Sardarji Jokes - Origin

Origin

Some of the dominant traits of the Sardar jokes include the Sardar being shown as naïve, inept, unintelligent, unclean, or not well-versed with the English language. Many of the Sardar jokes are variations of other ethnic jokes or stereotype jokes. Some of them also depict Sardarjis as witty or using other people's stereotyped perceptions against them.

Santa Singh and Banta Singh (Santa-Banta) are two popular names for the stock characters in the Sardar jokes. The researcher Jawaharlal Handoo associates some traits of the Sardar jokes with the stereotype of Sikhs being associated with jobs where physical fitness is more important than knowledge of the English language or intellect. He also states that "In my opinion, the ‘success-story’ of the Sikh-community as a whole has taken the form of a deep-rooted anxiety in the collective minds of the non-Sikh majorities especially the Hindus of India....Sikhs are a very prosperous and successful people ....this may have threatened the Hindu ego and created the anxiety which in turn seems to have taken the form of various stereotypes and the resultant joke cycle." Soumen Sen states that these jokes perhaps reflect the anxiety of the non-Sikh Indian elite, who may have suffered from a sense of insecurity due to the growing competition from the enterprising Sikhs.

A popular category of Sardar jokes is the "12 o'clock jokes", which imply that Sikhs are in their senses only at night. Preetinder Singh explains the origin of the "12 o'clock joke" as follows: The real reason for the "12 O'clock Association" with Sikhs comes from Nadir Shah's invasion of India. His troops passed through Punjab after plundering Delhi and killing hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims, and taking hundreds of women as captive. The Sikhs decided to attack Nadir Shah's camp and free the captive women. Being outnumbered by Nadir Shah's huge army, they could not afford to make a frontal attack. Instead, they used to make midnight guerrilla raids on Nadir Shah's camp, free as many captive women as possible, and return them to their homes in order to "restore the diginity of the Hindu community".

In jest, the Hindus would say that the Sikhs are in their senses only at night. This later became the trait of a widespread category of derisive jokes. Singh opines: "Hindus started referring to the relatively neutral 12 o'clock, rather than midnight" to avoid annoying the armed Sikhs, and the "final result was the safe, bald statement, 'It is 12 o'clock' shorn of all reference to its very interesting history.....When Hindus crack this joke, they are oblivious to the fact that had the Sikhs not intervened, their womenfolk would have been dishonoured and taken into exile".

Some of the Sardar jokes, self-deprecatory in nature, were made up by the Sikhs themselves. In The Other Face of India, M. V. Kamath wrote about "the Punjabi's enormous capacity to poke fun at himself, a trait that seems peculiar to the Punjabi, especially the Sikh." In his book President Giani Zail Singh, the Sikh author Joginder Singh states "...who can enjoy a good joke against himself or against his tribe except a Punjabi and more particularly, a Sikh?"