (p. 8). For our discussion, it is pertinent to investigate the connection between the Christian missionary and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

Due to oppressive British policies, there was unrest in Panjab and the locals were venting their anger on British residents living in Amritsar. Marcella Sherwood, a Church of England missionary became an unfortunate target of the wrath of a mob that attacked her (Lal 1993). Although she was saved, the incident provoked Dyer and amidst strong voices for independence he decided to teach them a lesson. Two days later the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was orchestrated. Even after the tragedy, which earned him the title of “Butcher of Amritsar,” a week later Dyer declared the street where Sherwood was assaulted as “holy ground” issuing “crawling orders” by which local people were flogged and made to go down “on all fours” in the Brigadier-General’s words, on their stomach “like reptiles” (Lal 1993). This also included residents who had tried to help the missionary (Collett 2005). Lal describes Dyer’s conception of the street on which Miss Sherwood was attacked as follows:

‘We look upon women as sacred or ought to’, he [Dyer] explained, and since the sacred had been rendered profane, the act of desecration would have to be undone. The profane would have to be retransformed into the sacred: ‘I also wanted to keep the street what I call sacred. Therefore I did not want anybody to pass through it.’… Imagining Miss Sherwood as a Virgin of Mary or a Florence Nightingale, Dyer erected a monument to her chastity.

(Lal 1993; emphasis mine)

By consecrating a sacred area for Miss Sherwood akin to that of Virgin Mary’s icons, Lal suggests that Dyer reinforces that within colonial lands, native spaces were racially marked and subservient to both political and sacral White spaces. For Dyer, this White, gendered and sanctified space of the Christian missionary that had been desecrated needed to be purified by creating a savage colonial spectacle of power: Profane colonial bodies needed to go on their all fours like they would while visiting a holy shrine to pay obeisance to the invisible yet iconic image of Miss Sherwood. This mandatory ritual of the “crawling lane”, a ceremonial display of brutal British power was ‘festooned’ with a flogging post for anyone that disobeyed the order.56 Through this act, as Lal observes, Dyer aimed to retransform and reinstate the sacrality of the iconic White space, which had been marred by brown bodies with their acquired temporary agency (even if misplaced), and had thus been taught a lesson. The hierarchy needed to be reset and reinforced, through this monument of chastity in which the missionary as a Christian icon was centralized and used to legitimize, sustain, and even justify political oppression, carnage, and dehumanization. Gandhi described it as a site of a national humiliation and a great wound on Indian psyche (Lal 1993). However, Dyer was welcomed in Britain as a “conquering hero” honored with the title of “The Man who saved India,” while Miss Sherwood defended Dyer for his actions, describing him as the “’savior’ of Punjab” (Mani 2018, pp. 135, 42). When images of Mary, or pieta, are placed in churches of Panjab, scarred with colonial trauma of the “master-signifier of whiteness” embedded in “the regime of visibility”, the memory of the land colors them in multiple hues (Hook 2020; Seshadri-Crooks 2000, p. 2).

The Jallianwala Bagh memorial was established in 1951 and serves as a poignant reminder of this civilizational mutilation inflicted by the British on Panjab’s psyche. As visitors walk through the memorial every day, the wall with punctured bullet shots stands as a somber reminder of the carnage and the collective trauma faced by the nation, which reverberates in the subconscious of the people. Karmia Lazali in Colonial Trauma reminds us that the psycho-social effects of colonial domination leave its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves (Lazali 2021). The Tarn Taran pieta stands barely 90 km (56 miles) away from Amritsar. It is less than a two-hour car ride with numerous new churches dotted through the landscape, their spires penetrating the horizon as the Christian cross gleams through the land and its blood-soaked colonial history.

3.4. Tarn Taran Pieta: An Avatar of Lacanian Return of the Real

Within this context, the Tarn Taran pieta functions as a powerful neocolonial signifier in a postcolonial state, representing as Fiamengo states in the context of Black Jesus (Figure 7), “white remains the great Mother of us all,” subsuming native religions under its cascading mantle, altering Panjab’s socio-religious fabric. The iconoclasm in the decapitation of pieta stems from centuries of colonial repression, metamorphosing into the return of the real. To explore this dimension, it is useful to apply the Lacanian model of the real to our analysis:

The real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic—what cannot be symbolized—what loses it’s ‘reality’ once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language.

(Loos 2002)

According to Derek Hook, Lacan describes the real as the non-representational pre-mirror stage that escapes language, materiality, and form, one that “eludes both symbolization and the domestication of the imaginary” (Hook 2020). Lacan propounds that the mirror stage is a period in children’s lives, between six to eighteen months, when they encounter the image in a mirror as theirs, drawing a distinction between the Self (the child’s own body) and Other (persons and objects of the world) (Mambrol 2016). Before this, the infant is from birth in the real stage, defined by a symbiotic relationship with the mother. With the mirror stage, the infant identifies with their mirror image and attains the first realization of bodily autonomy that appears whole even when the infant experiences a fragmented self, as they have not yet mastered the upright posture and full motor control over their body. This causes a radical transformation that despite the fragmentation, their mirrior image gives an appearance of a unified form, which becomes the basis of a coherent subjectivity (albeit an alienated one, seeing themself as separate from their mother). Through the mirror stage the infant imagines that they achieve mastery over their own body, which stands in contrast with the feelings of fragmentation but in a place outside of themself.57 From the Imaginary/pre-linguistic stage (where the child does not recognize the demarcation between themself and the objects in the world) the child transitions into the, Symbolic “in the world of predefined social roles and gender differences, the world of subjects and objects, the world of language” (Mambrol 2016). This subjectivity and its appearance of unity of the self is what imparts their image with a sense of agency and subjecthood. Thus begins the lifelong process of identifying the Self in relation to the Other—man/woman, Black/White, and so on (2016).

