Sardarjis: Jokes Apart

A few months ago, a senior Supreme Court advocate joined a long serpentine queue outside a Delhi Metro station counter that only sold tokens to buy herself a smart card. When Harvinder Kaur Chowdhury’s turn finally came and she placed her request, the woman at the counter considered Chowdhury’s face for a while and replied, “Kar dee naa aapne Sardar waali baat.” (There you go, doing a Sardarji-like thing.)

For all the irritation that the remark caused, Chowdhury let that one go. The woman at the counter could not possibly have known she was a Sikh, and the quip, however humiliating, wasn’t intentional, she reasoned.

A few weeks later, Chowdhury was yet again at a Delhi Metro station, this time at the head of a queue at a turnstile with her recently-acquired Metro smart card. She swiped her card this way and that, gently and rapidly, gave it vigorous flips and shakes in the air, but for some reason–-either the fault of the machine, her card, or just the conspiracy of bad luck–-the card refused to work. And then, from somewhere behind her, a comment emerged, manoeuvring itself around fidgety shoulders and bouncing off greasy heads, before finding its destination in Chowdhury’s ears.

“Baarah bajey [card] chalega,” it said. “Uss time swipe karo.” (The card will work at 12 o’clock. Swipe it then.) The reference being to a popular old joke about Sikhs that implies that they spring to action at 12 o’clock. And then it came to her: life’s cruel memories washing ashore. All the Sardarji jokes directed at her— in playgrounds, classrooms and even the Supreme Court; her impassioned letters, as an adult, to schools and colleges, her meetings with teachers and principals, asking for morning assemblies to proscribe the utterance of such jokes; her petitions to the police and the Government seeking their outlawing; her only son wanting to drop his Sikh middle name in school, lest it make him susceptible to jokes.

And at that moment, at the head of the queue when her Metro smart card refused to work, she decided she was going to put an end to these jokes. She was going to use what she possessed— her knowledge and work experience in legal affairs—to target the internet, which she believes is the most convenient platform to create and disseminate such humour.

On 21 August, Harvinder Chowdhury, 54, BA (Hons), LLB (Campus Law Centre), LLM (India), LLM (London), former legal correspondent with The Statesman and United News of India, filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court to ban all websites, some 5,000 of them in all, that carried Sardarji jokes.

Chowdhury’s petition has divided India’s Sikh community. To some, it is an unnecessary exaggeration of the suffering of their brethren. To them, yes, the jokes occasionally border on the obscene and offensive, but are offset largely by the goodwill the community otherwise enjoys. What makes the Sikh community so well-regarded and garrulous, according to these folks, is not just their ability to take a joke, but often their disposition to create a good one as well—something for instance, that the late writer Khushwant Singh did with his joke books. To others, however, Chowdhury included, the likes of Khushwant Singh are part of the problem, influential Sikhs who didn’t just check the progression of these jokes, but propagated, in their words, the image of the Sardar as a naïve and foolish individual.

When news of Chowdhury’s petition got round, it ticked a memory several hundreds of kilometres away in the city of Mumbai. “I salute her and what she is trying to achieve,” says Swaranjeet Singh Bajaj, director of Punjab Sindh Dairy Products and one of the founders of Sikh Media and Culture Watch, which was set up around a decade ago in Mumbai to check the propagation of jokes about Sikhs in popular culture. “We got this done in Mumbai eight years ago.”

Back then, the group was able to get a publisher in Mumbai, Ranjit Parande, arrested for having published a joke book on the fictional characters Santa and Banta. To Bajaj, these jokes are communally insensitive and result in social disharmony. “We didn’t just get the book banned and the publisher behind bars,” he says. “We got the [then] police commissioner in Mumbai to issue an official letter to all police stations in the city, directing them to act against people who create jokes on the Sikh community.”

A little before that period, the group, along with another organisation, The Sikh Brotherhood International, stormed the office of the media and entertainment company Pritish Nandy Communications in Mumbai, and got it to apologise for carrying a Sardar joke scene in one of its films, the Aishwarya Rai-starrer Shabd. In the movie, the character played by Zayed Khan tries to cheer Rai up by saying he will tell her a joke. The joke starts with “There was once a Sardarji” and it’s enough to start Rai laughing.

“The Sardarji—that was the joke,” says Parbinder Singh Chandhok, president of The Sikh Brotherhood International. “There was nothing after, nothing before. Just the Sardar.”

Chandhok says he can take a joke. But not one aimed at any community. “Make jokes on Manmohan Singh, Harbhajan Singh. We have so many of these people. But here, the joke starts and ends with a Sardarji.”

