Reflections: Echoes and Resonances

The book concludes with reflections about the echoes and resonances of Sikh women's voices into the present. It explores the specific historical and biographical circumstances that encouraged Punjabi Sikh women to voice their concerns through protests and music, as well as the conditions that enabled their voices to be heard. Amidst the farmer's protests to India's farm bills in 2020-21, Punjabi women's voices called out forcefully as they joined the chorus of public protests in North India that reverberated around the world through digital media. The chapter employs this example to illustrate the need to attend to the specific historical and biographical circumstances in women's lives that enabled their greater agency and vocality rather than ascribing an excessive degree of explanatory power to national cultures in shaping women's transoceanic lives. A lovely poem by Amardeep Kaur evokes the book's core themes about the centrality of the oceanic in the global history of Sikhs as articulated from an embodied female perspective in the diaspora.