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon reformulates Lacan’s mirror stage and effectively relocates it within racism to bring attention to the denial of subjecthood for the Black. He demonstrates that colonial embodiment pervades the binary of Self and Other, leaving the Black subject in a “zone of non-being” suspended as a “pseudo-subject” (Drabinski 2019; Hook 2020).58 The Black ‘identity’ created by the White continues to project the latter’s desires through it. Fanon further builds his point of the impossibility of the Black subject, because of what he terms as the epidermal character of race, to postulate that “the black man wants to be white … However painful it may be … I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” (Fanon [1967] 1986, pp. 11–12; emphasis mine).

Thus, “gendered notions of selfhood, power, and embodiment are structured from the inside” of the paradigm of Self and Other “by the colonial practice of racism,” in which the Black subject continuously remodels itself through the mediated gaze of the White (Drabinski 2019, emphasis original). This White gaze fixes Blackness, marking it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing Blackness into itself, such that Fanon declares the following: that Black people are locked in Blackness and White people are locked in Whiteness (2019). Thus, Black Skin/White Masks reflects the “miserable schizophrenia of the colonised’s identity” and accounts for the “omnipresence and inescapability of racial (and of course racist) consciousness in the colony” (Loomba 2005, p. 124; Hook 2020). The lack of subject formation in respect of how the “colonial subjects are positioned as ‘non-subjects’” relative to the master-signifier of Whiteness thus leads to lack of agency in the Other, resulting in the repression of the real (Hook 2020). This repression is further entrenched in the postcolonial subject resulting from a failure to acknowledge and consider the heritage of the colonial grip of its psyche, which springs in our lived reality as the return of the real. Rieger explains in the following:

In Jacques Lacan’s words, what has been repressed from the symbolic order—from the realm of language and open discourse, from the stories that we tell about ourselves—returns in the real. In other words, when we repress our colonial and neocolonial histories, they will come back to haunt us all the more.

(Rieger 2021, p. 532)

Movements such as Black Lives Matter too have shown that something continues to speak in the place where it has been repressed/oppressed (Lau 2021, p. 278). Laclau examines how the real bursts through the clutches of repressive regimes, not as a specifiable object but as something that only exists and shows itself through its “disruptive effects within the Symbolic” (Cates et al., 2018, Laclau 2006, p. 658). The decapitated Tarn Taran pieta exemplifies this rupture, in which the real of colonial trauma of the past ‘shows itself’ in the present threat of neocolonial legacy embodied in the Christian icon, splitting apart and tearing through to make its way in the Symbolic, our world of lived reality. The lack of healing to deal with the trauma of colonialism, especially the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the crawling lane, and the subsequent partition of the country (1947) (specifically of Panjab) due to British policy of ‘divide and rule’ has stayed with the postcolonial subject.

Unlike in some other countries, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has not been set up in post-independent India to adequately address colonial atrocities and begin the process of collective healing of the nation, thus suffering has carried forward by intergenerational postcolonial bodies. Studies on intergenerational postcolonial trauma show how deeply entrenched it is in the psyche and remains in the collective memory of the subconscious of the postcolonial subject (Ward 2013; Mitchell 2019; Masson and Smith 2020; Thambinathan et al. 2023; Sioh 2024).59 In “Colonisation as Collective Trauma,” Masson and Smith remind us of the following:

It is argued that colonialism ended when European powers retreated from their geographical colonial territories and handed back political power. However, it is an error to confine the colonial project to specific geographical areas or historical eras or even deny its ongoing operation… Beyond the decimation of populations and expropriation of land and resources, colonialism also entrenched Eurocentrism and Western knowledges through denigration, subjugation, …. Colonial violence, dehumanisation, alienation, and loss of meaning arising from the systemic violence of the suppression of language, culture, and dignity become internalised through a process described as the colonisation of the mind… In this way, racism and sociopolitical inequalities of the oppressive colonial environment are ‘at the bottom of such intra-psychic difficulties and psychological neuroses’… It is therefore imperative that colonialism is understood to produce a complex set of psycho-social dynamics both at individual, collective, and intergenerational levels.

(Masson and Smith 2020, pp. 14–15, emphasis mine)

At the root of colonialism and the collective trauma it perpetuated as “a racist exploitative project was a philosophy which claimed that ‘Christianity = civilisation, paganism =’ savagery” (2020, p. 15), visually echoing with propagandistic paintings of Laureti and Rubens commissioned by missionaries as discussed earlier (Figure 3 and Figure 4). The missionaries in Panjab do not acknowledge the historical reality of the trauma of British oppression even though it is well known that Christianity worked in tandem with colonial powers in suppressing indigenous cultures by imposing Western practices. In 1913, the German Roman Catholic missiologist, J. Schmidlin, summed up the role of missionaries: “to missionize is to colonize and to colonize is to missionize” (Quoted by Rieger after Bosch, 2021, p. 531). Christian religion in Panjab is marked by a stark denial and de-linking from its past colonial history of oppression in India.60 This erasure of the identity of colonized and its continuation in the form of denouncing the subjecthood of the postcolonial subject causes repression that pulsates as collective trauma in the psyche of Panjab.

