University of Toronto Mississauga to establish endowed chair in Sikh studies

The word Sikh means “student” in English. Sikhs, more accurately, are seekers—seekers of knowledge on a path toward the teachings of the Ten Gurus, written in the Guru Granth Sahib, the embodiment of their collective contributions, a living, everlasting Guru.  

The University of Toronto Mississauga is establishing an endowed chair in Sikh studies, so students can seek knowledge of the faith and the history and culture that surround it. 

The university’s Sikh Student Association says the decision represents a major step to address misconceptions and foster a deeper understanding of the religion and the culture that surrounds it, which have often been misunderstood, despite representing a large part of Canada, and Peel’s diverse population.

Through a $5 million investment — a $2.5 million donation from Davindra Singh that was matched by the University — the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) plans to establish a chair in Sikh studies, which officials say will support engagement with the local, national and international Sikh communities. It is a university-wide initiative, with undergraduate studies at UTM and graduate studies at Toronto’s main St. George campus. UTM has also committed a place in its library dedicated for Sikh literature. Davindra Singh, former chair of the Sikh Foundation of Canada, will be sharing his lived experiences and connections in Ontario’s Sikh community with the incoming chair holder and future Sikh studies students.

Gurjaap Singh Brar, president of the UTM Sikh Student Association, told The Pointer that having an endowed chair in Sikh studies will allow the University to reintroduce academia in Sikh heritage, which he says has been lost over the centuries.

“For me, it's about how do we usher in a new era of academia? Because the Sikh academia that we've seen in the past has been very weak, especially compared to academia in other fields,” he said.

“The Sikh faith, the Sikh people have a very, very, very rich heritage. You could not write enough literature to cover everything in our over 500-year span of history. We see so many scholarly institutions that existed and such a rich culture of academia that kind of died out and it's because our people went through so many hardships and went through so many issues that kind of held them back within the diaspora.”

Prior to catching wind of the endowed chair position, the Association had started a forum to gather signatures to get more Punjabi studies on campus. Once the position was announced, Singh Brar said the Association switched gears to acting as a liaison between the university and students on campus to promote the news and encourage more engagement amongst their peers.

With Sikhism having such a prominent presence in Canada, Mohkam Singh, co-president of the student association, told The Pointer the latest initiative from the University “isn't just an opportunity for Sikhs,” but also presents “an opportunity for non-Sikhs to understand this religion, to learn about it, and clear up the misconceptions and learn about us.” 

“We're having these opportunities to learn more about our faith, not just Sikhs, but non-Sikhs, so it will have a huge benefit on a global scale and just on a local scale.”

Members of the UTM Student Sikh Association Gurjaap Singh Brar (left) and Mokham Singh say the endowed chair will have a significant impact on the University’s course offerings.

(Submitted) 

Historically there has been a lack of Sikh representation in courses offered in Canada. The University of Calgary was among the first institutions to create a permanent framework for Sikh studies and while courses have been offered, no university in Canada had previously provided a research focus on the Sikh community.

Sikh soldiers in the British army march in Paris during World War I. The participation of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs who fought for Britain in both World Wars has been largely erased from the country’s history books.

(Toor Collection) 

The University of Toronto wants to change that narrative.

Peel’s Sikh population is the largest outside India, mostly concentrated in Brampton, with more than 163,000 residents who identified as followers of the faith in the 2021 Census, the largest religious group in the city. Of the Region of Peel’s religious population, 13.8 percent identified as Sikh, making it Peel’s second largest religious group, next to Christian, according to the Region’s 2021 Census Hub.

Due to the location of the University of Toronto and its Mississauga campus, Singh Brar highlighted there is a large community of Sikhs in the area already, which means the Association will be able to engage even further with the community and students on campus as the program grows.

“You have a lot of Sikh, Punjabi students that come on campus to learn about their heritage, learn about their faith, and unfortunately, in the past Sikh studies hasn't really been given a lot of focus,” he laments. “And that's not really the fault of anyone, except that there wasn't really an incentive for scholars to get into Sikh studies.”

Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur, also called Kartarpur Sahib, is a Gurdwara in Kartarpur, in the Punjab province of Pakistan, in an area where Sikhs prospered prior to the partition of India in 1947, when Pakistan was created as a majority Muslim nation.

