The Story and Recovery of Bachan Kaur
Story: The history of a Sikh presence in Sheffield. Dal’s encounter with Bachan - a named but unknown Sikh woman who, according to the 1939 census, lived on Sheldon Road, in Sheffield.
The recovery: “Point of Continuum” imagines a letter exchange between Bachan and Dal, imagining what her ‘unpaid domestic duties’ in Sheffield may have been, drawing from the experiences of Dal’s own mother.
’Sense of Us” is an attempt to capture the haunting of Sikh women forgotten in the archive. It also challenges the function of a census and re-stories Bachan’s invisibility in the archival records as a subterfuge, a refusal of capture, a fugitive from empire.
Poem 1: The Sense of Us (2024)
For weeks I was calling you in, wondering who you were
then I found your name between names, in the 1939 register:
Bachan Kaur, Born September 1914, Female, 25 years old.
Unpaid Domestic duties. Married.
You lived on Sheldon Road.
I drive past your house every week, how come I never felt you there?
(Bachan, Bachan, Bachan, your name hypnotic to my bones)
I keep looking for you in the window of that house Bachan,
looking for you wallking down Sheldon Road Bachan
imagining stepping into the traces you left behind.
It’s as if Sheffield has a memory of you Bachan Kaur.
Your name, a ghost on the page, made of words and waiting.
Waiting to be read.
Re-membered.
Made unfactual and mysterious again.
I look for you in incoming and outgoing passenger lists from Bombay to UK to Bombay
Bachan,
in naturalisation registers.
I look for in birth certificates. In Death certificates.
I look for you in the census’s either side of 1939.
You are not there?
Or not here yet?
Or left already?
Census: from the latin censere “assess” a registration of citizens and property for the purposes of taxation.
assessed & registered & taxed.
this makes sense of us in empire hands, empire lands.
us: registered property.
There is no us, in this non-cens/us Bachan.
No sense of Bachan in the 1921 & 1951 census’s.
Instead I’m incensed.
By your name Bachan Bachan Bachan.
Bones set on fire by your name, Bachan Bachan Bachan.
In/censed/us.
This makes sense of us.
Did your name burn in the 1931 census? Bachan, Bachan, Bachan
Were you here in Sheffield, then? Bachan, Bachan, Bachan
Let me light a rose incense stick in your name Bachan,
like my father used to do every morning at dawn.
Let the fragranced smoke lift your name Bachan
free you from a line in a register Bachan,
fill the Sheffield sky with the memory of you Bachan,
let us all remember your name: Bachan Bachan Bachan.
The first spoken word poem 'Sense of Us' is an attempt to capture the haunting I've felt since I found Bachan Kaur, the invisibility of Sikh women in the archive, challenging the function of a census or register and re-storying her invisibility in the records and archives as subterfuge, a refusal of capture, a fugitive from empire. Like my late mother, Bachan was/is an embodied archive, otherwise knowledges held within her being. I wanted to uplift the joy of Punjabi rural culture that she would've left, despite the hardship under the brutality of the British Empire then. Perhaps she got to sing and dance here with Sikh women visitors or if she had the chance to visit other Sikh families in other towns. I infused the atmosphere of the poem with music**, finding a track that both invokes and leaves space for the unanswered, creates an echo of her name ~ a way to celebrate Bachan's remarkable presence in Sheffield. She was and still is here.
Poem 2: Point of Continuum (2024)
‘... by the time the British Nationality Act 1948 reached the statute book, South Asian migrants, as British subjects, had already been in the Sheffield area for thirty years...1948 was not a distinct historical turning point in British migration history. Rather, it may have been a point on a continuum that began during the First World War...’ David Holland, 'The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants in the Sheffield Area During the Early Twentieth Century’, Past and Present.
Dear Bachan, February 2024. Sheffield.
I felt you arrive between the night and a thin sleep. Arriving for the dig. I couldn’t
hear your name yet. Even so, you are my point of continuum. I’ll start where I stand
In my city of ghosts. And I’ll dig. Dig up a legend that weights me with firsts:
My dad, Mr Kular: First Sikh man to settle in Sheffield in 1959?