Viewed from this perspective, the Tarn Taran pieta becomes a neocolonial signifier, a material veiled symbol of Western religion and its Eurocentric hegemonic power, looming as a threat to existing faiths and religious identities. As noted earlier, the recent massive Christian conversions have been met with a backlash from sections of the Sikh society echoing Akal Takht’s stance of denouncing “propaganda” of “fake pastors” that according to them have conducted acts of sacrilege toward the Sikh religion. Within the Sikh idea of beadbi (disrespect/sacrilege) the dishonoring of their religious ideas, book, and gurus need to be followed by calls to sodhi (punishment for sacrilege), which has taken shape as violent acts and means of delivering instant ‘justice’ beyond legal parameters, in the form of physical beatings in gurudwaras or even mob lynching and shooting (Sethi 2023, 2024).61 In such a scenario, the breaking of the heads of Mary and Jesus with an axe does not only become a visual signifier of sodhi for conducting beadbi (‘usurpment’ of Panjab’s land and Sikh identity by a White icon and its followers) but in essence “The rejection of a white deity [pieta] is not only a physical rejection but also an ontological one, serving both historical and existential realities of the oppressed … because of whiteness being a representation of the deity. The rejection of whiteness as divinity is not a rejection of white personhood but a rejection of the language of oppression” (Mdingi 2022, p. 588; emphasis mine) (Figure 8).

Beadbi can also be seen to function in another way. Sikh gurus were upper caste Hindu Khatries (Kshatriya) but sought to establish an egalitarian society and nirguna (symbolic) form of worship (Puri 2009, p. 35). After their 10th guru, Guru Gobind Singh who although revered Hindu Goddess, Durga as a symbol of feminine power and wrote compositions (Chandi Charitra) in her honor, according to scholars deprecated ‘idolatry’ and declared that he would be the last one in a human form and henceforth the Sikh holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, should be seen as the body of a living guru (Kaur Singh 1990, p. 245; Puri 2009, p. 35). The current mainstream Sikh religion does not practice ‘idol’ worship, what they term as Butt-puja/Butt parasti or worshiping the Guru/God in any three-dimensional figurative form. Instead, in their gurudwaras, worship is centered around their holy book.62 Though Sikh gurus fought the Islamic rulers for their hostility toward religious intolerance, human dignity, and freedom of Hindus to practice their religion centered on image worship of deities (murti puja), they themselves have stayed away from worship of images in three-dimensional forms. Nevertheless, within the Sikh religion, the image and ritual have become a crucial site of conflict related to identity, caste, and iconoclasm, especially “contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus” (Puri 2009, p. 56; Duggal 2022, p. 97). Thus, the iconoclasm of Tarn Taran pieta encompasses the idea of inversion of colonial oppression and rejection of imposition of Western religious epistemes thrust upon them (going back to the earlier quote by Khalistanies after they decapitated the icon, blaming Christians for “creating a mess”). Paradoxically, and most likely unintentionally, this act also marks Catholic icons as “Butt”/statue/’idol’ that does not represent the true reality of the Sikh idea of divinity (in their guru’s forms and the ultimate divine, the Akal Purakh (Timeless Being), which are inconceivable in three-dimensional figural form) (Kaur Singh 1990, p. 265).

The same ideology that allowed Christian missionaries to denounce and break Hindu ‘idols’ in European paintings and in Hindu temples in India along with attacks on practices of murti puja in the colonial period (Xavier 1543), haunts Christian icons today as they do not fit in the Sikh ethos of divinity, and hence from an ideological perspective too, they can be seen as targets of Sikh iconoclasm. The violence of colonialism and the tacit role of Christian missionaries in its perpetuation, circles back onto Christian icons, through this act of inverted iconoclasm. Here, it is important to remember that the question is not to locate the identity of the iconoclasts of pieta (that is yet to be established), whether they were regular villagers taking the shroud of Khalistanies to make their point about conversions, or actual Khalistanies, or for that matter, anyone else that wanted to make a visual statement of iconoclasm. What is important for our discussion is how cultural signification and resignification of the Tarn Taran pieta, makes the Christian icon a site available for multiple and opposing conceptions. As a return of the real, the iconoclastic image of pieta expands this terrain of inhabiting multiple narratives, making itself available for alternate visual writings.

3.5. Pieta as a Figure of Salvation: Epistemic Violence and the Crypto-Christian Sikh

Unraveling the Tarn Taran pieta from a different perspective, of Panjabi Christians, specifically the Mazhabi Sikhs, brings forth a different narrative in which Christian icons function as images of reverence, deliverance, and salvation. The breaking of Tarn Taran pieta is seen as an assault on Christian identity. I will explore this dimension by building upon my ethnographic work in Panjab.

The sacrality built around Christian icons heavily borrows from cultural and religious idioms of Panjab. In Christian sermons and events, Panjabi music, folk dances, and cultural practices are reinserted. Many terms used in churches and Christian congregations, such as Ardas (prayer), Langaar (community eating), Param Prasad (special offering). Parmeshwar (God), are directly appropriated from Sikh and Hindu religions, while other religio-cultural markers take shape in hybrid names, such as Christmas Shobha Yatra, Christian Jagraata (all-night congregation for Hindu Goddess, Durga), Christmas Tappe, Christian Bhangra, chanting Yeshu Di Balle Balle, and so on (Kissu 2025). Reframed within Sikh religious terminology, Jesus is revered as Satguru Jesus and Waheguru Jesus, while churches are referred to as “Yeshu da Mandir” (Christ’s Mandir) (mandir refers to Hindu Temple)) and “Yeshu da Gurudwara” (Christ’s Gurudwara (Sikh Temple)) (Khanna and Singh 2024).63 On the one side, these “religious appropriations” are seen to instigate and provoke sections of the Panjabi society that see these acquisitions (resonating with Nobili’s idea of “accommodation approach” discussed earlier) as a means, according to Global Sikh Council, “to deceive the convert Sikhs into believing they were merely following Christianity, an off shoot of Sikhism (“A letter to” 2021).”64 On the other, such hybrid encounters of Panjab Christianity can be seen through the lens of syncretism, which make the local converts, especially the Mazhabi Sikhs, comfortable in their newly found Christian identity, thus “making Jesus relatable” (Kissu 2025). These borrowings help missionaries attract potential converts by presenting the church as a space of continuation of Panjab’s cultural practices inculcating a sense of familiarity seamlessly weaving local idioms with a Western religion and its White icons. The setting up of schools near churches is another way the missionaries make inroads into the societal structure of Panjab.

