Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part F (2025)

Social identity of a people is constructed not through a linear chain of causally connected moments but through the interpretative negotiation of antagonistic events. Punjabis/ Sikhs today are commemorating, on one side the 1914 narrative of the Komogata Maru, which intensified the armed struggle of the North American Punjabis/ Sikhs against the British Empire. Simultaneously on the other hand they are also paying tribute to the Indian soldiers (of which more than 50 percent were the Punjabis/ Sikhs) who laid their lives for the sake of British Empire during the Great War of 1914. By reinterpreting these two antagonistic historical events through their present struggles of identity, they are celebrating the valor of the Punjabi/ sikh spirit.

The conflicts unleashed by these two great events did not end there. The battle of ideologies which crystallized during those moments, continue to the present in the form of cultural disputes- the externalized manifestation of cultural tensions immanent within the capitalist society. Ideologies exhausted and the conflicts of cultural identity are emerging, calling into question the values associated with modernity. By exploring the battle of ideas set in motion through these two simultaneous antagonistic moments of Komagata Maru and the First World War, we can understand the changing interpretative focus of political conflict from ideology to culture.