Honoring Kartar Dhillon, Political Organizer and Writer

As Women’s History Month draws to a close, I want to honor and uplift all the women of color in American history whose courageous activism and endless sacrifice have been erased by calculated accounts of history glorifying white settler colonialism exclusively. One woman in particular, who I had the pleasure of researching for a class this semester, has brought me closer to my diaspora community. I honor the life and legacy of Kartar Dhillon (1915-2008) in these pages and in every way I carry on her work.

Kartar Dhillon, award-winning writer and political organizer, was born in Simi Valley, California on April 20, 1915 and is said to have been the first Sikh woman born in the United States.

Admitting her disaffiliation from Sikhism later in life, due in large part to disillusion with institutionalized religion more generally, she nonetheless gained profound inspiration for her advocacy and art in early religious practice. She recalled in a 2001 interview, “All [of my family’s] prayers were aimed at making us realize that we had to be good and…honest; we must not steal, we must not cheat, and we must not lie. Without this kind of early training, perhaps my family wouldn't have had the character that I think we do have that we have always put the good of all ahead of our selfish game.”

Indeed, the drive to pursue the collective good ran through Dhillon’s veins: She was born into a family of immigrant farmers and laborers who founded the Ghadar Party, a radical interreligious movement for Indian independence founded in 1913 comprised of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus based in North America. Over time, she deepened her commitment to the liberation of South Asian people through her continued support of anti-colonial movements and communist organizing in India, as well as workers’ rights and women’s issues in the U.S.

Despite barriers to higher education posed by her parents’ untimely deaths and her resulting marriage at the young age of 17, Dhillon remained headstrong in her commitment to growth: personal, familial, and societal. She divorced her husband of ten years in 1942, consumed by a longing for the freedom to earn an independent living through meaningful community engagement and to pursue her and her children’s dreams of education.

Dhillon found the liberation she sought in San Francisco, where she worked a series of blue-collar jobs, eventually gaining employment at a trade union and writing for the People’s World, a union newspaper. In addition to working full-time and raising her three children, she hosted regular fundraising dinners at her home to support various political causes, including but not limited to the United Farm Workers, the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party of India.

Motivated to break the cycle of intergenerational oppression, inequity, and misogyny in both the public and private spheres, Dhillon sought to create an unusually equitable home environment for her South Asian American children. In her 1989 memoir, “The Parrot’s Beak,” she reflected, “My cardinal rules for raising children were: no physical punishment, no discrimination between boys and girls, and no unfairness…In the house where I lived with my son and two daughters in San Francisco, there was no girls’ work and no boys’ work.”

In retirement, Dhillon truly came into her own, pursuing passions she was forced to neglect as a working single mother and moonlighting organizer. She audited classes on rhetoric and Hindi at the University of California at Berkeley, published autobiographical essays about her early life in Oregon, served on the Ghadar Memorial Committee, and spoke across North America on issues related to politics, culture, and feminism. In 1994, at the age of 80, she founded Chaat: Voices from the South Asian Diaspora, a performance collective seeking to empower the voices of artists moved to speak on oft-silenced issues within the South Asian community.

Dhillon died on June 15, 2008, leaving behind two of her three children, nine grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. She is remembered by her descendants and South Asian Americans across the country for her commitment to social good and her love of the arts, all driven by the memory of her mother, father, and childhood faith.