Book Review: The Unfinished Struggle Of the Sikhs In Kashmir

Who am I in the long and contested history of Kashmir? Where does my community stand in a region that has so often spoken through the voices of its majorities? These deeply personal and unsettling questions shape the opening of Komal JB Singh’s Book, “An Invisible Minority: The History, Society and Politics of Sikhs in Kashmir”(2025). The Sikhs have lived in Kashmir for generations, sharing its land, labour, and history, yet their presence has remained persistently overlooked. Komal begins by placing herself within this silence, questioning her own existence and future as a Sikh in a region where recognition is uneven, and belonging is fragile.

The book powerfully highlights how academic and political attention in Kashmir has long centred on dominant communities such as the Muslims and Hindus, whose histories and identities have been repeatedly documented, analysed, and normalised. In contrast, the Sikhs have endured decades of social marginalisation, economic hardship, and cultural erasure, even as they continued to survive and resist. By confronting this imbalance, Komal’s work is not only an academic intervention but also an act of moral courage that aims to restore visibility, dignity, and voice to a community long pushed to the margins of Kashmir’s history.

Komal Singh significantly advances the scholarly discourse by constructing a meticulous historical ethnography of the Sikhs in Kashmir. The author’s central contribution lies in reframing their contemporary narrative not as a sudden tragedy, but as the culmination of a longitudinally documented “history of suffering.” Komal rigorously situates Sikh identity within a deep historical continuum, effectively arguing that their collective consciousness is forged through time. She situates Sikh identity within a deep historical framework, tracing its foundations to the legacy of Sikh Gurus and examining its subsequent political and social articulation under the Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule (1819–1846) in Kashmir.

The author offers a sustained critical reading of how this period of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s governance has been persistently cast in unfavourable terms by European travellers and Kashmir historians, narratives that were rarely neutral and often informed by specific political agendas and ideological anxieties. Rather than accepting these accounts at face value, the book interrogates the conditions under which such representations were produced and circulated. At the same time, the author resists any romanticisation of Sikh rule, openly acknowledging that the period was marked by internal factionalism, contested authority, and documented instances of coercion and social control.

The narrative then examines the systematic repression of the community under Dogra rule and the gradual transfer of various Sikh gurudwaras into the hands of the Kashmiri Brahmans. This process, the author argues, not only dismantled the Kashmiri Sikh community’s institutional power but also deeply undermined its spiritual sovereignty, signalling a broader transformation in the relationship between religion, state authority, and communal identity in Kashmir.

One of the most distressing chapters the book revisits concerns the consequences of partition, an event that disproportionately affected the Sikh community in Kashmir. Komal provides a detailed account of the massacre of 1947, during which raiders, identified as Qabalis, targeted Sikh settlements, resulting in widespread destruction of property, violations of personal dignity, and profound human suffering. Rather than treating this episode as a closed historical moment, Komal underscores its enduring psychological impact, emphasising how the violence produced a deep and unresolved collective trauma. The memory of this brutality, she argues, continues to reverberate within the community, lingering as an unhealed wound embedded in its shared historical consciousness.

Komal further traces the recurring cycles of violence that have repeatedly driven Kashmiri Sikhs to the edge of survival. Focusing on the genocide of 1984 and the assassination of the then-Prime Minister of India, she shows how these moments once again subjected the community to collective punishment. The protests that followed the mass killings in Delhi, organised as acts of moral resistance and solidarity, were met with further violence, costing many their lives. Komal reads this period as a decisive historical rupture, one in which Kashmiri Sikh identity stood at a fragile crossroads, threatened by both physical destruction and political erasure. She further laments the gradual fading of these traumatic memories within the community, suggesting that forgetting itself has become another quiet form of loss. The book then turns to a more recent and deeply unsettling tragedy that unfolded in March 2000, when thirty-six (36) Kashmiri Sikhs were brutally massacred in a remote village of the Anantnag district in Kashmir. This episode, the author argues, marked a profound rupture in the community’s sense of safety, dismantling any remaining hope in protection or stability in the region. The violence not only claimed lives but also generated a renewed atmosphere of fear, grief, and collective vulnerability that extended far beyond the immediate site of the massacre.

Together, these tragedies underscore the fragile condition of Sikhs in Kashmir—marked by resilience, yet continually scarred by loss, uncertainty, and the persistent struggle to assert dignity and survival.

Taken together, these historical and contemporary traumas reveal the depth of marginalisation that has come to define the Sikh community’s experience in Kashmir, as Komal compellingly shows. Despite generations of presence on Kashmiri soil, Sikhs have been pushed to the edges of political life, denied meaningful representation, and rendered socially peripheral within a regionallandscape dominated by two powerful majority groups. Their minority status—numerical, political, and cultural—has confined them to a fragile existence in which visibility itself becomes a struggle. Over time, this enforced silence has eroded public recognition of Kashmir’s Sikh history, weakening the transmission of language, memory, and identity, and allowing dominant narratives to overwrite their lived realities. 

As dominant narratives continue to shape political legitimacy and historical memory, a pressing question remains: what becomes of Sikh identity, existence, and security in a region that persistently renders them marginal?

Harjeet Singh is an Assistant Professor & Co-ordinator at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at Akal University, Bathinda, Punjab, India,