In the case of Tarn Taran, my interactions with Father John and with the villagers of Thakarpura revealed that the villagers seemed comfortable with the presence of the Infant Jesus Church in their village (established in 2011). The missionaries also set up an adjoining school next to the church that has helped in the upliftment of the underprivileged (interview with the author 2023). Father John explained, “For a child to get admission in a Khalsa school (religious school of Sikhs), they first check for visible marks of Sikh identity such as unshorn hair, kara, etc., before considering them for enrollment. Here, in our school, we welcome children from all religions without such preconditions and they can continue to carry markers of their respective faith” (referring to Sikh children in the school who keep long hair, kara, etc.).65 He added, “We even provide education to children whose parents cannot afford it.” In my conversation with the villagers that included Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, they confirmed that the presence of the school had improved education in Thakarpura and the knowledge of English imparted by the convent (Catholic) school helped in upward mobility in the society as their children were offered better paying jobs in the city. Rieger frames missionary endeavors, such as the setting up of educational institutions within Neocolonialism, stating that “Those in power shape the lives of those without power” and observing that “Western missionaries’ influence lingers in the colonies’ educational systems where Western and/or Christian values (e.g., definition of happiness), manners (e.g., western style dress code), subjects (e.g., English), and disciplines (e.g., Western medicine) serve as proof of civilization that enable upward mobility in the society” (Kang 2016). This is evident in how Christianity is practiced every day in convent schools by imposition of English language, engendering of Western mannerisms, singing of Catholic hymns, celebrating Christmas, etc. (Nkomazana and Setume 2016). When I interacted with the village children, the nuns constantly reminded them of wishing teachers “Good Afternoon” as they were leaving the school premises. The greeting comes across as an innocuous common gesture of courtesy, but if seen within Rieger’s view, it is a way of influencing local language and culture through assimilation into Western norms, especially since children are being trained to use ‘superior’ Western codes of conduct, instead of the local greeting of Sat Sri Akal/ Namaste, leading to what Reiger calls as “cultural genocide” (Rieger 2004, p. 209; Dotson 2011). From 1800s onwards, when missionaries arrived in Panjab, they set up schools even in places where there were already government schools with compulsory Bible classes and Christian worship but in early 20th century, they placed less emphasis upon evangelism and more upon character building based on Christian ideals (Webster 2009, pp. 43–44). As Jeffrey Cox, in his study of Protestant missionaries in colonial Punjab, points out, “Alongside the gospel of the spoken word, and the gospel of the printed word, was the gospel of institutional presence” (quoted by Webster 2009, p. 43; emphasis mine).66

Regarding the incident of breaking of pieta, almost all the villagers that I spoke to (around thirty) expressed dismay saying that it had marred the image of their village. Wandering through the lanes of Thakarpura, I met Lakhpal, a 73-year-old Mazhabi Sikh and a retired army veteran. He sat next to the 25-year-old, Dalit Hindu, Sandeep, in his small shop, decorated with posters of Hindu deities, Guru Nanak, and Ambedkar. While sipping tea, Lakhpal remarked that “asi ethee sab pyaar-prem naal rehndae haan, murti todd ke enhanae saadae pind dee izzat kharab kar detee” (“We all live here in peace and harmony, by breaking the statue [pieta], they [unknown preparators] have spoilt the izzat (honor) of our village”) (Interview with the author July 2023). Similar views were expressed by other villagers. Satveer Singh, son of the village sarpanch (leader) agreed, “There are around 2500 people in our village, out of which around 300 follow Christianity. All of us live here peacefully,” promptly adding, “We respect Christians and they respect us too. We do not have any problem with them. My own grandchildren study in the Christian school” (Sandeep Singh 2022). Likewise, Amar Singh, Gurdwara Committee member in Thakarpura echoed a similar sentiment, “Sikhs and Christians live peacefully in our village. The majority of our villagers are Sikhs and there are a few Christians. Most Christians were Mazhabi (Dalit) Sikhs (before they converted),” he said (Sandeep Singh 2022). Although when questioned that if there is equality in the village, why do separate gurudwaras exist for Sikhs belonging to different castes of Mazhabi and Jat Sikh, the same villagers became evasive. Many Sikhs (both Jat and Mazhabi) and Hindus expressed solidarity with Christians but either refused to comment or remained noncommittal when questioned if they would offer consent in case one of their own family members chose to convert. With widespread media coverage of the event by national and international media, villagers were tight-lipped on the topic of conversion. Interestingly, irrespective of their religious identity, their primary concern remained the reputation of their village, reiterating that they respect all religions and live in peace and harmony. To their point, the village has a small Hindu temple, gurudwaras (two for Jat Sikhs and one for Mazhabi Sikhs), Muslim dargah, and, of course, the church, the latter being the most imposing structure.

