Russian TV throws light on white Sikhism

Television network RT, formerly known as Russia Today, has produced a feature on white people who adopt the Sikh faith.

The English-language global news channel, broadcast from Russia, focuses the article at first on the Miri Piri Academy, an international boarding school in Amritsar, the Sikh holy city in India.

Students there include the children of foreign converts to Sikhism, who wish their offspring to be comprehensively educated in the faith.

Among the teachers is a Russian-American who has taken the name Mahan Atma Kaur. She converted five years ago.

Students are drawn from 13 countries in Asia, Europe and America and speak eight language, reports RT on its website.

The TV channel talks to foreign converts from around the world and reveals that a 1998 survey had disclosed substantial non-Indian Sikh communities around Espanola, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, California.

It estimated that there were nearly 8,000 “gora” or “white Sikhs”, many of whom came to Sikhism as followers of Harbhajan Singh Yogi’s Kundalini Yoga.

RT says Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, better known as Yogi Bhajan, was a Sikh yoga teacher who settled in America in the 1960s, and died in 2004.

After his death the US Congress passed a bipartisan resolution honouring and effectively equating his life with great names such as Dr Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Pope John Paul II.

The article sets out opposing views on the rights and wrongs of white Sikhism.

It points out that conversion dates back to the 1860s and the conversion of Max Arthur Macauliffe (1841-1913), a senior British administrator in the Punjab. A noted scholar, Macauliffe is esteemed for his translation into English of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib.

The RT article, with photographs, can be found in full at http://rt.com