By Malkiat Singh Lopo-Dhaliwal and Mukhtiar Kaur Rattian-Sandhu | Malaysia |
- Earliest evidence of Sikh women in Malaya. The first lady appears in Kamunting, Perak. She was the wife of a police sergeant stationed there. A European lady traveller was specially taken to see her and her son. This Sikh woman must have led a solitary life because, not even the Assistant Resident had seen her.
Isabella L. Bird’s description reads:
“We called at a Sikh guard-house and the magnificient Sergeant took me to see his wife, the women of the regiment, who is so rigidly secluded that not even the Commanding Officer Mr. Maxwell (the Assistant British Resident of Perak) have seen her. She is very beautiful and has an exiquisite figure, but was over-loaded with jewellery. She wore a large nose-jewel, seven rings of large size weighing down her finely formed ears, four neck-laces and silver bangles on each arm from the wrist to the elbow, besides some on her beautiful ankles. She had an infant son, the child of the regiment, in her arms, clotherd only in a silver hoop, and the father took him and presented him to me with much pride. It was a pleasant family group.”
Isabella L. Bird who wrote about the “crimson turbaned Sikh orderlies” of Hong Kong and Singapore Sikhs as ‘“collossal ” had given an interesting account of the Sikhs in Taiping.
“…………. Sikh sentries guard his (Maxwell) house by night and day. They wear large blue turbans, scarlet coats and white trousers. There are four hundred and fifty of them, recruited in India from among Sikhs and Pathans, and many of them have seen service under our flag. They are to all intents and purposes soldiers, drilled and disciplined as such, though called “Armed Police” and are commanded by Major Swinburn of the 80th. Regiment. There is a half battery of mountain train rifled guns, and many of these men are drilled as gunners. Their joy would be in shooting and looting, but they have not any scent for crime. They are splendid looking men, with long moustaches and whiskers, but they plait the long ends of the latter and tuck them up and their turbans, They have good-natured faces generally, and are sober, docile, and peaceable, but Major Swineburn says that they indulge in violent wordy warfare on “theological subjects”. They are devoted to the accumulation of money, and very many of them being betrothed to little girls in India, save nearly all their pay in order to buy land and settle there. When off duty they wear turbans and robes nearly as white as snow and look both classical and colossal. (The Golden Cherosonese and the way thither by Isabellas L. Bird; London: John Murray, 1883)
Editor’s Note: Isabella Lucy Bird, a 19th-century female travel writer, was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Among others, she is the author of ‘The Golden Chersonese : A Nineteeth-Century Englishwoman’s Travels in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula’, first published in 1880.
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