I’m from a long line of diggers too, from 9000 miles and lifetimes away like you. Punjabi farmers ~ women and men who dug the earth with big-palmed hands and plough, turning soil / turning stories, scything wheat / rolling atta with haldi-stained fingers. Women singing boli / dancing gidha. And here I am in Sheffield, turning archived pages with my fingertips, digging with the golden point of my fountain pen. To disprove a legend. That we weren’t the firsts and we won’t be the lasts.
I dig. I find a name, your name – Bachan Kaur – on the 1939 register.
You’re married. You’re 25 years old. You do ‘unpaid domestic duties’:
mop floor / make love / dictate letters home
clean hearth / make haste / make dreams
set fire / make spam sabji / dream of home
hand-wash clothes / make roti / make sleep
wring & dry by fireside / light incense / cry quietly
iron turbans / read prayers / make sleeplessness
make beds / dastar bandi / make protection
grind spices / make yoghurt / make friends
wash sheets / sew clothes / make belonging
You’re an ancestral thread running across continents and times. 85 years later I’m
being pulled towards you. Pulling you towards me. Your name means: 1) Word 2)
Precious 3) Instruction. Bachan Kaur. A precious word. A hidden instruction in the
archives?
I’ll call you the word princess, Bachan. Did you know that you’ll never end? I once
saw a photo of a ‘no.3 Jat Sikh woman of the Punjab spinning cotton’. My mother
told me she used to spin too before she arrived here alone in 1959, twenty years
after your name appeared in a register. I wonder what type of Indian woman you
were according to the (un)classifications of the British Empire?
Dear Dalbinder,
I can feel you pulling me from the page.
I was the type of woman who spun threads of magic ~ wove them with refusal and star
knowledge ~ in to cotton cloth. See that blossom-pink chunni your mother wears around
her head? The one that makes her kohl-eyes big and wondering. Like her, I wrapped one
around my black hair too. My veil of strength, resilience and home ~ I left the scent of
amla and faraway wherever I went from Jalandhar to London Road to elsewhere. See that
dastar your father wears, fresh-fresh arrived in 1954, his sister blessed this cloth with
prayers for his unknown destiny waiting.
Dalbinder, I’m that rare type of ‘non-elite’ woman who made it here before any of you.
They called me illiterate even though I hold all the wedding songs, recipes for a headache
and muscle spasm and stomach pain and make dhals and sabji’s and sweet meats from my
memory. I know all the steps to gidha ~ clapping and dancing myself breathless ~
responding to the call. I know when to plant corn, how to make buffalo milk flow at dawn,
how to make butter and paneer and yoghurt. I’m that rare type of woman educated by folk
and lore: an archive of otherwise. They can destroy the books. They can’t destroy what was
passed into my blood.
Dalbinder, Sheffield was this word my lips couldn't quite make, a place where those who
ruled us lived, a place that could lose us amidst it’s thick smoke. A word that a man in our
village had gone to work in. Made pesa like we’d never seen. A week by steam-train from
Jalandhar to Bombay. Six weeks by boat to Southampton. Sheffield. Sheffield. Sheffield.
Will I ever see home again?
Dalbinder, look ~ I’m a woman who refused to conform to type. Let me be your precious
word now. Your precious instructions. Hold me in your heart like your Sheffield Nanaji,
bheti. I felt you all too, a glimmer in the Sheffield nightsky, burning through smog like
stars waiting to arrive. I span a thread across the continents to make a throughline to you.
Sowaran, Rishpal, Dalbinder, your names burning in my heart.
Did you know how I used to invoke your names too? Wishing you were here.
In 'Point of Continuum' I imagine a letter exchange between Bachan and I, imagining what her 'unpaid domestic duties' in Sheffield may have been. I drew on the exhaustion of my own mother's experiences, the relentlessness of housework before there were domestic electrical appliances. I thought about their strength and power. I found out what Bachan's name* means and see her presence in my life as precious instructions from the archive. What can Bachan teach me about being here, planted in Sheffield soil? About my mother's experience here? About leaving a legacy and a trace? It's a speculative exchange, invoking Bachan to reply to me, to share some of how her life in rural Punjab was/could've been, how she felt being here in Sheffield.