To understand how the pieta and the church functions in the everyday lives of the recently converted Mazhabi Sikhs and also intergenerational Christians that frequent the church, I decided to join the prayer service.67 While Father John conducted the ceremony in chaste Panjabi, I saw women covering their heads (like in Hindu and Sikh temples) during worship practices while some Sikhs attended wearing their pagadi (turban). If one replaced the images of Mary and Christ inside the church with the Sikh holy book and added Gurbani (Sikh devotional music), the space would resonate with that of a local Jat Sikh gurudwara. Gurnam Kaur (name changed), a recently converted Mazhabi Sikh, shared her experience. “I come here every day” she said, flashing a smile. After her husband, the only earning member of the family, passed away two years back, she started coming to the church regularly. The church arranged for her children to join the school for free and also provided school supplies. “Now both of my children are getting English medium convent education,” she gushed with pride. Her smile seemed to be a testament of her happiness, which she was able to manage even while sharing her struggle with disability, poverty, and widowhood.

Likewise, 60-year-old Sukhwant Kaur, a resident of Dujowal village in Amritsar district says she has no one but Jesus (Misra 2021). Living in abject poverty in her one-room house made of bricks, “with no stove to cook on, and no family to cook for. The only adornment in her house are posters of Jesus” (Misra 2021). Considering the extreme neglect of impoverished Mazhabi Sikhs, the presence of missionaries and Christian icons, even if they may be powered with colonial vestiges, offers hope, emotional succor, and economic support leading to positive changes in their life. Marginalized on multiple levels, as prior Mazhabi Sikhs, people such as Gurnam Kaur and Sukhwant Kaur seem content in their newfound religion and their identity as Crypto-Christian Sikhs. While they are free to practice their new religion, they choose not to officially state their Christian identity and maintain their Mazhabi Sikh status to continue to receive government aid, reserved for the lower caste. Suspended in this obfuscated terrain of dual identity as Crypto-Christian Sikhs shuns them into a political vacuum and isolation. Untethered from their Mazhabi Sikh roots, they can no longer harness their Dalit political agency as caste benefits do not apply to Christians. As converts, they lose the freedom to mobilize their Dalit identity for their upliftment, obliterating any possibility of creating and rallying around a Mazhabi Sikh candidate or a political party that speaks to their centuries old struggle and exploitation. Instead, they remain entangled in continued modes of suppression. On the one side they are not publicly able to assert their Dalit voice, while on the other, they enter into a faith that is heavily governed by another system of hierarchy in which once again, they start at the bottom of the societal ladder. Celebrated Sikh author, Khuswant Singh notes, “Within a short time Isai, the word meaning Christian, acquired a pejorative sense and became synonymous with Cuhra (Chuhra), the Punjabi word for the Untouchable sweeper” (quoted by K. Kaur 2020).68

Although in this new surge of the Christian wave engulfing Panjab in the past two decades, Chuhra may be used primarily in rural Panjab, but as seen in the case of southern India, caste-based discrimination is a “pestering sore in the body of the Church—irrespective of Catholic or other denominations” (Mondal 2025; Akkara 2022). Pope Francis too has spoken about the brutal ostracization and the plight of “Christian ‘Untouchables’” in Indian Catholic Church (Dayal 2024). Out of the “200 bishops in India, there are only 11 Dalit bishops despite the community accounting for 65 percent of the Christians,” laments Fr Devasagayaraj Zakarias, former secretary of the Dalit Commission of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) (Akkara 2022). “There are still parishes with separate cemeteries and hearses for upper castes and Dalits; special doors to bring Dalit bodies into the church; Dalits denied membership to parish choir or as altar servers; preference for upper castes to receive communion first; etc.,” he adds (Akkara 2022).

This idea of segregation on the basis of caste and separation of worship spaces has been one of the reasons for Mazhabi Sikhs to convert to Christianity. During my fieldwork in rural Panjab, while attending church services, when I talked to Crypto-Christian Sikhs, they agreed to share their ideas with the local Father’s/pastor’s permission and on the condition of anonymity. When questioned about their previous Mazhabi Sikh identity and why different caste-based gurudwaras exist in their villages, I was met with a deafening silence with people avoiding eye-contact and turning their faces away. Aware of the sensitivity of the question and my own limitations as a researcher, I mulled over ways to articulate this gnawing cacophony of silence that I continued to encounter in different churches in rural Panjab. How does one express a dehumanizing intangible pain of erasure, which snuffs out language, devouring unborn words? A pain that reverberates through generations while continuing to shackle one’s psyche with the trauma of oppression; a ‘sticky’ living stigma that clutches your being, as one ‘moves’ from one religious identity to another, tethered to the quagmire of caste, while the quest for basic human dignity remains a distant dream? Their repeated averted gazes stabbed me with these questions. In my humble bid to articulate it, I would like to invoke Spivak’s analytical model of “epistemic violence” to help illuminate eclipsed contours of the nebulous identity of Crypto-Christian Sikhs and the self-erasure of their Dalit voices.

Centralizing the study of marginalized identity formations, Spivak developed the concept of epistemic violence to address a type of violence that attempts to eliminate the knowledge/worldview produced by marginalized groups by silencing their voices and smothering their ability to speak or to be heard (Spivak [1993] 2013; Dotson 2011). Epistemic violence stems from the concept of symbolic violence, which focuses on the discourse involved in the practice of othering (Brunner 2021). By linking Foucault’s notion of epistemic violence to the colonial condition, Spivak reframes epistemic violence as “the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other”, erasing traces of subjectivity of the colonized (Spivak [1993] 2013, p. 76).