To emphasise his point, Chandhok shares, oddly with an unusual relish, the joke that riles him the most. A Sardar, to test a newly-purchased car, drives to meet a friend in a distant town. He enjoys the drive and reaches the place within the expected time. But he takes several hours on his way back. When he finally gets home, some 12 hours after his estimated time, he explains his frustration to his wife thus: “These car engineers are morons. There was no problem going to my friend’s house. But it was so slow on the way back. They have built five gears to move forward and only one gear to move backwards.” “You see what I mean,” says Chandhok.

Chowdhury’s petition comes at a time when many Sikh individuals and organisations are unwilling to bear jokes made at their expense. Two years ago, a property dealer based in Jalandhar was jailed for hurting the religious sentiments of a member of a local Sikh organisation. The property dealer, despite being warned about forwarding a Sardarji joke, somewhat foolishly forwarded 15 more jokes to the same individual as a response. The Sikh Media and Culture Watch, having dealt with the makers of Shabd and the book publisher, turned its ire on a TV channel, one of whose presenters, the former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu, had apparently allowed a contestant to crack a Sardarji joke. The Sikh Brotherhood International, in Chandhok’s words, vandalised the office of another TV channel in Mumbai, where someone had made a similar joke. A Mumbai eatery, Papa Pancho, was vandalised for using the image of a rotund Sikh with a beer mug as a mascot. Anil Ambani had to apologise in 2007 when Reliance Communications, which he owns, issued a Sardarji joke as its ‘joke of the day’.

Chowdhury’s petition has gathered the support of several Sikh groups in India. Organisations like the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) have asked people to back her. A parliamentarian, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, secretary general of the Shiromani Akali Dal, has attached a letter of support to her petition. There is also an online petition doing the rounds, ‘BanSikhJokes’, with almost 10,000 signatures, which will be presented to the court to bolster Chowdhury’s campaign. “We are going to do everything to get this ban in place,” Paramjeet Singh Rana, a member of DSGMC, says. “This might be our best bet yet.”

According to Professor Jawaharlal Handoo, a former associate professor of folklore at Mysore’s Central Institute of Indian Languages, what is unique about the Sardarji joke is how, unlike jokes about other communities, it is not restricted to a certain geographic or linguistic region but has become pan-Indian. While such stereotypes of Sikhs might have existed in earlier times as well, the jokes started becoming popular around the country after the partition of the Subcontinent. “The jokes must have started spreading at the refugee camps during that period,” he claims. And as the community expanded and Sikhs migrated to various other regions within the country, the jokes travelled with them.

Handoo adds that the success of this distinctly high-profile group, with their attire, beards and turbans setting them apart, might have bred an insecurity among others that eventually found an easy release through humour. “The success of this community must have threatened the majority and created an anxiety among them. This insecurity in turn took the form of various stereotypes and joke cycles.”

Chowdhury is a feisty mother of three. She carries a small hammer in her handbag, and when she travels late at night, also packs a spraycan of chilli powder. “A few times,” she says, “I have used the hammer.” A few years ago, she drove alone late at night from Delhi to reach Jaipur High Court next morning. When highway robbers got in the way, she used the chilli powder spray to escape.

“So how did you return home?” I ask.
“No. I drove on to Jaipur.”

Married to a Hindu, BM Srivastava, Chowdhury was expecting her third child when her husband died of a heart attack. “Because I was a single woman, men, including my colleagues at the Supreme Court, would target and sexually harass me,” she says. But Chowdhury refused to let it get to her. She would create a ruckus in public areas. She would tell her harasser off and occasionally even physically assault him. “Then they would say, ‘Sardarni hai. Paagal hai’ (She is a Sardarni. She is crazy).” She continued with her profession, often carrying her infant to work, sometimes to court, sometimes even to Tihar Jail if she happened to be representing someone behind bars. The jokes only became fiercer.

Just like her school and college days, adult life—even the times spent in the hallowed grounds of the Supreme Court— required daily efforts to avoid the customary joke about the Sardar.

Around this time, she began to write to various educational institutions in Delhi, often meeting the principal and the staff to ask them to educate children against the use of communal jokes. She wrote to the Delhi Police and to the Telecom and Infotech Ministry seeking a ban on online jokes about Sikhs. Around this time, her son, Sahitya Singh Srivastava, said he wanted to drop his middle name ‘Singh’ given by her in honour of his Sikh heritage. According to her, he had faced several jokes and taunts throughout his childhood. Even though she forbade him to do so, he rarely ever discloses his middle name, something she mentions in her petition. “My children are toppers. But they will still be teased and called foolish,” she says. “Because of such stereotyping, many Sikh children now drop their titles and cut their hair.”