(Wikicommons)

The disconnect, he says, left gaps for students who were trying to learn but were often being misinformed.

“With something like this, it's an amazing step forward because what that means is you have now an incentive to bring in an amazing scholar who is going to focus just on Sikh studies, and that heritage piece is going to increase. You're going to have a lot of students learning more about their heritage, learning more about their faith. It's just a massive step forward for everyone involved."

Ajay Rao, UTM’s vice-dean of graduate studies and postdoctoral affairs and associate professor in the department of historical studies, told The Pointer that over the past decade, UTM’s Introduction to Sikhism garnered more interest from students compared to other religion courses and the demand has only continued to grow.  

“It's really about the evolution of UTM as an institution. I think what's probably not as well-known broadly is that the academic community has really evolved, and so this is really a step forward in terms of our research profile, but the other thing is the community embeddedness. The way I would frame it is that we're a public university. We serve public good, and we want to create programming that reflects our local communities and regional partners and the fact is Sikhs are increasingly important in Canada and certainly in the Peel Region.”

As someone who teaches South Asian religion courses, Rao says being able to establish a chair in Sikh studies will have “a very powerful impact,” not only on the University’s students but on youth as a whole.

“It's not just for students who are of Sikh identity, it's for everyone,” he enthused. “It's an amazing thing when you're in the classroom and you see how students learn about other cultures. This is something that they take away with them for their whole life. And this is what Canada is, right? It's multicultural. It's extremely diverse. I think there are very few places in the world as diverse as Mississauga, and so we feel like we're equipping our students to navigate a complex world.”

Associate professor Ajay Rao (who is not Sikh) says the University is working to create programming that reflects its local communities and spotlight Sikh culture and contributions to Canada.

(University of Toronto Mississauga) 

In an effort to foster a deeper understanding of Sikh culture and heritage, “the endowment will build on the recent momentum in Sikh studies, promoting new research and advancing knowledge and outreach initiatives, including engagement with the Sikh community locally and globally,” according to the University. “The endowed chair, currently the only one of its kind in Canada, can attract and retain internationally recognized scholars, leading to new research collaborations and building an unmatched program that will train future generations of students and researchers.” 

An endowed chair is among the most prestigious positions at a university that can be presented to a faculty member. The $5 million investment will go toward the chair, salary and research. Through conversations with Singh and the Sikh community, Rao says the position will be structured around fostering community engagement, with $4 million granted to the chair for research and the remaining $1 million directed toward engagement.

“We really see this as part of the university's outreach to Sikhs, but more generally, the populations in Mississauga, Brampton and beyond,” Rao said. Community engagement could include public lectures, as well as opportunities for student internships, visits to gurdwaras, and other activities that bring the University into a partnership with the community.

“We want the Mississauga and Brampton and Peel Region communities to see themselves reflected in our university.”   

The idea of establishing an endowed chair is something that evolved through conversations and has been developing for a while now, Rao explained, but it was not until the generosity of Singh that the needle moved further. It “is an important time to move forward,” he said with the university in a position where it is ready to take the program “in a right way that will really support the person who takes up the chair and the relationship with the community.”

The university is still working out a timeline for the appointment of the chair position, and will be looking for a leading scholar who has the capacity for community collaboration. The endowed chair position is something that is new to the culture at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and will be “something for us to all be proud of in Peel, to have world renowned scholars in our community.” While the university has its own academic timeline, Rao said there is a lot of preparation to establish the position. He wants to work with students and the community to gather input.

“When there are initiatives where you show responsiveness to the community and to students, it can have a real snowball effect. So the fact is that the course, the introductory course, has been offered, it's really whetted the appetite for much more, and students are enjoying that experience.”

“When you see your own culture reflected in the university, it's so powerful, something that's coming from the grassroots up.”

Having taken religion courses throughout university and in high school, Mokham said there was a lack of overall knowledge among those educators who have taught Sikh studies courses previously or touched on the area. He hopes the new position will take Sikh scholarship to another level.