Anchoring onto this framework, I argue that the Crypto-Christian Sikhs begin to inhabit triply marginalized identities, erased at several levels, remaining bracketed in the zone of the Other. First, in order to escape the agony of lower caste Hindus, centuries back their ancestors converted to Sikhism that promised them equality. Second, within Sikhism, they are trapped within a different kind of hierarchy in the caste system. Jat Sikhs who were of lower caste themselves (Shudras) became dominant landowners, manifesting a new model of oppression that relegated other lower caste Sikhs to a life of depravity and exploitation (as discussed in Introduction and Part 1). The colonial trauma marked with racial superiority faced by the Indian population, “Christianity’s seminal role in the social construction of whiteness” versus Otherness, systemization of the caste system under the British, and the creation of a “martial race” that privileged Jat Sikhs added to the oppression of Mazhabi Sikhs, which further marginalized them as ’bonded laborers,’ encased within ‘lower caste Brown bodies’ (Chenault 2022; Streets 2017; Mooney 2013; K. Kaur 2023). A third erasure of their identity occurs when in order to escape caste barriers in the current Sikh society and to seek economic well-being and spiritual refuge, Mazhabi Sikhs convert to Christianity.69 However, in all three religions, they become a victim of hierarchical social order and caste-based oppression accompanies them.

Tarsem Peter, a Panjabi Christian Dalit and a social worker from Jallandhar, reveals that the majority of conversions in Panjab are that of Dalits and traces their multiple conversions in which irrespective of their religion, Mazhabi Sikhs remain ensnared in caste dynamics. When they convert to Christianity, they continue to be framed within the stigma of their caste that is carried over from one religious identity to another, he reveals the following:

Dalits go there [convert to Christian faith] for another reason, to solve their economic social problems … discrimination in the society is a big factor. I converted many years back and we also took advantage of that conversion, our kids went to convent schools … earlier church used to connect to poor neighborhoods, and uplifted underprivileged kids through education … Punjab’s Dalit Christians are engulfed within a different problem now. When Panjab’s Dalits become Christians, their Dalit status is finished but neither the government nor the church speaks about it … ‘caste toe saathe saath chaltee hai’ (caste keeps following [us] everywhere)

(Sangwan 2024).70

Given the rapid pace of conversions, even though the Christian vote bank in Panjab has increased, “the condition of Dalit Christians has deteriorated over the last decade” as they are marginalized and “politically powerless,” says Dr. Emanual Nahar, chairman of the Punjab Minorities Commission and himself a Dalit Christian (Nahar 2024). He said that Panjab’s Dalits “had joined the churches seeking liberation and solace in the new community but found their expectations unfulfilled,” further adding, “A change of religion has neither healed their scars nor brought sweeping changes in their socio-economic status” (Nahar 2024). One reason could also be that many Catholic priests and Christian pastors come from privileged castes such as Jat Sikhs (Mahajan and Menon 2022; Nahar 2024), so even within the new religion the Dalit Christian voices remain subjugated.

Thus, when Mazhabi Sikhs become Crypto-Christian Sikhs their lower caste imprisons them in an epistemic violence in which both their religious and political voices are silenced or subsumed within larger narratives that control them. In Christian churches, the devout, including Crypto-Christian Sikhs, are welcomed when they surrender to the hierarchal system of the Catholic church and its tenants of worshiping White icons, thus operating from a “persistent ‘White privileged theology’” maneuvered by supremacist ideas of the West (Loynes 2017).71 This happens in conjunction with caste discrimination in Sikh society which, further enslaves Crypto-Christian Sikhs in their lower caste identity. Added to this mix are Jat Sikh and upper caste converted Christian priests and pastors under whom Mazhabi Sikhs take refuge. In the process, Dalit histories, experiences and postcolonial subject formations of Mazhabi Sikhs’ that have been marginalized become ultra-marginalized as traces of subjectivity begin to disappear by systematic fragmentation.72 Thus, their identity and worldview remains trapped in what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges” particularly in its meaning of the knowledge “coming from below” from the lowest strata of the society (Foucault 2003, p. 7), which instead of being recuperated, restored and empowered, is further lost in the annals of anonymity and decimated.

In the case of Tarn Taran church, Father John comes from a Jat Sikh family that converted to Christianity and many Christian pastors of Panjab also come from affluent upper caste backgrounds. While many well-meaning Catholic priests, such as Father John, lend a helping hand to locals, they are part of a complex hierarchical system in which the final power lies in the West with the Pope. As noted above, in southern India, where missionaries have been successful in converting major part of the population, Dalit Christians face discrimination in churches (much like the treatment of Mazhabi Sikhs in Jat Sikh gurudwaras).73 By changing their religion, Crypto-Christian Sikhs may acquire economic mobility, but as a caste oppressed community their dignity and identity is further obliterated.

Caught in their liminal identity, politically too, Crypto-Christian Sikhs struggle to assert themselves. “‘If success is measured in getting a Christian candidate elected, we [will] fail,’ said Atul Aghamkar, director of the National Center for Urban Transformation, which is a wing of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. ‘Christians are a scattered minority and lack the consolidated numbers needed to win elections,’” and they also vote based on their individual denominations that divides their votes (S. Kaur 2023).74 In context of Panjab’s Crypto-Christian Sikhs, Rohit Khokhar, a Panjabi Christian politician further explains, “Christians in the state were caught in a vicious circle. For fear of losing reservations, denying them the few opportunities they have, many do not officially register as Christian. ‘This is why the exact representation of the Christian community doesn’t reflect in government data. It is also the reason parties do not give us tickets,” he said (Brar 2022b). Considering rapid conversions in Panjab, Christian vote-bank is on the rise, but since Christianity in Panjab is primarily controlled by upper caste Jat Sikh priests and pastors, Crypto-Christian political voices remain effaced, leading to self-censure.75 Within these parameters, epistemic violence can be understood as a form of what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence”, that is, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, p. 2, emphasis mine).