Along with the petition, Chowdhury submitted around 60 of the most offensive Sikh jokes she found online, along with the URLs of around 5,000 websites with Sardarji jokes, requesting the Supreme Court to assess their merits, if any. The petition, while it was admitted and adjourned until next month, elicited several grins. The judges observed, as reported in the media, “You want all such jokes to stop, but Sikhs may themselves oppose this.”

Savita Bhatti, the wife of one of India’s best known comedians, the late Jaspal Bhatti, who also happens to belong to the Sikh community, says she is unsure how her husband would have reacted to the demand that Sardarji jokes be banned. But she suggests he would not have supported the demand. “We all live in this wide and varied family,” Bhatti says. “We have our differences. But we must all learn to live together in harmony. I understand this hurts us [Sikhs] sometimes. But I think we are big-hearted enough to let it go.”

Jaspal Bhatti, his wife claims, never let the popular image of Sikhs propagated through Sardarji jokes as a somewhat comical and naïve, although lovable, community hamper his career as a satirist. Once an executive engineer with the Punjab State Electricity Board in Amritsar who moonlighted as a cartoonist for the local edition of The Tribune and performed short weekly skits for Doordarshan’s Jalandhar broadcast, he rose to eventually become a hugely popular creator and actor of humorous skits through the shows Ulta Pulta and Flop Show on India’s main TV channel of the pre-satellite era. He made and acted in films, opened a film school, and set up his Nonsense Club for satirical street skits.

Savita, the daughter of an officer in the Indian Air Force, first encountered Jaspal, like many others in Punjab at that time, while watching the local edition of Doordarshan. Jaspal, then an unknown face, appeared for short durations in comedy skits, in between songs during the popular weekly Chitrahaar show. “I was like, ‘Who is this idiot?’” she says. “Nobody did any comedy on TV then. And then after a while everybody began to listen to him, again and again, and suddenly he grew on you.”

But unlike everybody, after a few months, an arranged marriage occurred and Savita found herself living with the young Sikh comedian who appeared between songs on Chitrahaar.

Flop Show, when you consider it, is a remarkable piece of comedy. The title of the show, ‘Flop Show’, with a menacing, eye-patch wearing Sardar (Jaspal Bhatti) in its opening song, is a mockery of the show itself. And each episode starts with a dedication addressed to the people whom the show wants to poke fun at. When the well-known cartoonist Ajit Ninan met Jaspal Bhatti after the TV series had been telecast, he held Jaspal’s hand and, according to Savita, told him, “Till now all of India made fun of Sardars. Now a Sardar makes fun of all of India.”

The Nonsense Club, and his antics through them, carried on through his meteoric fame and even after his disappearance from the public limelight. The club did odd things. Back in 1984, when Chandigarh’s famous Sukhna Lake was threatening to dry up, the Club members ran into the dry areas of the lake and began to play cricket.

During each election, Bhatti would launch political parties, like the ‘Hawala Party’ during the time of the Hawala Scam in the 1990s, the ‘Suitcase Party’ in 2002 to apparently give tickets to individuals depending on the size of their suitcases, and the ‘Recession Party’, during the time of the global financial slowdown in 2009.

A little before Jaspal Bhatti’s demise, Savita began to express her disappointment with the activities of the Nonsense Club. The Bhattis hadn’t done very well financially despite Jaspal’s fame, and the activities of the Nonsense Club were a drain on the couple’s finances.

But ever since he passed away in 2012, Savita Bhatti has, in honour of the memory of her late husband, taken over the reins of the Club and begun to organise events. Recently, she had a pack of journalists scratching their heads, when she, along with other members of the Club, decided to ask for awards so that they could return them to the Government. In the meantime, they said, they were returning their fundamental rights. “Are you protesting against the Government?” someone asked. “Are you protesting against the protest?”

“I told them, ‘Decide what you have to’,” Savita Bhatti says. “This is something (Jaspal) Bhatti saab would have done.”

There are some who argue that the inherent nature of the internet makes such a ban impossible to achieve. Handoo, however, provides another reason why such a ban would probably be unsuccessful. “With all due respect to the Supreme Court, there is very little they can do,” he says. “Jokes are a part of folklore and ethnic identity. They won’t disappear with a court order.”

humourSardarji jokesSardarjisSavita BhattiSupreme CourtUlta Pulta