“I'm hoping that this won't just be an opportunity for the endowed chair to look at research, but also dig into the university as a whole, and improve the department as a whole in terms of Sikh studies,” he said.

He hopes it addresses a lot of the misconceptions he sees in the community.

“[Even] in the Sikh Student Association we have a lot of people that are coming out who just know less than the bare minimum about their heritage, less than the bare minimum about their faith, to the point where if someone comes and questions them about who they are, what they believe, they're not really going to be able to say anything. They're not going to do anything about that.”

“It's really easy for someone to make them question their heritage, question their faith, and it's because of a lack of knowledge that's being spread among students. So just from an education perspective, it's massive, and it's going to really strengthen the community on campus. For me, that's huge. It's painful, to be honest, to see a lot of our students kind of move away from the faith, and move away from my heritage and just because of the lack of education.”

A Sikh woman and man tie their turban in front of a mirror.

(World Sikh Organization Canada)

The central role of women in the Sikh religion and the cultural life of Sikhs around the world has traditionally not been front and center in representations of the faith and its followers. The new endowed Chair will hopefully help change that.

Asked why there has not been more uptake in academic programming given that Canada’s population is so diverse, Rao said change takes time, and institutions like UTM are becoming more responsive.

“I think there's a lot of need, certainly… but it takes time. There are some pivotal, transformative moments. We feel like this is one of them, but a lot is being done, and I think that it just takes collective will and trust. But a lot a lot more work has to be done. There is goodwill, there are lots of initiatives, and it just takes time. And I think the thing is to sort of have everyone get behind the big, transformative changes. The more we do it, the more it just continues to build.”

As the university establishes an endowed chair, Rao hopes the initiative will create a benchmark for other universities to use in the future. 

“There have been other initiatives in the past, but this is the only of its kind in Canada currently. Change takes time. When change is happening on the ground it takes time for public institutions to adapt and I think we're far ahead of the other institutions in this regard. But we really hope that this is a model, especially with the community partnership, that this is a model that will be taken up elsewhere.”

The new position will be especially important given issues such as the expelling of several Indian diplomats by the Canadian government after evidence from the RCMP revealed they were part of “criminal activity orchestrated by agents of the Government of India," threatening the lives of Canadian Sikhs. The news came after a year of turmoil following the death of advocate Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was assassinated outside a Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C. last year, leaving the Sikh community unsettled as members who support religious and cultural autonomy in India are being targeted by the Indian government.   

“A lot of people just don't really know the background behind this stuff, what happened in the past, the history of us as a people, of us as a faith,” Singh Brar pointed out, underscoring that being able to have academic scholarship and peer reviewed research around a host of issues is extremely important.  

“Just covering who we are as a people, who we are as a faith, what our values are, where beliefs are, what our history is, that's huge just for understanding a lot of the contemporary issues that are coming up and a lot of the misconceptions come from a lack of scholarship on that. Whatever scholarship is available isn't readily available, and it isn't really something that people are actively seeking out.”

He also stressed that having an endowed chair established in Sikh studies at a reputable university like UTM will help “push back against a lot of the anti-Sikh hate and a lot of the rhetoric that's been coming out.”

The Association, he said, will be working to ensure the chair is not solely a research position but one actively engaged with students through research opportunities or internships, and in the community.

“Acting as a liaison means getting these students more involved in their heritage, more involved in their culture, which means a lot of these contemporary issues they can actually have strong opinions on and they can push back against a lot of the rhetoric and that's massive.”

“Having a university with really high integrity that is going to ensure that this position is unaffected by any influence and affected by anything abroad, is super important, because now we're going to have actual unbiased research. We're going to have real, trustworthy academic scholarship, and that means a lot to the community, and hopefully we'll get a deeper, complex look at Sikh studies than we did in the past.”

Email: [email protected] 

Twitter: @mcpaigepeacock 

At a time when vital public information is needed by everyone, The Pointer has taken down our paywall on all stories to ensure every resident of Brampton, Mississauga and Niagara has access to the facts. For those who are able, we encourage you to consider a subscription. This will help us report on important public interest issues the community needs to know about now more than ever. You can register for a 30-day free trial HERE. Thereafter, The Pointer will charge $10 a month and you can cancel any time right on the website. Thank you