Compared to Crypto-Christian Sikhs, other Dalit Panjabis are more vocal and able to organize themselves politically and even culturally. For example, in literature their biographical accounts include mapping of outcaste inequalities (R. Kaur 2022; Ram 2008; Judge 2018) with their “mounting Dalit assertion against the centuries old system of social exclusion” and instrumentalizing of their Dalit identity has become a critical medium of democratic mobilization in contemporary India” (Jodhka 2004; Misra and Bhardwaj 2021; Ram 2007, p. 4072).76 According to Pampa Mukherjee, a professor of political science at Panjab University, there is “a silent revolution going on in the rural areas of Punjab where Dalit collective mobilisations around land is taken by forming collectives and creating new solidarities spearheaded by various unions such as the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Samiti (ZPSC) and others” that work for the emancipation of Dalits’ by launching a land rights movement, in which Dalit women are emerging as the heroes of this uprising (Mukherjee 2022; Mondal 2025).77 By giving up their Mazhabi Sikh Dalit identity and its potential political space, the Crypto-Christian Sikh remains suspended in liminality, triply bracketed into the oppressive zone of the Other. Closed from any route of escape from the binary of Self/Other, “by setting the conversation in terms of central symbols, expectations, and concepts framed by the colonizers” (dominant), further binds them into another master–slave paradigm (Kang 2016).

3.6. Decoloniality and Contours of Begumpura

Contrary to Crypto-Christian Sikhs of Mazhabi descent, chamars, members of the other Dalit Sikh caste, empowered themselves through the Ad Dharm movement by mobilizing their lower caste identity (Ram 2008; Pervaiz and Mahmood 2018). Their flourishing leather business made them financially sound and in turn helped transgress social boundaries of class (Ram 2008, 2017b; Puri 2009). Calling themselves as Ravidassia, they follow the teachings of the Sikh Guru Ravidas, who was himself a chamar and instilled dignity in his identity while professing for a society without caste-based discrimination. Following his footsteps, chamars developed pride and honor in their caste and as Ravidassias they assert that the ‘untouchables’ were the “original inhabitants” of Panjab from time immemorial (Ram 2017a, p. 60). The seeds for this self-assertion began in 1920s, through the Ad Dharm movement that was positioned as a religious outfit in which proponents advocated for ‘untouchables’ and Dalits comprising a separate category of religion, similar to the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs that should be treated as such by the colonial rulers (Ram 2017a; Jodhka 2009, p. 80). Invoking the British notion of “racial-origin” theories of caste, they argued that Ad Dharm has always been the religion of Dalits and that they have existed from time immemorial (Jodhka 2009, p. 80). Although the movement eventually lost steam, it helped shaped the Ravidassia identity (Jodhka 2009, p. 81). In 2010, the “Ravidassia launched their own religion, the Ravidassia Dharam, with their own scripture—the Amritbani Satguru Ravidas Maharaj, and proclaimed the ultimate place of pilgrimage for the community—the Varanasi-based Ravidas Janamsthan Mandir that bears the name of Begumpura (a city without sorrow), a term used by Ravidas” (Bochkovskaya 2016, p. 76; Ram 2017a). This self-assertion has also taken the form of “pride in flagging their so-called low-caste titles publicly” (through pop songs such as “Danger Chamar,” “Chamar pride”), which, coupled with their upward mobility, helps them gain socio-political agency to emerge as a “strong and autonomous caste-religious community, an outcome of vibrant Dalit identity movements in Punjab over the last (more than) eight decades” (Misra and Bhardwaj 2021; Ram 2017a, p. 64; Jodhka 2009, pp. 79, 83).78

The lack of dignity in mainstream Sikh society controlled by Jat Sikhs led chamars to create a separate religion from Sikhs and construct their own “protest identity” by building Ravidassia gurudwaras, based on their ideology of an alternate Dalit narrative with their privileged position as “original inhabitants” of the land (Bochkovskaya 2016, p. 83; Ram 2017a, p. 60). However, this identity too falls into the divisive trap of superior vs. inferior, Self vs. Other, paradigms, which might be well-intentioned but only end up segregating the society by creating irreversible dichotomies pitting communities/religions/castes against one another fueling constant antagonism.79 Thus, escape from oppression produced another space of privileged exclusion, in which the hierarchal structure remains intact, in the end replicating the model of center/periphery and further deepening the chasm in a society divided by religion and caste. In other words, as M.S.S. Pandian puts it, “caste-based contest against power can congeal into new forms of power and exclusion,” even in the ‘lower caste’ by producing a kind of “‘Caste narcissism’ [that] imposes a singular point of view on those whom it considers its members, and resents different ways of being in the world” in the process denying “the space for self-criticism within the community” (Pandian 2018, p. 44).80 This reshuffling of caste hierarchies in Panjab reveals the fluidity of dynamics of power in caste, dismantling notions of rigid fixated idea of caste divisions, but one that nevertheless circles back into the endless perpetuation of the Self/Other model, fraught with hierarchies based on race, caste, religion, and gender.

