Joyce Pettigrew

Joyce Pettigrew is an anthropologist who has written about the Sikhs of Punjab. Library catalogues list her as Pettigrew, Joyce J. M., and give 1946 as her year of birth. Her books, as the catalogues give them:

• Robber Noblemen (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), catalogued under the subjects Jats, Sikhs and Nobility.
• The Sikhs of the Punjab: Unheard Voices of State and Guerrilla Violence (Zed Books, London, 1995; xii and 212 pages), catalogued under the subjects of Sikh politics and government, and the history of Punjab's autonomy and independence movements.
• A volume on martyrdom and political resistance movements (VU University Press, 1997) is listed under her name.

How Sikh writers use her: Bhai Ajmer Singh, in his book 1984: Unchitviya Kehar (2009), calls her an eminent anthropologist who has tried to understand Sikh tradition and culture in depth, and cites her on pages 42, 47 and 136. What follows is his Punjabi rendering of her, not her published English.

• On p. 42 he takes her view that it was not only events of daily life that moved the Sikhs to take up arms against the state. In her view some aspects of Sikh religious tradition produced the idea of confronting the state, above all the idea that using force to restore justice is both a right and a religious duty, and every Kharku fighter firmly believed that the Sikhs had been a separate nation since 1699.
• On p. 47 he quotes her on how a shared historical experience, from the Sikhs' beginnings to 1848, gave them a distinct identity.
• On the army's attack on Sri Harmandir Sahib in June 1984 (p. 136), he calls her judgment, that the army did not enter to crush a political figure or movement but to crush a nation's culture, strike at its heart and hurt its spirit and self-confidence, entirely correct.

What she is remembered for: for two studies of the Sikhs of Punjab, one of the Jat Sikhs of the 1970s and one of the state and the Kharku struggle of the 1980s and early 1990s, which Sikh authors such as Ajmer Singh quote on the roots of armed resistance and on Operation Blue Star. The sources opened say little about her own life.