Likewise theoretical paradigms which emerged to undo these binary constructions through Postcolonialism and Subaltern studies with their promise of unentangling suppressed identities from hegemonic frameworks too fell into a similar trap. As scholars have pointed, ironically, these apparently well-meaning academic interventions ended up strengthening and tightening the grip of divisive polarities, which embolden rather than dissipate the master-signifier of Whiteness, further consolidating the universalizing paradigm of the West.81

Focusing on a “decolonial turn,” scholars of decoloniality stress that while colonialism is tied to the historical event, coloniality survives decolonization, animated by its “polychronic nature of power” (Mignolo 2017, 2021; Eke et al. 2025; Yountae 2020). For Mignolo, these power regimes that are embedded in coloniality “refer to the Colonial Matrix of Power” (CMP) that entails a structure of management comprising domains, levels, and flows, controlling all facets of our life (Mignolo 2017, p. 40). He explains in the following:

If one looks at the transformations of the CMP since its formation in the sixteenth century, one sees mutations (rather than changes) within the continuity of the discursive or narrative orientation of Western modernity and Western civilisation: from, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christianity (Catholic or Protestant) to secularism, liberalism, and Marxism (in other words, from the Christian the civilising mission) and from ‘progress’ in the nineteenth century to ‘development’ in the second half of the twentieth.

Unlike coloniality, Mignolo posits that decoloniality “operates on pluriversality and truth and not in universality and truth” striving for “re-existing” rather than “resisting” European universalism as the latter reproduces the paradigm endlessly, implicating the Other into it (p. 41). To dissipate CMP, Mignolo proposes to de-link “from the imposed dichotomies articulated in the West, namely the knower and the known, the subject and the object, theory and praxis” by staying at the exterior/borderline of the Self/Other binary shaped by the principles of Western epistemologies (p. 42). He delineates that the gesture of de-linking/decentering must be accompanied by a process of re-linking/recentering with their own memories and legacies by resurrecting aesthetic and political indigenous structures that people want to preserve through a process of “decolonial epistemic reconstitutions” to overcome Western hegemony (Mignolo 2017; 2021, p. 6). This model of “indigeneity over decoloniality” allows for multiple “truths” to coexist rebuilding and re-existing under new conditions and modes of being that are your own (Mignolo 2017, p. 39). The act of rebuilding indigeneity implies decolonial de-linking from settlers’ control of lives in which “decoloniality is not an ethnic, national, or religious identification,” but a “political project” (p. 44).

Anchoring into native epistemes of untapped knowledge constructs to envision new socio-political orders, in which the West/White/Christian/Catholic/upper caste/Jat Sikh is not placed in antagonism with East/Black/Pagan/Hindu/Protestant/lower caste/Mazhabi Sikh identity, but rather inaugurating a space of multiple identity formations sans the hierarchical structure. This space would be rooted in indigenous epistemes, open to new religiosities but away from the boxed Western idea of the Self as the center in which the Other remains fixed in peripheries defined by race, color, class, and caste. In context of Panjab, one way to envision this pluriverse is through the idea of Begumpura. A notion propounded by the Dalit Sikh Guru Ravidas, Begumpura is a land without sorrows, a casteless, classless, non-patriarchal democratic world (Omvedt 2008; Bochkovskaya 2016; Jodhka 2009). A site marked by the absence of vertical hierarchal structures of exploitation with the presence of horizontal pluralistic identities, of different religions, castes, races, and genders to thrive together. In Songs of the Saints of India, Hawley and Juergensmeyer translate Begumpura, a poem by Sant Ravidas (Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988, p. 32):

• The regal realm with the sorrowless name:
• they call it Begumpura, a place with no pain
• No taxes or cares, nor own property there,
• no wrongdoing, worry, terror or torture.
• Oh my brother, I have come to take it as my own,
• my distant home, where everything is right. …

In the current circuits of the making of this indigenous social order, the notion of Begumpura conjures an image of an emancipatory decolonial landscape. One that is delinked from colonial power structures and from exploitative hierarchies of race and caste, and relinked to reinvigorated indigenous epistemes allowing for multiple religious formations to coexist: Deras, Dargahs, Hindu temples, Sikh gurudwaras, Christian churches, among other religious identities to thrive together. This allows for envisioning a space of equality sans manipulation due to hegemony, economic disparity or bracketing through stigmatization, or a dehumanizing rhetoric—a place in which people are not forced to convert under pressure or enticement due to poverty, lack of opportunity or dignity, but by exercising their free will. Following the modern making of this utopian order, Begumpura glimpses through Thakarpura’s villagers’ collective insistence on representing their village as a “space of mutual respect, peace and harmony” with multiple religions and castes living together. It is more evidently articulated in the contemporary idea of the new casteless “Begumpura village” (Mondal 2025) and popular music of Panjab, with albums such as “Begumpura Sher ko Layoo”, “Begumpura Bhajan Mandali”, and “Begumpura” by Kanth Kaler among others that have been keeping the utopian idea alive in Panjab’s contemporary popular consciousness.

4. Conclusions

In this paper, I tried to map out a conceptual trajectory of Christian icons in Panjab by examining the iconoclasm of Tarn Taran pieta to examine how it functions as a polyvalent site inhabiting multiple narratives intersecting with ideas of religion, race, color, and caste, bound through oppressive binaries. As a way forward, removed from this circular logic of dominance and subservience encircled with a constant specter of violence, can be envisioned by expanding Guru Ravidas’s idea of Begumpura. As an imagined decolonial space based on equality of caste, race, class, religion, and gender with malleable contours, Begumpura can be seen as a site of a decentralized, indigenous yet contemporary episteme of knowledge, emanating from the local. Not the one that academics construct, but one whose contours they follow as it reveals itself while being shaped by the people of Panjab.